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Is Today's IT an Undervalued Asset?
mwillems asks: "I work in the technology industry, as a CTO. What I have increasingly seen in the last year, both in North America and Europe, is that IT has ceased to be a valid way to spend corporate money. IT spending used to be looked at as a way to gain competitive advantages. Since the .com bust, the arguments I hear everywhere is 'IT has now been proven to be a waste of money'. At many companies it is now easier to get a corporate account at a strip club than a new PC. Or a budget to develop a much-needed corporate app. If any spending is done it is on hardware - at least that is 'real'. Do Slashdot readers recognise that? Are there going to be many techies left ten years from now? What can we do to keep the spirit of innovation alive while this 'IT is bad' era lasts, and how can we make it end? And, how do you prove the value of IT? This is not as simple as it seems. Try it with a spreadsheet: as your typical CTO has to do so, every day."
How do you feel about the cost benefits of IT? Is it worth what your company spends on it, especially if the advantages can't be reduced to a simple dollars-and-cents figure?
This is just a low cycle. Because IT as it is today is such a new field this is the first low end of a new business structure that'll rebound in the next months/years. There's still contracts out there to be had and still companies willing to pay good money for them, you just have to look harder and be more innovative to outlive, outlast, and out play the other IT survivors until life gets easy again.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
the truth is - nope, IT spending in the vast majority of comapnies out there should be drastically reduced.
I know of a NE Power Company that spends 10k/year/employee on IT expenses.
Which is insane. They arent a software company, they arent a development company, these expenses are a pure expense that generates no revenue.
none. nada, zilch.
how can you justify paying a HS graduate with a "certification" that tells people to reboot their machine as a fix for everything souble what you would pay a marketing person with a college degree?
you cant - there is no justification. Then you consider perpetual hardware upgrades and software licensing, you get an even worse picture.
Look at it this way - if you spend $1500 on a home appliance, like a fridge, washing machine, how long do you expect it to last? 15 years? 20? more?
and you want businesses, who arent in the computer industry, to buy new equipt every 2-3 years? not gonna happen.
then theres MS's latest yearly tax. if MS would have had it ready 3 years ago, it would have worked, but not now, no way - businesses dont care what they run, they just want to keep their expenses down.
... hi bingo
I'm the head of IT for a small Financial Management company in the midwest. There are 23 computers on my network connecting to two Win2000 servers for print and file sharing. I see 99% of my entire IT budget being poured into Microsoft.
;)
Look at every new machine purchased. How much of that cost goes directly to Microsoft for their Operating systems and even worse their Office suite? There was an article here dealing with it, but since it's almost time to go home I'm not going to take the time to look it up exactly. It was almost 80% of new computer costs go to license your Microsoft apps. And what's really sad is we are stuck on Windows. All our mutual funds send us their prospectuses in some crappy VB program or their brochures in Word format.
So don't fool yourself with where your IT costs are going. They're going to Microsoft and the trash for all the IT people who sit and read Slashdot all day when they should be working
this, unfortunately, is the flip side to the internet-bubble coin.
remember how, in middle school, people followed the trends initiated by the cool kids? same thing works in business. in the late 90s, people thought 'hey -- the joneses are buying nobusinessmodel.com, so i will'. now people think 'wow -- i lost my shirt on dot-coms -- computers are a waste, as that fellow in usa today pointed out.'
wired magazine had an article two months ago that pointed out that all tech developments went through a curve -- early adopters got people excited about a tech, but then excitement waned because people couldn't see the use. as applications became apparent, adoption and excitement picked back up. technology in general is going through the same trend.
go get it
Ever heard of that? I know far too many IS projects that have costs, but there is no way to quantify the benefits. There is one very simple thing to understand here: costs come out of IT, benefits come out of the customer department. If you can't get the customer to step up to the plate and provide a believable justification, followed up by demonstrated results, you're sunk. The next layer here is time frame. A project that starts paying for itself (i.e. is deployed) three months or less from inception gives everyone a benchmark to know whether the customer's estimate of benefits, as well as IS's ability to deliver those benefits. A project that won't be deployed for three years is, frankly, silly. It's an exercise in blind faith, not an exercise in rational development strategy. If your development methodology delivers things infrequently in large lumps, you've got real problems. If it allows you to break large projects down into two or three month chunks that can be deployed to start getting a return on that investment, then you've got something. The last layer is risk. Those massive three year projects have unacceptable business risks. If you break them into two or three month deployables, you've limited the risk your customer (internal or external) faces. John Roth
I'm not sure this is accurate, I think in many cases management is afraid of getting behind the times. This is especially true in companies who deliver computer/Internet related products. Our CTO is constantly trying to keep our company on the bleeding edge of technology (sometimes trying a bit too hard if you ask me). Many times this is simply so we can impress a client by saying that we're working with the latest greatest stuff.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think our company (I work for a college in the UK) don't quite realise the importance of IT in their establishment. I think the problem is, at least from the point of view at my place, is that people just do not realise how much computers have taken over the 'behind the scenes' aspect of things. Computers are responsible for our critical finance data, running our telephone system (Cisco IP Telephony), running staff payroll - the list is endless. Yet people still see network backbones as a few pieces of old BNC strung across the back of a wall into a small repeater under the desk.. what they dont see if the miles and miles of UTP and fiber we have linking the various blocks and departments together, not including the various switches and routers connecting networks.
