It's a great lesson in cooperation and divergent thinking. Students are tempted to look for a problem within the limits of their group, but they need to think about solutions that are external to their group to find the right answer.
Now let's talk about how information technology professionals, and the technology they manage, is typically "organized." We've got a box for server people, a box for network people, a box for storage people, and then there's that weird "developers" box that is, like, totally on a different org chart. If server, network, and storage were continents, developers would be the moon.
Humans are hard-wired to sort things. It's what we do. The need to sort people based on skills seems straightforward and harmless enough. But before you know it, you've created the antithesis of the goal-oriented engineer: THE SILO. (See my post on a related org chart malady.)
Silos trap not only engineers in neat little boxes, but also tend to isolate applications and functionality as well.
Earlier today, I was discussing strategy for the adoption of cloud computing when someone pointed out that many of the custom applications in use had their own authentication mechanisms, in contrast to using a centralized directory service like Active Directory. Migrating to the cloud is surprisingly easy when you're using centralized authentication. However, migration to the cloud is crippled by multiple, discrete authentication sources. It's possible, just messy.
In this example, the organizational silos were effectively interfering with the agency's ability to quickly move to the cloud. What's most frustrating here is that all of the pieces to this puzzle are distributed among the various IT groups, but those groups aren't willing to share their pieces, nor are they open to the idea that all groups benefit from cooperation and collaboration. If developers and server teams could work together to address access and authentication to applications via Active Directory, the agency would be moving towards a more portable and secure application infrastructure. Developers would save time by not having to build auth from scratch, and server admins would maintain complete control over all users in the environment. Divergent thinking would prevail.
Please keep this in mind as you go about your career in IT. The solutions to your problems might not be within your box, but they're rarely more than a few inches to the left or right on your org chart.
