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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?
Most people in the tech industry are going to fade out. Thus, leaving the majority of workers those who have been around before the .com boom. Bigger salaries and more work, instead of the bloated staff in a lot of IT departments that you saw during the .com boom. Personally, I'm glad to see it. I know plenty of people who shouldn't be in the IT field. Luckily, those are the ones finding other professions or reverting to their previous professions.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Hopefully the management will realize that having 10 minimum wage types working on their systems is not the way to go. They will then wrap up that money and hire one person who is worth a darn to do network security.
That is where they need to spend money, not on sub-vice-assistant-coffee-boys in charge of creamer for the network.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Most firms now realize that they can survive another year without upgrading their router or servers, which were either so expenseive originally that they simply must sit in the rack room longer, or are "good enough" even if they aren't the latest model.
Software is a whole other story. Most companies realize now that upgrades are a scam.
On top of all of this, many buyers realize that the latest tech will simply make them part of a large beta testing mob, where their old tech is now largely debugged and productive. Certainly MS users understand this.
I love working on IT, but let's face it, this is just like any other department in a company. Many of us have seen the total waste of $$$ that an IT manager will sell to the higher ups - sometimes just to work with new technology, etc.. The fact of the matter is that at a typical company, IT budget is not seen with an eye on monetary rewards. That has changed recently. Business rules state that if a secretary does something well for 30k a year, don't spend 200k to eliminate his/her position as it is not cost effective (even 100k is too much because it probably doesn't include maintence costs and the cost of changing business rules (which is much more expensive for software than a secretary)).
This is easy - innovate. Don't just buy new hardware and upgrade software, do something that IMPROVES life at the office. There's more to IT than scalable switches and making sure that you can ping the server. Come up with new applications of the technology and make yourselves valuable.
Create your own value, the rest of us have to do it.
This is the outcome of the insane IT boom of the 90's. I see many companies that purchased false promises and have nothing to show for it now. The company I work for has boxes full of software from various vendors. Most of which doesn't do what it claims, or does it so poorly its not worth running.
I don't think the attitude we're seeing the the death of IT, rather the maturing of it. There is now a need to justify purchases. The "we need it cause it's cool" attitude is long gone. People now look at a product and say, how will this help me.
Innovation hasn't slowed down, false promises are no longer considered innovation. I can envision the next few years to be some of the most innovative we've seen in quite a while. The smoke is cleared and the mirrors are gone, tis time to do real work.
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
This may not be a popular opinion but I really don't think the majority of corporate users NEED a new pc very ofter. I'm a full time software developer and I'm perfectly happy with my "ancient" PII 400... Granted there are always exceptions to the rule, but for the most part I think new PC purchases should be scrutinized.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
The late 90's: All Tech Spending is Good
:)
The early 00's: All Tech Spending is Bad
It's oversimplistic reactions to the problems that came from tech spending in the 90's. Many people were creating products that were full of pizazz that didn't work for crap and people bought them because they thought technology was their salvation. Well guess what, technology isn't a magic pill, and anybody who claims ANYTHING is a magic pill should be taken out back and shot.
So now today, everybody is gun shy and overcautious. A company gets burned in the 90's converting their billing system to some flaky electronic system that has cost more money to keep together than your old system. Today they get the choice of buying yet another new system, taking the same risks again, or sticking with the known quantity. At this point, with money tight, few are willing to take that risk to get it right the second time because they can't afford to get burned this time.
Over the next few years as a recovery slowly works its way into the system, some people will feel that they can take some risks again. Those flaky systems will have long since been purged from the software gene pool and there will be good products that people will be able to trust. We'll actually begin to see those efficiency gains that were supposed to happen during the 90's hype and the world of IT will be back in business.
Until then, batton down the hatches and hang on tight
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I work in software development and in speaking to our customers (yes, I actually talk to my users directly so I know what they want/need) many of them are working on much better and more useful applications than they were two years ago.
Less online phone directories more online report generation from divergent systems. Moving data from paper booklets to online is cute, but what does it save? Create real time reports using data from different systems (internal and external) and suddenly you have something that makes life much better.
