You: Your life in 5, 07/26/99

Error 404--Not Found

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.

Error 404--Not Found

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

By Julie Bort
Network World, 7/26/99

Even as you read this, you're standing in a virtual minefield. One misstep in choosing which skills to master over the next five years and you're dead.

More dangerous still, the skills you think you need provide nary a defense. Knowing how to converge services onto a single network and manage bandwidth may make for good conversation, but won't earn you corporate kudos.

Already, casualties have been reported. A network manager is shocked to find a pink slip on his desk one day. His last review was great, and he was on track for meeting his objectives: network failures were reduced, projects were on budget, prices well negotiated. Why did he get the boot?

Some vice president wanted to standardize on Windows NT and this network manager was a NetWare proponent. Never mind that the manager had hard-earned opinions on the network operating systems (NOS).

Sadly, this tale is becoming increasingly common, says Dave Passmore, research director for NetReference, a consulting firm in Herndon, Va. "Network managers may align themselves too heavily with a vendor. The next thing you know, they've created a perception that they're biased, and quickly lose credibility and, often, their jobs."

The issue isn't which vendors are best for the company, but control. In the next five years, business practices will shift because of technology. The network's role is being elevated by electronic commerce, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and convergence. Step wisely, or you'll lose command.

Behind closed doors

While today's typical network manager agonizes over bandwidth, other less-informed people are readying to make hard-core network decisions. Before you know it, they'll mandate voice over IP, sign ill-guided service-level agreements (SLA) or standardize on an unsuitable vendor.

So what if they don't understand what the technology can and cannot do? You could be told to make it work ... or else.

Laughing at the thought? Get serious. Blinking red warnings are flashing in front of you. How many of you swore that NT would never be your primary NOS, only to be given a mandate by a higher-up to adopt it?

That's only an indicator light. Microsoft broke ground in the way it sells Windows NT - pitching it to management. Microsoft's underlying message is that the network has become too important to be left to mere network folk.

NT's success is a harbinger. Take a look at how vendors are marketing these days. Mainstream publications such as Business Week, Fortune and Forbes are loaded with ads from Cisco, IBM, Lucent, Sun and others, as is prime-time TV. In print, ads are punctuated with editorial on new technologies. The bits aren't created for net managers but for all the nontechnical people who are poised to make IT purchasing decisions.

Can business people with scant technical backgrounds choose network technologies as well as you can? Surely not. No matter - it's going to happen. If their choices turn out to be disastrous, the new marketeers have a ready answer: Replace you with the vendors themselves. Look at how many times and in how many ways outsourcing is sold in ads and articles. The same story is being told directly to your bosses, via consultants.

Replacing you with a service provider will become increasingly common, experts agree. "In the future, networks will be outsourced. The functioning of the physical layer will not be your problem," says Tom Nolle, president of CIMI, a technology assessment firm in Voorhees, N.J.

A fighting plan

So the usurpation of your decision-making power is your biggest threat. Here's a little secret: It's also your chance to rise to the top of the salary and org charts. The brass now knows the network to be the business' cardiovascular system, and that positions you to be a strategic player. Whether your career rises with the network, or you become like the copier repairman, invisible as air, depends on the action you take today.

What you need is a fighting plan. You must shift your skills from mostly technical ones to largely business and strategic ones. You need to establish political might and hang with the right people.

You must become the master network "consultant," teaching senior management about outsourcing and technology. Necessarily, you must continue to understand networking better than anyone else, but the goal of your training has changed. Your job will be educator, not implementer.

In short, how you spend your days will change drastically from July 26, 1999, to July 26, 2004.

The great mediator

Network managers in 2004 will be doing a job that looks a lot like the chief information officer's job today. You will no longer be judged by how many packets cross the wires unharmed. You will be rated on how the network boosts business. Call yourself a network mediator - you'll turn business needs into action items for the network and then report on how business goals were achieved.

So if the chief financial officer declares that the company must invoice orders faster, you'll make it possible. You'll boost priority for fulfillment records, potentially working with accounting and application developers to make it so.

E-commerce will be a driver. As a company relies on networked systems to bring in the orders and manage the supply chain, availability will be a given, not the ultimate goal.

"In five years, instead of watching the pipe and making sure it's running, the real aspect of the job will be to analyze business flow - to offer more tracking. There's a blending between the business side and IT," says Nick Evans, technical director of PricewaterhouseCoopers' Internet Practice in Dallas.

That is, upper management will want you to translate the movement of packets into business information. Instead of telling who is sending the packets from which applications, you'll be drawing the big picture for management. What does network activity say about customer habits, supplier needs and interdepartmental shortcomings? It'll be like ERP on steroids.

You need two types of know-how to change from a packet watcher into the great mediator. One is analysis; the other is political.

To gain the former, turn critical thinking into an art, advises Michael O'Dell, vice president and chief scientist for UUNET in Fairfax, Va. "When people send out data sheets or when you read articles in the press, you've got to know which are pompous air. . . . Magic answers won't fall from the sky," he warns.

As an example, O'Dell offers up the area of policy-enforcing technologies, be they firewalls or the promised policy-based network management systems. The skill needed is the ability to figure out which services need what level of protection, then develop enforceable policies that perform as intended. Configuring the tool becomes a technician's job, be it in or out of house.

Gaining analytical skills could require some business classes or even an all-out MBA. Courses the company offers about itself, such as the standard orientation for new salespeople, are also a good place to start.

