Working oneself out of a job

While working at Voodoo I've befriended an extremely bright individual, Trevor K. I dont' believe he has a blog but he is an extermely interesting person with the way he is able to describe situations. He puts into words a very simple explanation of a complex idea. One of his ideas that he has told me I've put into a personal mission of mine:

To work myself out of my current job.

Now, it may sound crazy but if I can do that, I'll must have done something amazing. Staples takes this concept and runs with it a little bit with their easy button concept. If you could develop your job into something so easy to do that all you had to do was push a button, wouldn't that be incredible. Now, offer that up to companies and see what they'll say. I'm sure they'd jump at the chance to take on someone with such a vision. Truly, I'm blessed to have such a visionary friend :)

Anyways, this takes me to my current post and my current topic of discussion. At Voodoo I developed a software and testing system that would completely software a machine based on the SKU's you ordered and then run a whole suite of applications and games to test the machines. It did this all based on your order number. All the technician had to do was type the number in and he was done. As a customer you could change your order and software mix right up to the day of testing and the technician didn't have to worry about double or triple checking each and every order to ensure it was correct, the system did it for you. Even better was ensuring each machine was softwared the same way excluding the variations between orders. After softwaring all scores and hardware were recorded with future plans to give the sales people that information to better make a sale.

Anyways, I've now moved on from Voodoo but am bringing my skills with me to help push for a flexible automated system of deployment in a corporate environment. My ideal system of deployment would be as such:

1. Client orders a system
2. System is ordered
3. System arrives, plug system into network
4. System is softwared automatically with the clients choices

At Voodoo I got very close to accomplishing this before I left. At Haworth it is an interesting challenge to get Haworth up to and hopefully surpass this.

So, lets look at some methods of softwaring (which, BTW is NOT a word as I learned very rudely one day) systems.

Starting from the very beginning is the plain jane off a CD. It's very slow and time consuming having to manually enter and install each piece of software, but it's EXTERMELY flexible.

There are ways of speeding it up, though that usually takes away flexibility. Going along with it for now, some low-hanging fruit is to automate the entry of common data. In Windows this is most easily done by using unattend.txt files or sysprep.inf files which contain answers to those annoying dialog boxes. So that's low-hanging fruit number one. The other is to automate duplicated procedures. This is having to install the same application over and over and over again. In Windows you can automate this process with silent installs. Differing installers have different ways of automating (or silencing) installs. Some have no way of being silent at all! Those that don't have a way of being automated require tools such as AutoIt.

So what do we have thus far? A very static way of doing installations. Flexibilty is a premium (if lean has taught me anything) and should be strived for as much as possible. There will always be information that will be the same across systems, but at the same time there will almost always be one thing that is different. So the best method is a mix of the two.

How can we mix the two? Well, we should start with some scenarios to help illustrate some pretty basic but creative ways of resolving this issue.

Corporation Fubar has two lines of desktop and a line of laptops they use in their organization. The desktops are completely different, ones an AMD with NVidia chipset and graphics while the other is an Intel with an Intel chipset and ATI graphics. The laptop is a basic intel system that requires special software.

Some corporations will use 3 base images for each of the three systems (very static) and update them as different hardware and software come in. Eventually, problems arise because one version gets of sync, a alot of effort is required to maintain them or different hardware requires even more images (say, the Intel desktop now comes with an Nvidia chipset and graphics).

What can you do? You could restrict employees to only use certain computers and start taking away their choices (but flexibility is a good thing right?) or we can come up with an IT solution that will give them their choice and make life equally easy (or dare I say easier) for us.

More for tomorrow, it's bed time right now ;)