I wrote this 7 years ago:
I wrote this post about corporate communications. The original post was about how the tech we use to communicate was changing our world. I wrote it about a year after Facebook opened up to the public. Now, everyone uses all of sorts of “social media tools” to broadcast their message. This medium now has more rules and regulations about how you are supposed to talk than you can shake a stick at. In my opinion, the promise of connecting people by just connecting with them on a personal level has been ruined by corporate marketing and PR trying to retain their stake in that game. I’m not the only one who feels this way.
I guess this is probably a great time to remind everyone that this is my personal blog, and my remarks here are my personal thoughts, not those of my employer. For more details/disclosures please visit my about me page. A girl’s gotta eat after all. 🙂
Let’s be honest, since I was one of the first technical people to move to marketing using social tools to connect quicker to our customers to share technical details about our products, I have lots to say on the topic of how this social tools have been poisoned by corporate marketers looking for leads via “content marketing”, infographics, and making sure techies have appropriately branded socks, but that’s not what this post is about. All of that mess is noise, and we have important work to do.
Our world – the world of IT – has already changed.
The world started changing about the time I wrote the above-mentioned post. I started blogging because I couldn’t work on virtualization. It was too new…and I was told by the leaders in my organization that EMC would NEVER go to the cloud.
Things change. And fast. Virtualization was the first fissure in the massive change we’re seeing now. Look at this post from 2008, when people where still trying to make sense of what the virtualization tremor really meant. Looking back, it’s clear to see the impact of those first tremors. Servers, storage, even networks are now virtualized. Virtualization has enabled us to build clouds, whether we do it on an IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS platform. Since all the things are becoming virtualized, we saw the need to bring dev and ops very close together, so whatever dev builds can actually get deployed, and changes that will make our platforms better server the business can be pushed out continously, into production without downtime!
We can do all that right now. People are already doing it. If you aren’t doing that already, you will be soon.
Here’s the gap I see in getting from traditional IT to cloud (any platform): vocabulary. It may be the trainer in me, but if people have already gone full cloud, they don’t know how to talk to traditional IT people who are trying to make sense of this seismic shift that has happened. Traditional IT people don’t have the words yet to ask for what they need to get to cloud without disrupting the business. And the new cloud people don’t understand the implications of not being fluent in the processes IT has had to build to support and protect the business.
Here’s an example I hear all the time: traditional IT people understand they need a SaaS backup tool like the one I work with. But they don’t understand that traditional measurements — like RPO and RTO — may not be what they want to hang their hat on when they are buying a solution.
I am going to start writing about this more. I think there is a need for a bimodal translator; what language do you need to make a mental ladder to when you’re going from traditional data center opps to any type of cloud? Have you seen anything like that yet? Or are you having your own issues communicating with a cloud (or a traditional IT) person? If I published a survey to try to understand this more, would anyone respond?
The world of IT has change forever y’all. It’s time to accept that, and roll up our sleeves and get to work.