A Zero Defect World?

When I was in the Army, we were constantly reminded the Army was not a "zero-defect" organization. Leaders expected mistakes because they were inevitable (especially when the "leaders" were making them). Mistakes were how you learned and got better. The Army's National Training Center in the California Desert - a truly awful place - was built on that principle. The opposing force, the bad guys, played that role constantly. They knew all the terrain, and regularly beat the crap out of the army unit that was there for two weeks of training. My unit was one of those subjected to a two week beating. But we learned a lot.

In July, Cisco's Networkers keynote comedian speaker, John Cleese, made mistakes the theme of his address - "Mistakes are a good thing because you learn from them and get better. So, don't be afraid of making mistakes, because when you start being afraid of mistakes, you stop innovating and taking risks. When that happens your business will be left behind."

However, does this rule apply to networking these days, or for that matter, all of IT? Let's be honest, one line missing or changed in Cisco IOS can make a world of difference. For example, if you're trying to give VoIP the highest level of QoS in your network you would want an ACL like this:

ip access-list extended Tag_EF
 permit udp any range 16384 32767 any range 16384 32767

However, let's say you actually configure this:

ip access-list extended Tag_EF
 permit tcp any range 16384 32767 any range 16384 32767

That can make a BIG difference for your company. Now, conference calls with the global sales team are failing, the CEO's call with the President is garbled, and calls with your customers keep dropping. One little mistake. Are we still a zero-defect organization?

Millions of dollars in productively or actual revenue could be on the line. I doubt the CIO would've called the engineer in question and said "That's ok, I just want to make sure you learned from your mistake". Sure! I bet that's what the CEO, the President, and the VP of the call center told the CIO. As technology gets more and more complicated and integrated mistakes are bound to happen. But businesses have no tolerance for errors or downtime.

I find myself struggling with this problem day-to-day. As I moved further in my career, my focus is becoming more about "what" technology can do instead of "how" it does it. But I find myself searching for the smallest details to verify there are no mistakes, making sure the "how" lines up with the "what". The last thing you want as a senior architect is to recommend a technology only to find out it doesn't work at implementation. Again, millions of dollars are at risk.

I do love networking and IT and look forward to a long career. But honestly, the future is going to be zero defects. And the future is now.