- Introduction
- Fatal Fallacy 1: Presuming That Major Components of Facilities Management Are All Addressed
- Fatal Fallacy 2: Believing That the Roles and Responsibilities of Key Individuals Are Clearly Defined and Understood
- Fatal Fallacy 3: Thinking That the Owner of the IT Facilities Management Process Is Adequately Qualified and Trained
- Fatal Fallacy 4: Relying Solely on Environmental Monitoring to Eliminate Supplemental Analysis
- Fatal Fallacy 5: Ignoring the Nurturing of Human Relationships
- Harris Kern's Enterprise Computing Institute
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Fatal Fallacy 3: Thinking That the Owner of the IT Facilities Management Process Is Adequately Qualified and Trained
One person must be assigned the role and responsibility of facilities management process owner. The fallacy occurs when infrastructure managers presume that this person is instinctively qualified and trained for the assignment. The fallacy becomes fatal if a major incident such as physical disaster pushes the person beyond his or her skill level.
The owner of the facilities management process almost always resides in the computer operations department. There are rare exceptions—small shops or those with unique outsourcing arrangements—in which the facilities management process owner is part of the facilities department and matrixed back to IT, or is part of the IT executive staff. In any event, the selection of the person assigned the responsibility for a stable physical operating environment is an important decision.
The fallacy can be mitigated by selecting a candidate with several key attributes. These include an understanding of at least some of the basic components of facilities management, such as power and air conditioning. Knowledge of hardware configurations is also desirable, because understanding how devices are logically connected and physically wired and how they can be impacted environmentally helps in their operation, maintenance, and recoverability. The ability to think and plan strategically is key when laying out computer rooms, planning for expansion, and anticipating advances in logical and physical technologies.