Is it because IT systems have become so reliable, and so transparent to the average user that they give it any thought any more? We keep pondering flicking the power switch on the core switch one day, just to see how much people suddenly realise their IT network means to them.. I'd give it about 1 minute before we got hassle from senior management asking when the network was due back up.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
...especially if the advantages can't be reduced to a simple dollars-and-cents figure?
This hits the nail on the head. I make software for a living, and I can't imagine how I ever did my work without the Internet. E-mail, Web access, it all saves me quite a bit of time, and therefore the company money, but I would have a hard time trying to quantify these savings in dollars and cents.
I don't think IT departments will die. Virus checking, bug fixes, etc., it'll all still be necessary. People are getting more and more dependent on IT technology (wireless e-mail, web access). There is no way we are going to go back to snail mail and typewriters.
Now, delaying buying the latest and greatest hardware, and the latest and greatest version of MS Office, that I can see happening...
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
Most people in the tech industry are going to fade out. Thus, leaving the majority of workers those who have been around before the
"Bigger salaries and more work"? Puh-leez!! Since when has the collapse of an industry caused salaries to go up? The whole reason why unqualified people flocked to IT in the first place was the high salaries. The high salaries were the reason why companies pressured the US government to relax immigration controls. Frankly, I think we will see smaller salaries and more work as proprietary programmers struggle to compete with open source.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
And, how do you prove the value of IT? This is not as simple as it seems. Try it with a spreadsheet: as your typical CTO has to do so, every day."
Screw that spreadsheet nonsense. If I EVER hear a calculator monkey where I work say something as half-assed as:
'IT has now been proven to be a waste of money'
I'll be headed straight for the wiring closets and pulling the plugs on all the switches and routers I can find. Shortly thereafter I'm sure he'd figure out that IT actually does have value, though he may still be hard-pressed to quantify it.
The real problem with IT is that we were promising people the wrong thing. We promised them that it would make workers more efficient, allowing us to get the same amount of work done in less time. What really ended up happening is that now we get several times as much work done in the same amount of time. We don't work shorter hours, but we do get more done. That's a good thing.
The company that I work for has done several projects for businesses and government agencies that seemed prohibitively expensive at first, but usually ended up paying for themselves in savings after 6 to 12 months. We've done computerized inventory and supply chain projects and tied it all together with wireless PDAs resulting in a faster and more accurate accounting of inventory, reduced labor costs, and the near total elimination of paper documention that required costly and inefficient storage solutions.
It's can somewhat difficult to understand, so I can see where someone might deceive themselves into thinking that IT is a waste of money. It's much easier to see when you have a specific task that is being moved to a computerized system. But honestly, I have to think that someone who sees IT as a waste of money is either a) not using it properly, b) paying far too much for it, or c) not really thinking about it.
I run the IT dept. at my company. I am the IT Director, the Systems Admin, and the Network Engineer. It is a small company of 30-35 people. We spend more money on IT than anything else except salary compensation for our employees. When I have to justify something like a computer or peripherals...I usually do it by simply explaining that we are spending 100k on an employee in salary and benefits and that he has to have an effective working environment in order to be productive. We can't just give a programmer some 3 year old used PC and expect the same level of productivity from them as one with a new PC and an ergonomic mouse/keyboard with a nice monitor. Now I'm not talking top of the line stuff like an Aeron chair and a computer with a Geforce4 Ti4600 card...thats just plain ridiculous. But actually investing in hardware and infrastructure that can VISUALLY be seen benefiting the users.
