When things go wrong in the server room or the network operations center (NOC), employees are usually eager to point the finger somewhere else before it can be pointed at them. While absolving oneself of wrongdoing is reflexive human behavior, it shouldn't override dealing with the problem at hand. Unfortunately, it often does, resulting in needlessly long downtime while team members scramble to cover their own posteriors, and then identify and solve outage problems.
IT consultant Hal Pomeranz calls it a "classic pathology of low performing IT organizations." Could yours be one?
Pomerantz says that playing the Blame Game is an exercise in futility that only serves to make employees look foolish in the long run. "It’s also one of the classic signs to the rest of the business that IT Operations is completely out of touch, because otherwise they’d be trying to solve the problem rather than working so hard at finding out whose fault it is," he says.
Rather than join the finger-pointing party, consider ignoring who's to blame in favor of finding a solution or maybe even shoulder the responsibility yourself so the team can move forward. Pomerantz points out that, in the end, no one really cares who's at fault as long as the problem gets solved. In fact, you may even get lauded for being the person who fixed the problem at hand.
Consider this: when you call your mobile phone company to discuss a billing error, do you really care what department dropped the ball? No. Do you want to wait on hold while the customer service rep locates a throat to choke? Of course not. You just want your account credited so you can go about your business.
IT consultant Dr. Jim Metzler says the misguided perception that the network is the source of all performance problems has contributed to the witch hunting that goes on during an outage. "This piece of [conventional wisdom] leads to a new management metric – the mean time to innocence (MTTI). The MTTI is how long it takes for the networking organization to prove it is not the network causing the degradation. Once that task is accomplished, it is common to assume some other component of IT such as the servers must be at fault. This defensive (a.k.a., CYA) approach to troubleshooting elongates the time it takes to resolve application degradation issues."
Metzler recommends organizations adopt a performance strategy that focuses on the IT infrastructure as a whole, not just on its individual components. "In 2009 more IT organizations need to focus their management attention on performance and these organizations also need to move away from a CYA approach to troubleshooting that is based on assigning blame and adopt a CIO approach to troubleshooting that is based on fixing the problem."