- Always On
Remote work stopped being a question of capability years ago. What changed is that the places where connectivity ran out have disappeared, and those dead zones had been enforcing a rule about stopping that nobody ever wrote down. - Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Every team checked its own component and reported it clean. Nobody had traced a transaction. In the absence of evidence, the blame went where it always goes. A timeout is not a location. - Everything Can’t Be P1
Every outage is a P1—just ask the customer. They have the severity definitions. They signed them. They want everything critical anyway. The wish cannot be granted, and not because of policy. Because of arithmetic. - The Outage That Didn’t Happen
Every outage gets a postmortem. The outage that didn’t happen gets nothing—no review, no story, no name. Operations is built to examine failure and has almost no apparatus for examining success. - The Framework Outlived the Manual
The ITIL binders were heavy enough to prop open a door, and most of that paper existed to look thorough. Length reads as rigor. The useful part fit on a whiteboard the entire time.
About James Nerlinger
James Nerlinger came up as an engineer on servers and networks and spent thirty years in enterprise infrastructure—major incident management, global operations, and director-level roles at Atos, formerly Siemens IT Solutions, with account responsibility for Fortune 500 clients including Disney, MetLife, McGraw-Hill Education, and Harrah’s Casinos.
He is also the founder of Deep Dark Abyss Productions, an independent software studio, and the author of the interfaith theological blog Many Lamps, One Flame and the memoir One More Beat.
At Ground Level is where he writes about technology, organizations, and what happens when they interact under pressure.
Contact Me
For consulting inquiries, speaking engagements, or general correspondence:
jnj@atgroundlevel.com