On another note, due to the fact that I am the only person in our IT dept. at the current time I have been able to keep costs down in other areas of my dept. I don't have to pay for training for any other IT employees or for more computers for them. The fact that I have kept my dept. streamlined and directly on task for what it's purposes are has garnered me alot of faith and responsibility from the higher ups, which means more freedom with the budget.
IT shops that just spend and show poor price/performance and hence have trouble getting things done is a symptom that there are some really ineffective people in the IT field. I'm sorry, but a degree from DeVry's is not going to get you a job working for me (I am looking to hire someone soon to allieviate some of the upcoming strain on my time). I have been in this field since I was 15 and working for Ericsson during high school as an asst. network admin. I did this because I loved the work not just because it paid well. If an IT person can't show me that they not only know computers but that they understand the underlying purpose of an IT dept. (which is generally to help the company get its work done) then they will be ushered right out of my office and back on the street.
Honesty may be the best policy, but apparently by elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
Unfortunately, the internet is ruined with spam and popups for the vast majority -- no matter what happens. Corporate culture has already sunk it's teeth, and like a vampire, drained it's culture right out of it. We still get to live and be geeky, but it will never be like it was. With how many hundreds of millions online, how will spam ever stop? I like my job, I get to sit and write code. Some is viewed over a web browser, some is never viewed just a network server. This is what makes me happy, not fighting with a dozen clueless dipshits that left the wonders of their fast food job to join a company as a "Senior Perl Developer" because they read a few perl books. I can see it happening now, and it'll be great when the economy does filter it self so that those who do deserve jobs and can't get them, receive them. It's a shame to see good developers go unemployed purely because there is a massive deluge of resumes to try to filter out.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Man, I love to spin a good yarn.
The year was 1998. I had just scored a job as an IT guy for a small silicon valley company that was going to revelutionize the world by building a netmeeting for radiologists.
Well somewhere along the line, my paranoid overly mormon CTO began to think I was satan and thusly ordered all my root priveledges be taken from all servers..
I'm not going to go into too much detail about why, we'll just leave it at he was a lunatic. I could no longer add users to the mail system, apply patches or do anything a person in my job would normally do, so I just sat there browsing the web all day. Surfing the web and getting paid is pretty fun to say the least.
This psychotic CTO thought it would be a good idea to put the burden of sysadmin'ing to the coders beneath him. That lasted about 2 weeks.
Secretary calls, "I forgot my mail password"
me, "Sorry but since I had my admin rights taken away I can no longer fix those problems"
CEO calls, "I just got an email saying 1 million porn spams for dildos just passed through our unprotected SMTP server is this true?"
Me, "Sorry sir, but without access to the logs I cannot verify this, here talk to the coder kendyl put in charge of that"
Where everyone was used to issues being resolved in 10 to 15 minutes with one phone call now turned into a trapeze act of phone calls trying to track down which coder was in charge of what system. It prevented me from doing my job, it made the coders jobs harder from fielding stupid questions, and the CEO was very pissed off about the whole thing. Coders were wasting up to 2 hours a day each to deal with stupid network shit.
Well eventually the CTO was fired for being a stark raving lunatic. The coders that held alligence with him blamed me for his downfall. One in paticular would do shit like run a samba server to fuck with my PDC, due to oslevel=1000000 my NT box would never become PDC.
The company brought in a new group to rewrite the product from scratch, and they brought with them a very wise admin named Ed Goldthorpe (If his resume ever crosses your desk, hire him, he's worth whatever he's asking) Ed slowly but surely got the coders to co-operate with him and got the network turned around in about 3 months. We had VPN, started running qmail, and basically everything was good.
I sort of faded into the background from then on. I still fielded support calls from our socal office and the one I worked out of.
The office moved 2 hours away from my house, where before it had been only 15 minutes. I put up with the 4 hour commutes by spending less time in the office. Eventually the company threatened to put me on hourly, I told them to fuck off and went to find another job. Maybe i'll write about the next job if we get an on topic story for it.
So going back to the point i'm trying to make. Most of these companies that are ditching the full time IT staff and doubling the load on their engineers will feel the burn in about 6 months. They will realize that an engineer pestered by idiots who can't change a font all day isn't a happy engineer.
IT acts as that buffer too keep the animals from eating the engineers/coders alive. When you throw away IT, you'll be losing a few good engineers too. It happened at my company, and it will happen at yours.
Either simulate or cause a disaster. Also simulate that there are no IT people in the organization.
Hmmmm, should this simulation be scheduled?
Now ask the people who would normally be in charge of IT (usually a CFO, CIO, or COO) at the director/exec level to fix the problem propperly.
