When is the last time you heard someone in IT say triumphantly “Everything went according to plan!”. Not often… IT is one of those fields (like medicine and meteorology) that combines immense complexity with non-deterministic systems. In IT’s case, the non-deterministic part is human behavior, both users’ and administrators’.

The bottom line is that IT planning and IT execution have an enormous gulf in between them: IT reality. Only the very best IT professionals can go from planning to execution successfully without major changes in the original plan. It’s simply the nature of the business.

I tend to think of IT planning (budgets, architectures, diagrams, expectations, performance profiles) as very important but not sufficient for IT execution. Somewhere between the plan and the execution you have to introduce a reality feedback loop. You have to look at how your plan is doing when put into the real world and adjust accordingly. This is where visibility into the actual behavior of IT systems becomes crucial. IT Search provides a feedback loop that allows IT professionals to tweak their plan to account for unexpected factors and to reconcile their plan with reality. That’s what execution is all about.

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