Cross Training Teams in a Knowledge Culture

“Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.”
— Chinese Proverb

There is so many things IT people need to know these days.  Gone are specializations in many organizations.  Yep, IT pros must know 20 to 30 different types of technologies to remain relevant and competitive.  In fact, as I interview younger candidates, there is evidence the new generation of IT people already have these skills and more.

And that’s just infrastructure.  All organizations expect IT people to know core business applications.  Specifically, how they relate to the organization and customer, technical work flows, monitoring, and on and on.  How does an organization tackle it all while keeping IT pros at least tuned into the periphery?

How I’ve done this historically is this idea of knowledge culture and DevOps’ “Sharing” idea, where team members present material via a TED talk.  Below is my deck on peer learning.  I hope you find it applicable.

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Lanvera Update: January 2018

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” – Benjamin Franklin

January marks the six months and our progress is moving rapidly on multiple fronts.

1. Developed and publicize IT’s strategic plan for 2018. This is our road map for the year, developed in December and approved by senior leadership.

2. Workstation Technology Refresh is in full swing. Moving to Windows 10 has been fairly uneventful and user satisfaction is high with the hardware decision. Although we’ve made a conscious decision to stay with legacy software productivity platforms so we can have more time considering Office 365.

3. VMWARE NSX progessing slowly. Primarily, due to difficulties with our network provider, a subject for a future blog. Mobius has been fantastic and working with my local team. Concurrently, team members are spinning up on NSX via VMWARE’s training classes.

4. SOC2: AICPA’s Service Organization Control 2. SOC 2 is considered a technical audit, but goes beyond that. SOC 2 requires companies to establish and follow strict information security policies and procedures, encompassing the security, availability, processing, integrity, and confidentiality of customer data.

5. Knowledge Management and ORC. Hard push getting Operations Readiness Checklists for all production systems to serve as the foundation of our KM system.

\\ JMM

+++ If you read this far, you may be wondering if this is an old post. Yes. It was never published, along with the other 30+ posts in various stages.

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