Moving along

I'm both happy and frustrated with how things are going at work. On the one hand, last week I got to tour an incredible facility that provides electricity and internet access (very very reliably) and cooling and so on for computer servers. My company is looking at moving our servers into such an environment, and I'm taking on a lot of the responsibility for the planning of how to do that, including being in charge of architecting the server layouts and so on. As nice as it is to have my technical opinion sought and accepted, it's still really frustrating to realize that, even if I were to provide the exact specifications for how we should go forward with it, I know nothing is going to happen with it for weeks because the people upstairs are not committed to the course of action. Even though it's clearly, to me, the right move for the company, and it's something that they've said to people outside the company it's their intention to move forward with, they're sitting on their hands and doing nothing to move it forward despite my promptings.

On the other hand, sometimes when I take the initiative things work out pretty well. Over the weekend, I took it upon myself to take one of our servers that was having trouble keeping up with the requests on it and gave it a tuneup. I upgraded software and tweaked some performance options and got it running a lot smoother. When I came in this morning, the boss complimented me on the job and asked me to do similar tuning on some other servers that were starting to give us some trouble. I put forth the effort and moved things forward and they accepted it and it all worked out. So why isn't it that way with everything?