Introducing The Leadership Series
Enterprise Infrastructure Acceleration (EIA)'s bread and butter is to execute Network and Security programs for our clients. This inherently involves working closely with technical teams as well as with much of the leadership, from team managers to C-level officers.
This puts us in a unique position to view the challenges faced by both teams.
There is often uncertainty around what to do with “NetDevOps” and “Network Automation” at the leadership level (and among the technical teams). At that level it can be exacerbated by budget considerations and siloed organizations.
We often see individual and organic efforts at network automation from individual contributors versus planned and managed efforts with business-driven goals.
Real “makes a difference” business-impacting network automation is less common.
We see leadership:
shy away from automation because they know that if they deliver a service they have to support it (while an insightful conclusion in the short term it does not serve the business well in the long term)
allow contributions made by individual contributors without direction or recognition
allow organic growth which can ultimately result in unanticipated dependencies (remember that support you wanted to avoid?), single points of process failure, and significant technical debt
Technical resources abound, particularly for individual contributors, but what we at EIA see is a lack of actionable content targeted at leadership.
To that end, we are launching ourselves into the new year with “The Leadership Series”.
We have brought in Anthony Martin to share with us his perspectives on today's IT leadership challenges particularly where Network Automation is concerned. Through his series of contributions here on LinkedIn we hope to add value, direction, and some lessons learned to the IT leadership community.
Anthony started in Aerospace (programmer, Sysadmin, tech writer, proposals), and eventually moved to NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a sysadmin role. A natural leader, that role could not help but evolve into leadership roles starting with technical management of IT Operations. Personnel management roles such Supervisor, Section Manager soon followed. Anthony led JPL’s IT organization which was a cross-functional group of over 400 IT professionals (both Caltech employees as well as contractors) providing IT services to the entire campus including all JPL Missions.
After leaving JPL, Anthony spent several years in the start-up arena as a Director of IT. Other roles followed including consulting within the Biotech and Telecom area. His latest role was in the public sector serving as the Infrastructure and IT Operations Manager for the City and County of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management.
A career spent supporting and managing IT operations across many verticals gives Anthony unique insight into IT leadership and he will be sharing that insight with us in the coming weeks starting with Network Automation Forum's inaugural question: “Why haven’t we seen full adoption of network automation, yet?” Anthony’s response? “Why didn’t they just ask me?”
Stay tuned…
by Kevin McLaughlin, President
