Overview

I was appointed as Facilities Manager for a University as an experiment. The University had tried promoting from within, but without significant success, because they constantly came up against the Peter Principle. Dr Laurence Peter proposed that employees are promoted to their level of incompetence and stick there. The University found that when they promoted their Operations Managers or their Network Manager into the post of Facilities Manager, they tended not to be either effective or happy there, and soon left. So the experiment was to bring in someone who didn t necessarily know anything about computing, but who had a track record of management. And so I became a Facilities Manager more or less without having been inside a machine-room before. This brought an outsider s perspective to the installation, and I must admit gave me many sleepless and uncertain nights. The learning curve was steep, but the experiment seemed to work, as we brought some order to the minutia of running a 24 hour 365 day per year operation.

The experience was tough, but it did teach me the value of bringing a newcomer s perspective into established processes. In this chapter, I am taking an opportunity to look at the traditional Facilities Section of the in-house IT department through different eyes.

Facilities includes the running and maintenance of the processors, networks, applications, and infrastructure. The installation of new IT infrastructure is included, as is backup, security, and contingency planning. Some installations incorporate the call-centre or IT help-desk into...