Balancing Acts: Making IT Work for Everyone

Our day-to-day work presents us with problems that are complex and expensive to solve, and even the easy solutions have their unintended consequences. Some of us face outward to the user community and to our customers, and some of us remain behind the scenes working aside peers and colleagues, but we all wear many hats. Fortunately IT professionals are well suited to balance multiple perspectives because we know systems. We work in relationships of all types and know that every cause has an effect. We balance loads, supply & demand, capacity, and budgets. We do this so successfully and so constantly that we hardly notice. We strive to balance the need to be quick with the need for quality and the need for thrift. In this opening session, we review the tragedy and the comedy of ITs quest for balance and the many characters that carry our storys plot.