For the past 10 years or so, we have had a dedicated system administrator at our computing center. They were responsible for our specific system. It was easy. If we needed something done on the back end, we would contact this person.I got a disturbing email from the person today. They are now being taken off the job. It is part of a enterprise wide shift in how work gets done. Instead of specific people being responsible for each system, the whole system administration staff if going to be responsible for all the systems.
This means staff unfamiliar with our system will be matrixed in to do the work. While this might work for stable systems with straight forward standard operating procedures, I bet this will not work well with our system. There is a lot that the administrators pick up over the years. And it is hard to train this instinct. I think we are going to have to suffer for a while until they realize that the new plan is not working. Great.
