Change as a Catalyst
When Vernon was first presented with the mandate to start researching alternative database solutions for Financial Widgets Plus (FWP) he saw a much larger opportunity at hand. Coming in to a new company that had a database department that consisted entire
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Change as a Catalyst When Vernon was first presented with the mandate to start researching alternative database solutions for Financial Widgets Plus (FWP) he saw a much larger opportunity at hand. Coming in to a new company that had a database department that consisted entirely of a group of what he termed as Reactive Database Administrators that had created and deployed an amalgamation of one off solutions and had never explored the concept of standardization, he realized that this was the best thing that could happen to not only FWP, but also to the department that he was now heading up. Where others saw the migration to a new database solution as an opportunity to lower costs significantly and be done with what they perceived as a predatory vendor, Vernon saw this is an opportunity to fix many headaches and problems that had been plaguing the organization for quite some time. From the very first discussion on the topic he realized that he was going to seize upon this opportunity and use it as a catalyst for change for his department as well as the organization. He had already made some inroads into change once he had taken over the database department with developing and promoting standardization in a few areas. However, this would allow for the opportunity to effect change on an even greater level with the opportunity to rework and fix many of the legacy headaches that plagued his team, and in some ways the entire organization as a whole, with difficult to support and maintain products and services. There were many hours of time spent in the support and maintenance of poorly written and designed database side processes and code. Although some © William Wood 2019 W. Wood, Migrating to MariaDB, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3997-1_6
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Chapter 6
Change as a Catalyst
of that time was in fact billable to the end customers, it was in fact lost time for the organization itself. It was time that was better served being expended working on new and improved solutions, new product lines, and normal maintenance that was sometimes being deferred due to the lack of staffing resources or the time to actually allocate to them. Up to the point of entertaining a new DBMS solution, Vernon had systematically been pinpointing areas of improvement that could be targeted without major overhauls to the solution side, and the biggest problem was breaching the reactive attitude of the department that he had inherited. This was not just internal to his department, but was also a problem with the way that every other internal team within the organization treated and worked with the database team. He had great disdain for any organization or team being predominantly reactive in nature because it was never conducive to productivity and never provided a positive experience, especially when it was something that could be easily automated or monitored. Of course if there is an outage of some type there is no other approach than to react to the situation, but when the culture is one where the staff is surfing the Internet, shopping,
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