IT Can Learn from the Koala Experience
I think no one can argue that Koalas are among the cutest and most cuddly mammals on the face of the earth. Unfortunately, in recent decades their population has decreased by 80% in Australia, where they live. Even though organizations and the Australian government are trying to protect them, the Koala population continues to shrink. There are two main reasons for their disappearance — the first is deforestation in many parts of Australia that dramatically reduced the number of eucalyptus trees, on which the Koalas depend for food and safety.
The second reason is the Koalas’ specificity in regards to their nutrition. Even though there are hundreds of types of eucalyptus trees, the Koalas can nourish themselves from two or three types only. Their entire lives are spent among 4–5 trees, eating 0.5 kg of leaves per day. Any change to their habitat will most probably result in their death, either from lack of food or from the need to migrate, be run over or preyed upon. The Koalas developed narrow expertise in eating and digesting very specific types of leaves, and now they cannot adapt to any change to their environment. As the climate has changed through the last hundreds of thousands of years, the Koala’s evolution made it more and more specific in its diet, but also changed its brain structure so that the two hemispheres are not connected to each other as is in the human brain. This has also caused the Koala to be one of the least creative mammals.
The Case of the IT
Today, technology is forcing an accelerated evolution on organizations and individuals. One major example is the IT department and profession that have existed now for approximately 70 years. We can find two similar characteristics of the Koalas’ story in IT. The first is that there is an environmental/climate change occurring that is affecting the IT, and forcing it to transform. The second is that the IT department has several Koala-like vocations. When I say koala-like I’m referring to high specificity vocations, where any change to their environment may bring to their “extinction”.
So, what is the climate change befalling IT? It is the accumulation of several new technologies and architectures that the IT, for the first time, must transform or perish. They include, among others, DevOps & NoOps, big data, and various automations, but mainly public cloud computing. As I see it, vocations like DBA, storage, system, network, service desk, and even unified communication are at high risk. DBAs are usually extremely vendor specific (Oracle DBA, SQL Server DBA, etc.), so are storage and system personnel. The network and unified communication teams handle a slightly larger variety of vendors, but are still very specific to the organizational ecosystem. The specificity of these vocations also limits and hinders the creativity and innovation in those teams, and fosters a more conservative and conventional approach.
Public cloud computing to the IT is comparable to the deforestation process, pushing numerous species to forced migration into other habitats or to extinction. I wrote in a previous article that the IT is required to adopt an ‘adaptive capacity’ approach.
Don’t be a Koala and Retool Yourself
The above-mentioned technologies can be viewed as the ‘deforestation’ process the IT will undergo. A scary, ominous cloud foreshadowing a mandatory change that will force the ‘Koalas’ out of their comfort zone after so many years. But in fact, we live in the most advanced and open era of human history, with endless possibilities. The ability to access unlimited information from different domains and to continuously learn are just two of the amazing facets of this era. Also, for the first time in our history we have the awareness in real-time that a massive revolution is occurring, and not in retrospect (as the first industrial revolution). Most analysts and research institutions agree that in the next ten years the workplace and occupations will significantly change, and as much as 60% of the current roles will be irrelevant. I see and hear from various IT organizations voices of resistance and ridicule to these changes, and statements like “this too shall pass.” The high specificity of numerous IT roles is not only limited to the low-level employees, but in fact one of the drivers that lead to promotions is excellence in a specificity. So, also managers in the IT, who are accustomed to stability and little change in their work environment, may lack creativity and be afflicted with a too conservative approach. In the age of accelerations and hyper-innovation, it is unrealistic to expect that experience and habits will help anyone weather the storm. As the famous evolution quote states — it was never about the survival of the fittest, the most specialized or the most experienced, but of the one most adaptable to change.
Unlike Koalas, which have limited cognitive abilities, people can learn and adapt to a changing environment, but they need to want it and take control of their career and professional life.
