I thought I should start this category with a brief background so you can choose to accept or disregard my views on the subject of career and work.

I exited undergraduate studies (a completely different blog topic) in physics and mathematics in Australia (my country of birth) and got a job working in a University IT department. Got to admit, I enjoyed the campus life so much, it was a dream job. As an apprenticeship it was exception. Started doing the normal stuff, helpdesk, desktop and network support and progressed up through workstations (DEC Microvax, DECstation) to the bigger stuff (Vax Clusters, IBM Mainframe, SGI Supercomputer). I did the normal stuff, support, system administration, and a little systems programming. Eventually and the need to fund my life got stronger, I moved into management positions and further from my technical roots.

I moved on from Universities to a range of management and consulting positions in various industries (telco, utilities, finance and public sector). A combination of technology deployment, IT operations, architecture & planning with some true consulting (BCP/DR, Risk Management, Outsourcing, Down-sizing).

The one thing I know about myself and can directly see my reflection in my father is the periodic need to throw myself in the deep end. Perhaps a micro-midlife crisis (or perhaps a mid-decade crisis). Anyway, career wise, this came in the form of Sun Microsystems. A friend who I had worked with as an Apple reseller had taken up a job and referred me to a position in the company. It was a career xroads, the world of Sun and the IT Management career I was moving along do not really co-exist. So I took the same decision that has served me well for the past twenty years, I went with my gut and did not analyse the situation too much.

Working at Sun in Australia was a completely different world. I thoroughly recommend people work for the vendor side of the IT Industry at some point in their career. The financial imperative of a company that sells products and sevrices gives you great clarity of focus. Anyway, I was doing similar things in the areas if technology implementations, project management but very little IT management level consulting. After a couple or three years, the micro-mid life crisis struck again. Working in a country of 24 million on a city of just over a 1 million, I begain to realise what a small world we live in.. A fortuitously an email happened across my desk "Project Manager needed for Japan!!"

Once again, off into the deep-end. What do I know about Japan! Except for Japanese Tourists on the Gold Coast of Australia, not much. Did I speak the language (not at all)? Before you know it, that hat is in the ring and the response came back very quickly. "We need you to be in Japan in two weeks time for two weeks and then possibly two or three trips in the next month" Bags were packed and off I went.. A two week gig, became two months and three and half years later, I leave Japan (that is a story for another time). The job was basically DC Management and Support consulting for the largest consumer of IT in Japan. There was also a short gig as a services architecture for a large global customer.

After three years, many days snowboard, getting married and essentially absorbing as much Japanese and japanese culture as a could, I faced my next micro-mid life crisis. I had come to a xroads where I needed to commit at least another 5 years to Japan, or move on to the next thing. Low and behold, an opportunity to do a job in Singapore came across the table. Bags and new family packed, off we go to Singapore.

The work in Singapore involved alot of travel. As a Solution Architecture for Managed Services I supported Sun customers across Asia Pacific. Most notably I spent alot of time in India, China, Thailand and back to Japan. I never quite managed to make it back to Australia. Anyway, a mind broadening experience this was from a diverisity of markets, economies, customers and culture perspective..

You guessed it, 2.5 years later, and a new baby girl, the crisis returns.. This time an opportunity to move to the US was up for consideration. So in May 2006, we arrive in the US to start a job in Silicon Valley working for the services group.

Its been a fun ride and I have lots of experiences to share, some personal and some career and job related. I will try and catalog them here and my personal blog in the coming weeks, months and years. Of course the journey has just begun ...

Whenever you start to talk with companies about IT Service Delivery improvement or IT Optimization, the conversation inevitably turns to business alignment (if it doesn't then you are in even bigger trouble). This alignment is due to the ongoing challenge of the IT Department to provide the link between the "IT Industry" and the "IT Users". In the middle of this tug-o-war of activity is the IT Department, a mediator between the two, trying to facilitate a steady equilibrium.

In the inserted image, the external pressures of "IT Users" are shown at the top and the "IT Industry" pressures at the bottom. By no means a comprehensive list, but you get the point.

"IT Industry" is strongly dominated by vendors, but influence definitely comes from professional groups, IT media, investors and and other parties who try and influence the IT industry.

So to deal with this IT Service Delivery executives, management and technical staff have a large range of strategies to consider. Through this category I will explore some of my ideas on what strategies are worth considering and some approaches on how to tackle.