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 work for a VBC that's known as one of the best managed companies in America. We love companies with the attitude you describe. We call them "also-rans". Each year our businesses are given a target cost they must remove using IT projects. Spending on the projects comes from projected savings. The business owns the budget, but has to spend it through a centralized IT group. In our business, the number was $270 M (our revenues are about $10 B). Miss the number one year and the VP's don't get bonuses; miss it twice and the VP's don't have jobs. The trick is measuring the benefits, and auditing after project implementation to make sure they aren't playing games with the numbers. Does it work? This year, we expect to save $1.6 Billion (across all business) while increasing IT spending 12%.
However, alternatively, I've been thinking upper managers aren't worth their salary and the overall burden placed on IT (i.e. regular staff meetings, and various time wasting activities that could be devoted to streamlining the business... or handling a data conversion from a merger, etc).
And besides, what is the value to assign to cost savings for automating processes so individual peons don't have to press buttons and screw up data? One bean, or two? When I convert a customer, order, and trouble ticket history database from one company to ours... and it allows a single support person to intelligently answer a new customers question quickly - is that worth one, two, or three piles of beans?
I hate justifying my existence, and generally never have to when I deliver on projects that simplify processes and do things quicker than would have to be done by hand...
I'm not sure, but I really don't think the sky is falling either...
Lets face it, the networks are in place, the companies have a computer (no matter how old) on every desk, and they've already run their network lines throughout - and if they haven't yet, then they aren't going to.
They age of innovation and upgrading is over, the workers of IT have built a solid IT foundation, and now that it's constructed, budget is cut to simple maintenance. Of course the IT dept isn't disapearing, it's just no longer expanding.
Why is a mouse that spins?
I've noticed that as my colleages machines have been upgraded, their code has gotten slower and slower. Maybe your admin assistent needs a GHz machine to run your finance spread sheet, but I know a good developer doesn't need the $4000 machine to hack code. I also know that our new enterprise Solaris box isn't as fast as the old duel processor Linux box that we used to use.
Okay, now that I'm going to lose my job for whining about corporate decision making... everyone have a nice day.
-brian
I've almost found the opposite. Because I can sysadmin boxes, I'm an added resource. In fact, because of those abilities I may be heading up a very cool project (development, mostly, but tight system/network integration) so I'm thanking my lucky stars I know how to admin on (except for HP) unix platforms.
Most people do more than their job function, learning how to do other related jobs only makes you better in your position. Keep in mind that you are keeping with the real geeks who lost their jobs. The ones who have 12+ node networks at home on a cisco switch. This is why sysadmin experience is wanted -- because they can get it.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Today's IT undervalued, to a small degree yes, a little bit of an overreaction to yesterday's IT being overvalued. Spending probably should be reigned in compared to previous years, more justification for purchases and projects offered, etc.
People should realize that the IT of a couple of years ago was inflated just like the stock prices, that today is more normal than then. Apologies for the bad news.
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.
I'm not saying that what your saying isn't true. I just don't believe that is has anything to do with anything. If there is ANY lesson to learn from the last few years, it is that people do not operate (either personally or professionally) in anything approaching a rational way. People operate on the principles of greed and fear. Right now we are in the fear state. Sometime later we will be in greed state again. I always snort derisively when stock market "analysts" say that investors have returned to "value" investing (not that the analysts themselves has anything to do with people doing "non-value" investing...).
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Could it be that management has finally caught on to the trick of buying hardware and software that requires constant expert maintenance? As an IT dept. head, wouldn't you rather buy stuff that you know would keep those under you busy and employed? You sure wouldn't want to be the one that made the decision to buy hardware/software that made the IT dept. unneeded.
(I'm not saying this happens often, but it does happen. Ever had to try to convince some MSCE to let you buy the right tool for the job, instead of the electronic version of the spork?)
Unfortunately, thanks to M$ licensing schemes, hardware that's outdated 3 minutes after the box is opened, hardware that is underdesigned and runs hot, vulnerable software, etc., IT is a money pit. This especially true in those organizations where some PHB just has to have the latest/greatest as determined by some marketing wiz.
It's a pendulum that has swung way to far one way, and will swing far the other way. Hopefully it will settle in a comfortable position soon.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
In any era of disconfidence, there will be upheaval--this one is no different. If we're lucky ('we' meaning people in software and hardware development), the number of positions will shrink, but the workload and pay increase.
