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Trust – but verify

It’s quite common for IT to fall under the control of someone who’s professional experience is in another area in this particular case, the CFO. While a true expert in his own field, with the introduction of virtualisation technology, the IT infrastructure he was in charge of was getting beyond his level of understanding. Like many of our clients, his relationship with their technology supplier was solid, with good communication – this isn’t a situation where we were brought in to fix anything, everything was working as it should. The CFO’s problem was that he was simply unable to go to the board and explain what was being planned and actioned – because his understanding of IT matters wasn’t deep enough. When he could walk into the server room, look for the big black server labelled “Exchange”, he could see what he’d paid for. Similarly, with domain controllers, file servers, and intranet servers. With virtualisation, that level of visibility disappears – the machines he’s paying for simply don’t exist – at least, not in the physical realm. Because of the nature of their business, there was also an increasing level of customer demand for more “high tech” solutions, and the CFO was being taken away from his core duties to attempt to solve problems that were bordering on outside his expertise. Enter Pragmetric. Initially, we take on the technology part of a project, working up the technical specification in conjunction with the in-house experts, then shopping around for vendors who can meet the requirements, including meetings, discussions, and arranging quotations and timing. Nothing too earth shattering, but a better use of resources than taking the CFO’s time to do the same work. Moving on from there, we work with the technology outsourcer to understand why a recently installed SAN wasn’t doing the job it was supposed to – it turned out that the core application’s hardware specification changed between quotation and provisioning of equipment, and no-one had notified any of the relevant parties. We’d like to think that that’s the sort of thing that our double checking catches, but since we weren’t involved at that point, we can’t be 100% sure.