The checkbook for contractor/vendor/consulting dollars will probably fly open.
IT is the nervous system of any company. You know you've got one somewhere, but unless you get hurt in a major way, you'll never know it's there.
"...the shortest distance between two points may be straight line, but it is by no means the most interesting."
Stupid companies will offer low pay and deal with the people they attract with that, who will then go out and make boneheaded decisions and toss the whole company into well-deserved chaos.
Now, I agree that the average salary has gone down, however that's more just from there being a reasonable pool of people to choose from rather than 1% unemployment.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
With how many hundreds of millions online, how will spam ever stop?
Leave the Internet and form a new network and tightly control who can and can't get on... much like Internet2 for example. Sure, it will never be as popular as the Internet and will probably just be a few hundred nodes if you're lucky, but it will be like the Internet used to be before the rampant commercialism caused it to take off in popularity. I would say you could try setting something like this up fairly cheaply by tunneling it over the current Internet as you start out. Maybe start out using IPSEC and IPv6. We need to cease this silly notion of anonymity on the Internet as well. There's no reason why anyone should expect to be anonymous on a public network. The very fact that you expect ME to accept your packets means that you should be willing to reveal who you are to me. IPSEC authentication would do nicely for this kind of thing. No more spammers getting online, the teenager kids would be kept off, etc. It'd be a serious network again.
I'm not sure I agree. Or maybe I agree but don't realize it. I think we'll start to see a blurring of the lines. There will always be the 'pure' techy jobs, but I think we'll start to see a lot more jobs that blend non-tech and tech skills. Just as non-tech workers have learned to develop their own Microsoft Word templates for memos, or more advanced users have created Excel macros to aid with their work, people will start to develop their own custom software to help them do their jobs. An influx of tech workers into non tech jobs could drive this, provided the corporations don't get in the way. If anything, the non-techies should be getting worried. 'Course, I could be nuts. /. discussion a few years ago?)
(It's a shame, there's a great argument in my head, but it just can't find it's way to the keyboard.)
(Whoa! major deja vu... wasn't there a similar
-beme
1971
Too many places pour money into big servers and expensive equipment, thinking "If we build it, they will come".
The bottom line is, you have to have a great idea to get anywhere. IT is not where this happens. That happens in marketing (cringe) and in R&D, NOT IT.
BTW, what do you mean standardizing. Damned if I can by the same rack mount today that I bought last year. I can't even get them to ship the same rack mount rails that I have ordered from them time and time again...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
On the PBS show Small Business School (http://smallbusinessschool.org/webapp/sbs/sbs/ind ex-ie.jsp?Size=800&Speed=250&page=/webapp/sbs/prof iles/228/home.jsp), there was an episode about this guy who bought a chain of failing art supply stores (The Art Store). He used IT (AS/400s) to monitor his inventory, sales, costs, etc... He ended up turning the store around with a well implemented solution using technology that works. Not some new product/technology that's still being BETA'd.
I'm sure the /. crowd could come up with many more instances of similar situations.
Unfortunately, most people want to use the newest stuff out there and they don't consider if the tech. has been proven or not. I see it time and time again, somebody in management says something ridiculous like, "We need an Internet, Java, XML messaging, scalable, IT solution!" Of course, it's not allowed to ask, "Why do we need that when we could use a(n) ."
P.S. Sorry about the link. You can find the transcript of the show at smallbusinessschool.org and look for "The Art Store"
There is no spoon or sig.
The biggest reason that IT spending gets out of control and produces no real results is becuase managers just don't understand the technology or their technical people enough to know what they are doing and are unwilling to admit their mistakes letting the problem get worse and worse.
An example here at my current job is working with the monitoring department. The decided to use Netview and Robomon to monitor Windows servers. They hired two contractors who had no experience with either product. The manager who hired them had no experience with those products, project management or even basic programming skills. She simply trusted the judgement of the people who were under her.
The could not get Netview working, they could not get Robomon working and their usual complaint was to blame it on the system owners. When the system did work, they had done such a poor job of writing monitoring scripts it was not uncommon for our deparment to see on the screen, about 50 to 100 error messages a second scrolling through events window.
After a while upper-management broke down and hired a outside contractor to tell them what was wrong. I talked with her and she said, it was the contractors that they hired. I asked, are you going to tell management that? She said no, they did not want to hear that they had made a bad decision so she was going to give them what they wanted. Saying they may need some training.
