Bridging the Gap
Mike Bushong and Denise Donohue join Eyvonne, Jordan, and I to discuss the gap between network engineering and “the business,” and give us some thoughts on bridging it.
Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
In my opinion most techies consider business value when making choices, it is just that they are working on the less visible part of the value chain for most people.
There are many examples where innovation and efficiency is driven by techies. There is business value in building a hose over pipe qos model, in deploying a device with deep hashing capabilities, in a controller programmed to bypass certain paths for certain customer flows, in a serverless application executed close to the end user, in a UI that completes a transaction on a single click of a button.
Tech knowhow is tough, the fact that some business people don’t get it isn’t because there is no business value in tech…
Was it the focus on EBITDA, ROI and TCO that created iphone?
The road does run in both directions — business folks also need to learn how to listen to tech folks, as well as the other way around. This is an oft-missed point in the discussion. At the same time, tech folks need to learn to climb the stack out of their basement with wires and appliances, and start seeing information technology as an ecosystem, rather than as a bunch of strung together appliances… 🙂
Agreed but that has always been the challenge more or less. What once used to be value (in the form of connectivity-based services) has now become “speeds and feeds” and “undifferentiated heavy lifting”. IMHO it is the agenda that has changed not so much that techies don’t think business.