Tech Teams 2022: Never Go Full Action Movie
Here is a caution for tech teams in 2022. Every action movie has this one scene. It’s the “Scotty” scene. It’s where the fearless captain says, “listen Scotty…we have to do this thing or we are all gonna die. How long is it going to take us to do this thing? ‘That thing? That thing is going to take 18 hours, captain!’ You’ve got four hours, Scotty.” This NEVER fails to entertain.
The full Scotty.
Truth be told, lots of really smart and intelligent technical people love the chance to be a Scotty at work. In technology departments? It’s more contagious than Omicron. Jump in, lay down some hot code. Test it, refactor and push to production. Bob’s your uncle. Back pats all around. The day has been saved, just call me Scotty.
Oh man, was that a mistake.
Want to know why? Because that thing you rescued? You own it…for-ev-errrrr! On your next rescue mission you are going to get a call from the last rescue mission. Help us super-person! You are the only one who knows how this thing works! Then on the next rescue mission you are getting called back to your last 2 rescue missions. Over and over, again and again. This is your life as a fire drill. Don’t you feel important now?
WSJ says blow it all up.
There is an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about getting rid of IT departments entirely. In other words, folding technology directly into operations.
Think about that. They’re in all the client meetings. They’re part of the day-to-day. Their responsibilities and expertise may not change, but they are naturally going to become more focused on business success – and that’s what they will be evaluated on. There will be fewer disconnects. Now that the teams are integrated, they also become more flexible and nimbler. Operations will no longer need to “get in line” for technology solutions.
In today’s business environment, speed is often a critical factor. The pressure on businesses to do more with less has never been greater. Successful finance teams must be experts in data-driven insights pulled from advanced analytics and predictive modeling.
Why it just might work
Low code applications. Here is the thing. There are exceptionally bright people, genius level people, that should never ever write a line of code. Why? Well let me ask you this. How do you like playing a musical instrument? a) never tried it. b) tried it and hated it. c) tried it and liked it but don’t have the time to get decent at it. As far as coding technical solutions, 95% of our people’s skill set is about the same as their musical skills. We have a very limited set of “clarinet” players and just can’t afford to have them doing low grade work or red cape work. It’s just a misuse of talent. Low code applications shift the burden off of the good clarinet player and onto the 95% of the talent pool of non-clarinet players. Thing is, these people are the same ones carping about IT department responsiveness. They are happy to take the low code workload.
This is where applications like K3 come in
Executing ETL or ELT functions in code? That’s just nuts. Lot’s of ETL tools require so much code. But really, do you want to be spending your time maintaining basic ETL code? Don’t. K3 connects to all kinds of data sources, transforms the data and transports it to other places like data warehouses, applications, and regulatory destinations. It’s our own flavor of superpower. Rather than being a toolkit for coding, we’ve abstracted the ETL process into a low code environment. It’s just far easier to set up and maintain. We are always happy to show off our stuff and how we can help your company drive real efficiency and business responsiveness.