I'll go on the unpopular edge and say I think IT has been overhyped, personally, as if it were the fundamentals of all industry. I think it's important, but certainly not as much as true business. IT is infrastructure and support. All it can do is act as a lubricant for other processes, not create on its own. To have a massive IT department with huge budgets, particularly if the business is not directly in an information-dependent business, is like paying structural engineers 6-figure salaries to make sure the building is still level.
Someday, when software and hardware become truly stable and less bug-ridden, IT departments may just go the way of the contract skilled labor. Until then, we have dedicated personnel and associated costs.
One of the major issues with having in-house people for IT is that they look for work to keep themselves on payroll. It's natural. The next big thing is XYZ, and we need to have it! That typically spells investment in time and money, but not necessarily a justified need being filled. I've seen it done in past companies many times, and thought nothing of it because we had money to pay for it. Not anymore. For instance, I got 3 different machine upgrades in one year because our IT department kept raising the bar on machines and didn't want to keep older ones around, because it was more work for them to maintain different configurations. It caused more upheaval for the whole company than not doing any upgrades at all, and kept them mighty busy doing conversions. We had 6 people on staff to serve less than 80 employees. Tail wagging the dog syndrome.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
IT is a value added resource in most companies but, sadly, in most companies it really doesn't directly contribute to the bottom line of profits vs. losses. IT's value is in making the employees lives easier without intruding on the day to day operations of the company. This tends to a be a cyclical trend based on two factors. The first is arrogance and the second is repentance.
The arrogance factor is what drove IT spending a couple of years ago. In essence, it is drawn from the idea that for the vast majority of corporate America IT organizations have tended to view themselves as being "The Reason for all Existance." CIOs, and the organizations they represent, develop an over exagerated opinion of their place in the world. The inevitable happens when the CEO realizes that spending a third of the total corporate budget on new computers still means he has to use Microsoft Office.
The repentance factor happens when after the arrogance factor has disappated and IT spending has flushed itself down the toilet. Computers start breaking and the two guys who program in COLBOL either retired or died. The peasants rise up in arms and the CEO takes notice, realizing that just maybe he needs to up the dollar count before he drives his company out of business.
These two cycles make up the Hebrew Cycle of Corporate Management, or HCCM for short. This is named after the relationship that God's chosen people have developed with God.
In a couple of years, when processes start breaking and computers get older causing more downtime than otherwise necessary the trend will turn around.
Beware the wood elf!!!
I don't think anyone has made assertions as extreme as the straw men you are shooting down. What people are saying is that IT needs to be rationalized like any other factor of production. In the 90s that wasn't happening.
We're not done bursting the bubble yet. On a fundamental level, I believe in the value of computing and information technology. Any money and effort spent there is bound to reward any large company. The problem is that the effort/money isn't spent well. We've been in a long era (going back much further than
Among any technical job title out there, be it "Java Developer", "Web Guru", "Network Designer", "Oracle DBA", or any of the other millions, I firmly believe that a large chunk of the people holding a given title (75%, higher in some areas) aren't worth their salaries. They should be making $30,000 for the amount of real benefit they are providing, not $90,000.
Companies need to get real. They need to spend IT HR money into two basic categories, and wisely: Production Support (mostly human macro tasks, shouldn't pay all that well), R&D (coders, testers, app designers, systems/network engineers - should pay well, but you should have about 10% of the staff you have now, and they should all be skilled and worth their money).
With a clear vision and none of the bullshit overspending fluff this industry continues to see, I bet the average IT dept could run on 20-30% of their normal budgets.
11*43+456^2
That's funny, I just heard in class today that customers are telling us that while they recognize that B2C is pretty much dead, B2B and infrastructure update plans are still going forward full force. Bandwidth updgrades, SAN strategies, moving legacy apps to the Intranet -- they're all continuing to move ahead, even in the current economic conditions.
.bomb was an interesting picture show, but more importantly, I think it helped companies realize that you really *can* dramatically alter -- and improve -- the way you do business, with the right technology. I'm not talking about betting your business on ad revenue, either.
Sure the
Intelligent Life on Earth
Now, it is just not considered as magic anymore (like in add sulphurous ash, ginseng and garlic and dot com) but is on same line as any investment, just where it should be.
This post, combined with the story yesterday about IT workers heading for restaurant jobs points out how important it is to be consistant.
.com slump are the one's which kept their bearings and didn't overspend. Likewise, heading too far in the non-IT direction will end up destroying a good number of companies which find out, only too late, that they can't keep up with their competition. Consistancy and keeping to a logical business plan is the key to a successfull business. Always.
