The "tech triangle", for IT consultants

I have received some encouragement with respect to trying to share the knowledge I use day-to-day as an IT consultant, to help others who might like to do this kind of work. This is, particular, the kind of thing they don't teach you at uni. Thankyou to the people who encouraged me and, for the people who think IT consulting might be for them, check this out and let me know what you think.

Any given technology is best understood through three lenses at once:

These lenses can be summarised in terms of their key sources:

• The business case for customers: whitepapers, advertisements, and the front page of the product's website.
• The official developer experience: technical documentation, tutorials and blog posts from developer advocates.
• What it actually is: third-party blogs, technical specifications (if available), and hard-won first-hand experience.

The default for the hacker is to focus on "What it actually is" or, more specifically, "What can I make it do?" But for IT consultants this is not enough. We need to understand the customer perspective, so we can se-- I mean find the right fit between a client's needs and the product's supported use cases. And we need to understand the official developer experience -- just because something can be done doesn't mean that we should do it in a client's production environment if the vendor is not going to support it after we leave. Understanding the official developer experience also gives us a language to communicate effectively with developers who are experts in that particular product.

A simple illustration is found in Azure. Every time I have to learn about an Azure product I'm not familiar with, say Azure App Services, I look at three things:

• the first search result for the product name, which will be a promotional page on the azure.microsoft.com domain, directed at a business or IT executive audience;
• the product's section (or sections) under the docs.microsoft.com domain, which will be directed at developers;
• the relevant services and operations in the Azure REST API reference.

This is of course the same model presented graphically above. Neither of these three lens provides the full picture. The last one -- what the service actually is -- is technically the most comprehensive, but this information is not actionable in the commercial sense. Nobody wants to buy a `POST` request to a `Microsoft.Compute/serverFarms`. They want to migrate off their incumbent high-cost hosting provider and take the opportunity to offload a lot of administrative overhead while they're at it, by adopting managed services. You won't find that in the API reference.

The tech triangle is a general approach to accumulating and making sense of technical knowledge. There is a lot of theory and practice that is vendor-agnostic, but when it comes to implementing solutions for businesses then you must be familiar with specific products on the market. However when you come across new or unfamiliar products in your various reading adventures on the Internet, it's easy to let them just pass by without retaining any useful knowledge. After all there are so many of them.

But if you use the tech triangle then you can focus your mind on one lens at a time, and try to work out how this new product maps to the products you already know about, within that specific lens. A new API gateway product might have the same business case as an existing product but with a different developer experience, or conversely it might deliberately have the same developer experience (to encourage migration) with a different underlying implementation that offers some cost or performance advantage. Meshing the three lens back together will also help you evaluate the credibility of a vendor's claims. There's no such thing as a free lunch: innovation is great, secret sauce is wonderful, but it has to exist somewhere.

Importantly, we are not simply accumulating marketing materials and jargon to impress people with. All of this knowledge is connected with your understanding of how these products work under the hood. That's key to your credibility as a consultant.

As a final note, the best thing about the modern cloud is that you can access all this information from home, any time, and even take enterprise products for a test drive. For example I have an Office 365 tenant with one user (me) that costs $8/month. For this I get to play with the same identity management tools that large enterprise customers use. It also handles my email for me.

Hopefully you find the "tech triangle" useful in growing your knowledge of IT products. If you have any questions about this, or any other aspect of IT consulting, please don't hesitate to get in touch. I can be reached here on LinkedIn or at [email protected].

Image credits for this article are (in the order they appear):

• Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
• Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
• Photo by Sara Kurfe? on Unsplash