Tuesday June 29, 2004 IT SOX...
No... This is not a poke at Sun IT. Well... Not (quite) a poke at Sun IT. They are currently going through some extremely difficult times, and it would not be (quite) appropriate to critic them (too) harshly. They are after all keeping Sun's infrastructure going and are doing some pretty amazing things, in a CFO driven, process obsessed, cost cutting kinda way. They are also one of the best reference accounts that we have for our technology.
SOX is the TLA for the Sarbanes-Oxley act, which is the US Congress's knee jerk that followed the Enron, Worldcom and other scandals. Mainly, it asks for the CxOs of a company to certify that the financial statements are correct and that the controls surrounding them are working correctly. Granted, this is an over-simplification of SOX, but it will do for now. A quick search on Computer World will help to fill the holes...
Now... What does SOX has to do with IT? Many of the applications that are supported by IT have to do in a direct or indirect way with financial reporting or have an impact on Sun's ability to generate and book revenue. As a result, Sun IT is driving a policy where a strict seperation of duty is occuring between the developers and the people supporting and administering these applications.
And it is a great thing!
It might sound weird to hear this from a developer. After all, I will loose a lot of control and flexibility on what I can do. It will definitively make my life more difficult as I will have to give a lot more training to my IT counterparts instead of just being able to reach out to the server and fix what is causing the problem.
On the other hand, it will drive the adoption of technologies such as JMX, standardized logging and other different standards that will provide more information and more control to the support and administration teams and free up my time and the time of other developers to solve the problems, write the software and do amazing things rather than support all of the hacks that they ever did while at Sun.
-- Fred ( Jun 29 2004, 11:10:19 PM MDT ) Permalink