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Can These Data Center Employees Be Saved?
This is a story of politics and disarray in a couple of data centers that were allegedly combined over a year ago. That they still, to this day, have different cultures, operating procedures, and expectations this far along into things tells you much about what's very wrong with this picture. And it serves as a powerful cautionary tale to anyone who may be tempted to play the game in a way that cuts them off from the rest of their coworkers. But I get ahead of myself. |
One of my closest friends works in a data center at a huge company that was merged with another data center in the same company. I can't reveal many particulars for reasons that will soon become obvious, but let's just say one of the centers is in California and the other is in Georgia.
One allows overtime pay for nonmanagement ITers, the other doesn't. (In fact, the manager of the second site allows only comp time even grudgingly.) In one, the data center employees manage and maintain all the servers in the data center. In the other, the business units are responsible for their own servers even if the machines reside in the data center. From the sounds of things, if it were physically possible to plug a computer into a standard wall jack in different ways, they would do that, too.
Despite all this, about a year ago--for corporate and cost reasons--the California center was ordered to take over the Georgia center. All the big bosses discussed it during a golf outing somewhere and told the middle managers and other personnel involved to Make It So.
The middle managers told their direct reports, who basically scratched their heads and said sure, and then kept on doing what they had been doing in exactly the same way they had always done it. Worker bees on the two staffs kept going to their (former) respective managers with all the same questions and concerns they always had, without knowing or really caring what the new org chart said about who their new actual or dotted-line boss may be or who they might need to work with on the Other Side.
For a while things worked out by not working together. The two centers kept their very separate existences and identities, just as they had done for years before. Nobody broached or enforced the idea of standardization or staff cooperation or, heaven forfend, new job descriptions for all involved. No team building exercises, no weekly conference or planning meetings among the joint staffs, no communications at all on a real workaday level.
Meantime, the former manager of the Georgia center, the one who ostensibly lost all his staff in the reorg, had been trying to mobilize as many people as possible against the California boss in an attempt to get the other guy's job and, by so doing, his own status back. "Bob," shall we call the Georgia guy, through dint of personality and some loyalty among his former staff, got people to do the darndest things. Memos were written, hallway conversations were had, bosses' bosses were griped to. As the fallout began for the people who had done these things at Bob's urging, staffers eventually caught wise to Bob's toxicity and his tactics, and now everyone pretty much yeses him to death while doing nothing he suggests. Even those things that might make a modicum of sense.
As all this was unfurling, along came grid computing, storage resource management, and other technologies that required the two data centers to be somewhere in the same book together, no less on the same page.
Only now, reluctantly and through mostly clenched teeth, are employees starting to have real conversations about work-related details that should have been ironed out back when the reorg was first announced. Managers should have led this process, but they didn't and still don't.
Career opportunities have been squandered along the way. Projects have come and gone, and there's still been no systematic look at who's doing what, where people may be able to acquire new skills to move ahead, and how it all fits into the larger corporate scheme of things.
People tend to lose focus in an environment such as this, where the message loud and clear is that nobody cares much about what they do.
As data center folks begin to retire in droves and professional associations continue to warn about the untimely death of many enterprise-level skills, I have to look at situations like this and wonder whether some companies are reaping what they sow.
Have you been in circumstances like this, and if so how was it resolved? Did you and the other people involved transcend politics on your own, or was management and/or outside help factors in getting everyone to play nicely?
Weigh in below.
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