"Organizational issues" -- sore spots of IT? [closed]

It is common for "organizational issues" (such as politics, organizational inertia, and selective hearing -- think Dilbert) to cause more IT problems than computers and servers do?

YES. Any organization with more than one person will have "organizational issues", and almost always those will cause more headaches than the technical issues. This is a fact of life because although we are nerdy people, we are people. Further, the problem is just as prevalent in high-tech companies as in "normal" companies. IBM and Microsoft are just as bureaucratic and silo'ed as GM and Bank of America.

Likewise, is it common for one's employers to not really know what said person's job entails, or even care, until such time as they have a computer glitch, and want everything dropped to have it fixed now?

Sure. Do you know about or care about the jobs of a telephone service tech, the auto mechanic, the accountant, the plumber, the cashier, or the bank teller? No. But when you need something, you need it now, and you don't care about their issues. Again, this is not about computers specifically, it is about people generally.

What can be done to ameliorate such situations?

Be understanding of the other people in the organization, and ignore when they do not reciprocate. Recognize that they are just trying to get through the day, and recognize that almost certainly whatever problem brought them to you interferes with that goal. Don't expect them to understand your world and tailor themselves to it.

In the end, the only thing you can change is yourself. Think Gandhi.

How do you take satisfaction in a job well-done when no one knows or really cares what you are doing? Indeed, how do you stay focused if it doesn't seem to matter if you do anything or not?

If you need recognition and approval, you are in the wrong line of work.

Effective people in our business (system administration and support) are not noticed by their organizations, because the systems work and problems are handled calmly, quietly, and quickly.

Get out of departmental IT! Joel's blogged about why his time at viacom sucked for this reason.

Sad fact is that if you give good advice to a business as an employee it's questioned & untrusted. If a consultant walks in & gives the same advice for $10,000 its cherished.

Not all organisations treat their staff this way. Go work for a vendor & you might notice a difference. You can't change toxic culture like that, but you can choose where to work.

EDIT: It's obvious we need a Joel test for sysadmins! Help us create one!

Listen, my nephew bought a linksys access point and got my home network running in 5 minutes flat. Why do you bring up terms like attenuation and spectrum? You're just making it more complicated to keep yourself in work. I hardly think we need 85 access points to cover this campus... Welcome to the world of IT. A skill which is just as important as troubleshooting is people skills. Unless you can find a department with a really good manager who covers the politics for you.

A good IT department aligns itself with the organizational goals - no cares if a server is down or what hand waving you do to fix it, they only care if they can make widgets. You need to spend the time to educate your customers (the rest of the company) on how what you're doing makes their life easier.

And as tomjedrz said, you're in the wrong line of work if you need recognition. On average in the last 10 years I've been recognized less than once a year.

As an administrator being unappreciated is part of the job description. You're not front-facing, you're not working on the latest sexy project, nobody hears from you and nobody even knows you exist until things go wrong. Users come in and log on and they get their stuff; they expect this to happen, and they don't know that you may have been up until 4AM fighting like a hero to ensure that it did happen.

There's actually quite a lot of job satisfaction to be had from that, but it's entirely up to your own attitude and approach. You either accept it or you move on, but if you can take your own personal pride in a job well done, I've found that a lot of other things become less intolerable.

I'm sure that I could tell the very same war stories as anyone else: the server replacement request that was refused until the old one died at the most inappropriate time (and your subsequent night without sleep as a consequence), the suggestion you've been making for years that was totally ignored until the smart-suited consultant makes the same one and gets drooled over by management for it, and so on.

In the end what it comes down to is that people don't analyze things until there is a crisis, and if you're doing your job well, that crisis rarely happens, and is very smoothly managed whenever it does. So like I said it's your own attitude to the job that counts. Just learn to take being unappreciated as a sign that you're doing your job well!

I somewhat answered this in another answer recently but this is a good topic. One of the key issues between IT and "the Others" (sue me, I'm a Lost fan) is that in the Dharmaville we call IT, we know what we're doing. We're happy. We understand our parts (for most part) and know how to do it well (again, for most part). The problem comes in how IT is utilized. In the past IT was the hammer that drove the nails. We came out, provided dumb terminals and as long as the mainframe and network were up nobody really questioned anything. Nowadays IT NEEDS to be seen as BUSINESS PARTNER. Nothing gets done without IT involvement now and when people fail to realize that you can't plan to put in a massive product and not even know if 1) It really will help anything 2) If it even works with what we have and if it doesn't what do we need to do to get there. We need to evolve our thinking and update our policies and procedures to accept these new changes or we'll always be stuck in the same old rut.