Finally they decided that it was the Robomon software that they had purchased was the problem. So the contractors, who by this time, being so effective, were hired as employees. They had decided they wanted HP Openview, nevermind that they had not worked with that either. They wrote a report detailing their methodology for determining the best monitoring software and listed HP Openview at the top of the list. I took at look at their report. It seems that made up a number and then assigned it to the packages that they were suppposed to review. Of course Openview was at the top.
So now, after two years, they still have not been able to configure an effective monitoring tool but lets look at the total costs.
$1.055 million dollars in support and software, don't even know about the hardware. The manager had been told that their were problems with their employees but she brushes them off, and always backs them up. So is it any wonder, with this attitude about technology that people don't want to put more into that bucket!
I know someone that could make you feel better. Last years wages, over 6 figures. This years to date: $0.00
And his stock is worth so little, he can't even short it.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
People who would rather visit slashdot.org than work on their latest assignment.
I agree fully, though Slashdot is as reasonable a news site as any (in their headlines) for getting tech news, which can be quite imporant ("New Windows Worm Attacks IIS 5.3.1 installations"). It can be used reasonably.
People who would rather try getting Linux running on their companies server than maintaing whatever's already on it
I don't buy this. If the company really has no need to expand that server's services in the future, isn't throwing any more money at the server software, and is comfortable with whatever degree of technology lock-in they're suffering, *then* there is no reason to try Linux.
There's a lot of money being blown on IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft servers because at purchase time, no one wants to try a sudden, jolting transition, and no one bothered to do a gradual, gentle one earlier. These gradual changes can save the company a lot of money over the long term. If an IT person has spare time, he *should* be experimenting with cheaper software alternatives for the company.
People who think they can show up to work dressed like a slob and that people will respect them because they are 'elite hax0rs.
I *hate* the entire "dress up to go to work" ethic. Now, don't get me wrong. You have to interact with people over the course of the day, and they don't want you wearing a thong or a "Big Johnson" T-shirt. That's legitimate. And some positions (sales, for instance) really do put a *lot* of emphasis on making a corporate impression for the company. So I can understand dressing up there. But I really don't see the point in blowing a bunch of time and money getting dress shoes. They don't improve my productivity -- if anything they hurt it. I spend most of my day looking at a computer screen and maybe occasionally a telephone. I'm not talking face to face with customers. Why should anyone care whether I have a tie or whether I have an expensive dress shirt?
Fortunately, the ridiculous emphasis on clothing has been recognized and mostly eliminated in the last few years -- compared to the 70s or the 80s, clothing requirements are far, far more lenient. A shirt with a collar and slacks pretty much are enough most places I've seen (and slacks=>blue jeans at others).
May we never see th
As this post eluded, the ITAA is around to help secure the futures of the IT companies, not the individial workers in those companies.
Maybe it's time for IT pros to really start taking a hard look at the laws that are being passed and band together to help each other. While the EFF and such as doing their part on behalf of the consumers and some tech people, they have a much different focus -- on the technology rather than the people for the most part.
If there was an Information Technology WORKERS Association of America, how many of you would join to support the cause? How many of you would be willing to pay a membership fee to this organization to support its operations -- ie - staff (lawyers would be needed since we would be interacting on a large scale with the hill), assistants, equipment, rent, etc?
Personally, I would be more than happy to join this kind of association to get my voice heard somewhere other than Slashdot.
Thoughts?
I can remember when I first decided to get into IT (in a support role, not a programmer) the only thing that I was thinking about was working on PC's all day, keeping the up, upgrading, etc...
Only one problem with this, I had no idea what PC's are used for in business. Like it or not, how users us their systems is of great importance. Basic business says if it saves money, it is good, if it costs money it is bad. For the last 5 years, IT has cost money. The typical user is not the multi-billion dollar international company with 1000 servers and 10000 workstations. It is the small mom and pop shop on the corner. They buy PC's because everyone says they will save them money, without ever finding out how PC's are supposed to do this. In the end, most of them find that they are spending more money, because they either hired a "shadetree" IT person who sold them an NT server to handle their accouting, or because their users are not educated in using the equipment. A lot of companies have cut spending on IT because of this and feel they can do without IT.
We have to remember what PC's were designed to do, which is replace people. In order for a small business to justify using a PC, they have to be able to cut payroll costs, or production costs. Most of them still have the same number of employees, or more employees with the IT staff. As much as we like being the center of attention, we have to get to the point where we are invisible to the user. They never see us, and the system always works. The key to creating a market for IT is changing some very old habits in business, and improving what we offer.