The Secret IT Manager knows that the only way to get knowledge workers to work for him is mind-control !!! This is less 60's scifi than it sounds - anyone working in IT these days is a fully paid up, michel porter-esque knowledge worker. And that means their most precioud asset is, no not their knowledge, or even their brain. It is their focus.

Focus is what pulls knowledge and brains and effort into the same place, focus is what churns them up and occasionally, produces great work.

And we humans focus on what is fascinating, what is part of a chain of importance to us, individually. And the best way to make something important to anotehr person is to tell them the story of why.

Story of why

One powerful story of why is "A computer on every desktop". Another is "We shall fight them on the beaches". Sadly another is "The Jews secretly run all the banks"

Each of those "stories of why" has two parts, wrapped up nice and fractually with the context

a reason for doing things,

and a restricted set of things to do

So if you were a civilian listening to Churchill in 1940, you would know that Nazism must be fought because it was an evil, and because you had no choice if you wanted to remain free. And if you believed the story of why, your actions were restricted. Could you surrender. No.
There were other people in 1940, who thought surrender was feasible, or preferable. But they were not nazi stooges, merely people with a different view of practicality.
But they had no ringing story of "why".

So when you want to make a lot (or a few) people believe what you want to believe, you need a good story to go with it. A story of why.


And here is the first "story of why" and IT managers needs to tell

1. Be able to recreate every piece of software throughout the whole network, from bare metal, from scripts, totally automated.

This story tells us much - if we have the capability to recreate it all, there is nothing missing. We are not going to be unable to find that wierd config tht runs once every last thursday, because we have it in the crontab in svn.
It means we will be able to restart if anything goes wrong. And that is an immensely freeing idea - allowing us to experiment with new and unusal soluitons.
It also means we must write weverything froom now on with anneye to building it from scratch from scripts.