If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. These words of wisdom come from Henry Ford, someone who was all about disruption.

Looking at the tech industry, I sometimes think we are becoming more deeply divided than ever. When I started, it was very divided between developers and infrastructure. Developers wanted admin access to everything, for better or for worse, and infrastructure fought to keep developers from getting access to anything. Within infrastructure, we became siloed, typically separating critical infrastructure into something similar to storage, servers, and networking. Of course this varies, and smaller companies generally merged these out of necessity. This has created significant stagnation for many in the IT industry, both personally and as a group.

Within IT we can no longer afford to be siloed. I have talked about this in the past, but I can’t say this enough. We need to start creating disruption within our own teams. Cross functional teams are no longer just a good idea, they are the future of IT. Moving to the software defined datacenter, the policy driven datacenter, requires that a team be made up of all resources required to complete a project or support an application.

As we continue down the path of further automation and application driven infrastructure it is time to disrupt our teams, learn broader skill sets, and move to an agile architecture, engineering, administration, and support model. That or we can keep doing what we have always done, and keep sending our users to the public cloud since it is easier to get things done.