"The network manager of the future will need a solid background in business fundamentals, such as project management, sales and marketing, as well as effective presentation skills. He can't be locked in the basement anymore," says Bob Currier, director of data communications at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

Given that the average Network World reader routinely works overtime, where do you find the time for this training? What do you give up?

The hard answer is to give up under-the-hood technology. Spending your days mastering a new routing protocol could be a career killer, especially if you have five-plus years' experience and a couple of certifications, CIMI's Nolle says.

Stay too close to the technology and you'll find yourself more desirable at a carrier or a consulting firm than in an enterprise setting, says Cheryl Currid, president of Currid & Company, an IT consulting firm in Houston. The technology-oriented who want enterprise ties will have to find skills other than networking to make a living. "They may take on an application focus: databases, e-commerce or capacity planning," she says.

Scarier still, people who will have invested 10 years or more in a career by 2004 face rampant age discrimination in these hard-core technology positions (NW, Sept. 14, 1998, page 1).

If this seems like the kind of pompous air O'Dell wants you to dismiss, consider that organizations with cutting-edge networks are also proponents of this "business network manager" breed.

"In smart organizations, the network is seen as critical. In these places, soon you'll see the job transformed. Network managers will have to learn more of the business side," says Joe Mambretti, director of the International Center for Advanced Networking at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

He cites businesses that offer customer-support Web sites. Here, the network manager would need to coordinate net operations with product launches, for example.

Of course, this depends on hanging out with the right people.

CIMI's Nolle says: "The most important relationship the network manager will have is with the operation planners. In every enterprise, there is a group of people who take a business problem and convert it into a project. The network manager's role will be to ensure the network's capabilities are understood in this process of conversion."

Phil Evans of Perot Systems in Plano, Texas, agrees. Evans is an illustrious network visionary, co-author of the Network Manager's Handbook and former president of the International Communications Association, the once-ubiquitous user organization. "Spend time with the managers who are responsible for the planning and delivery of the company's business and with the major customers and suppliers of your company," he advises.

Evans also recommends developing relationships with other business telecom managers and unbiased consultants and educators who have proven records for predicting technology trends.

If you hang with and gain the respect of the power executives, you won't be viewed as a low-level techie. You need to be seen as network educator, able to translate the thickest techno-jargon into the clearest concepts.

"Avoid no one, but moderate the time spent with the techies who are more interested in the engineering purity of a solution than with the business," Evans warns.

More with less

Despite the network's rising power, the net manager in 2004 will supervise smaller staffs than ever before. The talent pool will continue to be small as service providers raid from the enterprise, helping provide credence for using outsourcers. They have all the talent, they'll claim.

Yet, for the savvy business network manager of 2004, outsourcing won't be your undoing. Rather, it will augment your small staff, releasing you from your pager. In short, you'll hand off crisis management.

"Just because you've got a service provider doing some of the things for you, the need for the network manager doesn't stop. The job becomes more strategic and less daily fire-fighting," says Peter Wagner, general partner for venture capitalist Accel Partners in Palo Alto.

So when not in meetings with operational executives, a regular part of your job will be to select your company's providers - by evaluating their underlying technology. You'll need to maintain high-level education in emerging technologies and, certainly, security.

Ironing out a fair, executable SLA - along with a method of verifying it - is a final requirement. Ironically, the skill for this will likely have a bits-over-the-wire technical component. Tools that monitor the net for SLA compliance are already coming into the market. Sometimes said to have a "service-level validation" function, these products fall under the umbrella of service-level management devices.

As you distance yourself from technology, your staffers - or even the outsourcer - will probably use such tools. You'll analyze the reports they generate, and verify if providers are keeping promises. You'll exact retribution for lapses.

In the words of UUNET's O'Dell: "The point of SLAs is that the people don't want money back. They don't want it broken in the first place. Part of this has to do with defining the service, what it is, what it isn't, what we do and what we don't do."

Ultimately, you will catch and fix performance problems before the lawyers are called.

Plugging the unplugged

Despite selective outsourcing, the network will continue growing. In five years, it will host dozens of services, such as IP voice and video. Network appliances, thin clients and wireless computing are also expected to be big by 2004. Consider this: Market research firm International Data Corp. projects that 721 million devices will access the Web at least once a quarter by 2003. At least one-third of these devices will be something other than a PC.

Even if you don't adopt non-PC devices strategically, you can't keep them from your enterprise; users will bring them in. Once there, you'll be expected to support them.

Therefore, a fundamental aspect of your job in 2004 will be to master a multiheaded network that includes the entire WAN, LAN, desktops, wireless networks, personal digital assistants, Internet-enabled cell phones and Internet-specific handheld devices. These devices will need to work together. Data generated by one will need to be accessed by another. Even if you intend to outsource, you'll have to coordinate the work of a handful of service providers.

"Networking options are increasing. There's cable being used by telecommuters, all the different digital wireless stuff . . . it's still about moving bits, whether it's a wire or not," says Chris Hjelm, senior vice president and chief information officer of Federal Express in Memphis, Tenn. "Integration is a big role."

To manage the FedEx network of 2004, Hjelm says he'd want people experienced in managing global networks, particularly for e-commerce and Internet applications. Candidates should also have exposure to a variety of network technologies, including wireless; proven integration skills; knowledge of network and Internet security; and, most importantly, "an excellent set of vendor negotiation and management skills."

Adds Duke's Currier: "A manager's technology skills will require him to be a generalist and a network pathologist. [Companies will] pay you to listen to the technologies and, as systems and applications are added, understand the possible problems."

Safe passage from the minefield won't be easy, but it is possible. Knowing the hidden hazards, the next five years will see you do more than survive - you'll thrive.