IM Local Edition – London – Infrastructure Masons

The Infrastructure Masons (iMasons) held our first local meeting in London on 02 November, 2017 and it was a smashing success! 14 members and 36 guests attended the session, filling the private dining room at The May Fair Hotel in London to its capacity. The attendees represented the London area infrastructure community, a few from the wider United Kingdom area, even a few from the continent. Lively networking sessions occurred from the start of the day through the end of the iMasons session, and continued into the UK Data Center Interest Group (UK DCIG) meeting which many attendees stayed around to see as well.

After a short introduction to iMasons for the new guests, attendees dug right into the first workshop topic, What ideas should be included in an iMasons 50-50 hiring guide, a short publication on recruiting more female tech talent. As part of the Diversity & Inclusion initative in iMasons, members debated thoughts on how to solve the issues surrounding attracting and retaining more women in infrastructure. Discussion was vigorous for the 35 minutes allotted, and participants shouted out and recorded 90 different suggestions. Key points from the discussions

- - Start recruiting early; get to young girls and women to influence decisions in middle school or high school
  - Highlight successful women in tech so others can picture themselves in successful roles
  - Make the workplace more attractive (pretty) vs spartan
  - Make flexible work and distance work more functional
  - Get successful female mentors involved in iMasons, connect women who want to be mentored
  - Target/brand/advertise the fact that we want more women to apply
  - Put measures in place to distinguish confidence (male) from competence (women); hire for competence
  - Get more women on the Advisory Council, modeling successful industry participation
  - Develop apprenticeships specifically for women
  - Ask recruiters specifically for 50/50 women candidates
These suggestions mirror the ones made in the iMasons Dallas local meetup in September, and will be incorporated into an upcoming iMasons hiring guide to help managers recruit qualified female candidates for infrastructure jobs. iMasons participants then moved on to the second workshop topic, working with the newly created Data Center Incident Reporting Network, or DCIRN. The iMasons board recently voted to have iMasons become the North American sponsor for DCIRN (pronounced DEE-cern), an open, publicly-available database of infrastructure incidents that is being developed as a tool to help the industry improve safety and reliability of infrastructure systems. Incidents are reported and verified, then “dis-identified” so all information about persons, companies, and manufacturers involved are removed, making it impossible to name the specifics of any one incident, but retaining the lessons learned to be shared with all participants.
iMasons attendees discussed the question, “What should iMasons do with DCIRN to maximize impact to the industry”? Lots of great suggestions flew around the room, settling on 48 ideas recorded in the interactive spreadsheets for the session. Top ideas:
- - - Define “incident” better; differentiate incident, failure, outage
    - Develop a self-regulation program before government steps in; life-critical applications key
    - Incentivize operators thru education and shared learning; “show us yours we’ll show you ours”
    - Have iMasons support and promote DCIRN at all events
    - Set KPIs for baseline monitoring and improve against those KPIs
    - Educate attendees on specific incidents and how to detect / prevent / mitigate
    - Copy the best practices of the aviation, automobile, and maritime industries that are doing this
    - Have sponsors lead the way by seeding the database with incidents early on
    - Leverage iMasons to reduce negative publicity of reporting, encouraging others to report

Get more information on DCIRN

Overall, a huge success. iMasons seem to have found a great home in London. Special thanks to Simon Allen of UK DCIG for organizing and driving home the meeting arrangements, attendees, and promotion! Looking forward to doing it again soon!

Spreadsheets with the full array of ideas generated are http://bit.ly/imlon1 and http://bit.ly/imlon2