Build a cloud, IT automation foundation with system programmers

The more I work with IT automation tools the more I realize that very few organizations actually do meaningful automation. Sometimes there's an expectation of automation, such as when folks use a front-end system like VMware vRealize Automation. A tool like that has extensive automation capabilities. Look closely, though, and you'll see the automation used for tasks like approval workflows and sending e-mail messages to humans to get them to do work, like entering items in a configuration management database or setting up replication. I thought automation was supposed to reduce the work humans do.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit, and I think it's due to one big problem: IT people don't know about system programming for the computers they work with.

There was a time when you needed to understand the computers you used at a very deep level. Actually, it wasn't all that deep -- machines had many fewer layers of abstraction, much thinner operating systems, and applications were much closer to the hardware. Commercial software was scarce, and businesses tended to write their own applications. Sure, there were non-programmers in IT back then, too, but the ratio of system programmers to other roles was much higher, mostly out of necessity.

Then personal computers and commercial software booted programmers out. IT staff stopped learning to code and focused on vendor certifications. It was enough to know how something worked, and much less important to know why it worked. The computer science types were replaced by business school graduates. The MBAs serve a valuable purpose in IT, but very few of them know how to program. And now, as we announce our desires to build a cloud and rely on automation services, we look around and see that there's nobody left in our own organization to do this kind of work, even at the most basic level.