The Importance of (non-IP) Networks
Note: In full disclosure I had planned to post this article in June of last year, but then I got kind of busy, and it got lost. I discovered it this week, and while it’s not super timely, I think the advice is “evergreen” so I’m posting it hopeful that you find it useful. I have edited it lightly to make it less time-sensitive.
Networking: Not just for CCNAs, anymore!
About six months ago, VMUG hosted our second annual Virtual Connect event. We had some industry heavyweights like VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram, experts from companies like Dell, VMware, Boomi, Login VSI, Runecast, Faction, and a ton of others, and community leaders like Jonathan Toulon from CONVERGED User Group. We even had a celebrity emcee - Jonathan Frakes aka Commander Riker from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” - and a closing keynote from Frank Abagnale, the con artist profile in the film Catch Me If You Can. Clearly, we pulled out all the stops for this event, and it really showed because the content was awesome and the feedback I heard from attendees was stellar. While I’m always partial to VMUG events, I think our global virtual offerings are amazing, because they have the opportunity to bring together the very best in the industry.
While I love all our events, Virtual Connect is something I personally get excited about because it’s the realization of my belief that community is at its best when we’re bringing people together. I’ve said a bunch of times before that there are exactly zero customers that are exclusively VMware customers. Every company that is using VMware has an environment where they need various types of hardware or different cloud providers. VMware may be a dominant vendor to your business, but it has to run somewhere on something. Even if none of that were true (it is), you still are only using VMware software or services because you want your apps to be more flexible. You aren’t running VMware’s software or tools for their own sake.
It stands to reason that if VMware is always in use with other products or vendors in the mix that VMUG members are always working in environments with multiple vendors. This is why I think Virtual Connect is such a valuable event for VMUG members as well as members of other user communities. In fact, Virtual Connect is co-presented with several other user communities, including CONVERGED, Dell Client Community, Dell Tech Unified Workspace Community, and the Boomi User Group. This is powerful because there isn’t a CIO that I know of that is only interested in one technology. Instead, it’s more about how they work together to achieve the business goals of the company than how any one specific technology works. I think it’s an incredible value to have diverse communities represented at Virtual Connect.
I know next to nothing about videography and recording clips, but I know some people who are experts at it, and I have leaned on them a lot during the pandemic as more communication gets recorded. You could say the same thing about food. I don’t know how to cook, but I live with someone who does, I have also learned on her heavily during the pandemic.
While attending, I was able to see members of different communities with very different technical focuses make connections in the various lounges and chat rooms that we had set up for the event. That’s really cool because these folks may not have met each other were it not for Virtual Connect. While it’s much too recent to have any stories about how those connections benefited people long-term, I am absolutely confident that they will because those kinds of connections have helped me out over the years. In fact, I recently was able to leverage a connection from the Boomi user group to help out on a project that I was involved in when my university started leveraging Boomi tools internally. I knew nothing about Boomi, but I knew someone who knew a lot about Boomi.
In a similar way, I think it’s important for you to make connections with other technologists within your own company who have an entirely different focus than you do. The broader my view of technology leadership gets the more I realize that a successful IT team is primarily about separate subject matter experts connecting and charting a course forward together. This may have always been the case, but it is certainly more pronounced now than at any time I remember. I can’t think of a single project that we’re working on in my office that doesn’t involve a cross-functional team. Like every other group of projects, some of ours are going better than others and the common thread that I find is that the ones that are progressing the fastest and appear to have the best chance of being very successful are the ones where the cross-functional team started the project already having strong relationships.
Looking at that same logic in reverse, it stands to reason that not building these connections puts you – or at least your career - at risk. This is both because you may not see technological change coming and because even if you aren’t at risk technically you will have a limited impact if you only focus on one small technological slice of the pie. Almost all of the most impactful people in IT have depth in more than one technical area, and it’s the intersection of those areas where they provide true and lasting value.
Let’s look at what happens if you don’t keep your eyes on the ever-changing technology landscape. Imagine if you were the very best Novell admin in the world – number one across the globe – but you didn’t know anything but Novell and you only connected professionally or socially with other Novell fans. You probably missed a boat because you didn’t realize that this Windows thing was starting to become the dominant player in enterprise networks back in the late 90s or early 2000s. Right about now you’d be wondering why no one is giving you a call back when you apply for jobs. You didn’t have a network of people around you doing something other than Novell that you could have gotten some perspective from, and so you drove that Novell car right off the cliff.
Now let’s pretend that you aren’t worried about being technically irrelevant (which I think is a bad hypothetical construct, but let’s go with it). It’s still a bad idea to not make connections outside of your functional area for all the reasons I mentioned above. You simply cannot be successful on your own; there is no technology or application that doesn’t rely on some other part of the stack – and the people who manage or operate it – to be successful. If you’re an app person, you need the operations folks for your application to be stable and successful. If you’re a database person, you need the storage folks to ensure your queries don’t get bogged down in poor IO. If you’re a…. actually, I’ll stop. You get the idea. If you don’t get the idea by now, the extra words I am going to type aren’t going to help you.
Islands: amazing for vacations, and terrible for careers, technology or otherwise. The most successful people build interstates with others, not moats.
The point is simple – you cannot have a stellar career in IT if you exist as a technical island. I get that this feels like a cruel joke that a career path that so many introverts are drawn to would benefit from extensive personal connections, but I assure you that every CIO I have spoken to gets this. If you want to be someone on the boss’ radar, you had better be able to show how you’ve worked with people outside of your immediate team or expertise in order to advance the goals of your company.
I was going to make a comment about how if you insisted on going alone that you’d become relegated to being a digital plumber – just making sure the pipes work – but then it hit me that plumbers need a network, too! Have you ever met a plumber that didn’t need an electrician to wire in the hot water heater or rough in electrical work for a bathroom renovation? If carpentry didn’t exist, they wouldn’t have a building to plumb. The trades are a great example of how you cannot exist or operate in a vacuum. The most successful tradespeople I know do a great job networking and building their contacts with other folks they can collaborate with.
You have a great opportunity in front of you to build strong relationships with other IT pros in your company. As a suggestion, I would start by asking someone in another area of expertise than you if you can grab 15 minutes just to talk about what they’re doing because you’re interested and want to learn more. You’d be surprised how easily someone can make 15 minutes appear in their calendar if someone is genuinely interested in what they are doing. Just start small and get to know what people are working on and what their interests are – then offer to help them if they ever need anything that you could provide. I promise that if you invest just 30 minutes a week on this, you’ll see an improvement in both your productivity and your job satisfaction in almost no time at all.
Questions for reflection:
Do you make an active effort to build a network of people from disciplines or technical areas that you are not familiar with?
When was the last project that you didn’t need anyone else to help you with? Why is it so hard to think of one?
How can you start (or accelerate) building strong relationships with other IT professionals in your company?