The companies that are doing the best in the current
I've heard this story in the comparison of Wal-Mart vs. K-mart....one spends consistantly on IT projects that result in overall savings (i.e. not boondoggle projects), the other simply flaps with the breeze. K-Mart is now trying to catch up with inventory/tracking/pricing/shipping software and improvements that take years to implement correctly. They are also on the brink of insolvency.....not exactly the time/place to be making lots of rushed and critical decisions....
Perhaps there will be a downtime for IT, but it will come back as soon as things start to break around the office....
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.
Companies buy crap that they don't need, don't use, is unnecessarily complex, or that can't work in that environment.
They get suckered by sweet sales talk, then complain when it does not work.
If you shoot yourself in the foot because you don't know how to aim, don't complain about the quality of the gun.
We need a return to K.I.S.S. and a more level-headed evaluation and planning approach.
I don't know what the answer is. BS experts are just too damned good at what they do. I just read an article in the WSJ about how some sales experts are having a substance injected into their face which reduces certain facial expressioins by deadening nerves. IOW, they have cosmetic surgery to hide their lies.
Get the Goddamned suits out of my face, and I can build pretty good systems that are realatively simple and maintenance-friendly that solve real problems that I will happily stand behind. However, when the suits start stick their grimmey fingers into the mess, then all bets are off.
True geeks solve problems, true PHB's manipulate problems. Control over key decisions tend to gravitate toward the manipulator's region for some reason.
Table-ized A.I.
Fortunately (unfortunaely for some) this will be the trend for a few more years while the untalented IT workers fade away. Before the boom, IT and IS had qualified workers. Then the web took off and my grandmother became a VB programmer b/c she's one of a few americans who can program her VCR. This led to calling HTML monkeys 'programmers'. Then the era of dot bombs and an increase in failed IT/IS projects came along.
/dev/null then it does being productive. Basically the same reason why the majority of americans are afraid to invest money in the market today.
Of course companies are tenative on dumping money into IT becuase the money still has a better chance winding up in
A few more years when the unqualified IT/IS staff go back to ringing up Big Macs(tm), faith in IT/IS will return to normal. In the mean time, if you are good, just hang on and and do your best.
Also, as we get a few years older, more and more people (employers, co-workers, and ourselves) will understand the role of IT and our field will be better defined...thus better 'trusted'.
There are many problems that have erupted in IT since the .com boom. These may or may not have been around before, but they are definitely known now.
One of the biggest problems I see is that there are many managers of IT departments who are just that - managers. Think of the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert. Just because someone is a manager doesn't mean they know the first thing about IT. I'm not advocating the promotion of your average IT nerd in place of them, but there are always a few people who have both management skills and IT knowledge. A good manager passes things off to the big bosses as good ideas. If he (or she) understands what he's working on, then they will probably be good ideas. If he doesn't, then they will be things that look good on paper and get him more funding. Nevermind that it makes the people below him aggrivated. It makes him look good, and gives him more money to spend on his desktop toys.
I have seen this problem in action. It's always fun to get a blank look when you try and explain the simplest of tasks to these people. It's like trying to explain matrix algebra to a 3rd grader, only with less chance of success.
Another problem I've seen is that, in the name of saving money, people buy inferior products. Some manufacturers are more reliable than others. Before ordering 100 systems from a company because its "cheap", it might be a good idea to order 5 of them and test them for a month or two, and see how well they perform. Maybe even order 5 from another company to compare them to. Also, ask the people who regularly maintain the ystems which kind of systems they have the most problems with. It might be a good idea to get their advice on who to order systems from. Then you will avoid problems like the one I have seen recently, which involves losing more than 1 computer a week to hardware failure. These computers are not even a year old, and still under warranty, but it still causes problems when you have 4 more break before the first warranty part gets there.
Hopefully, the cutting of funding to IT departments will drive off people who are "in it for the money", like these managers without IT skills, and also will cause people to take more care when selecting computers.
"Who am I" and "Why are we here" are not the problems.
The problem is when someone asks "Why are they here."
Surely there is room for Linux in there somewhere.
Sure there is room for Linux in there. As the article says, IT spending is now considered a waste of money. Therefore, free software must now look pretty appealing (but don't expect them to spend money on services and support).
-a
How to rationalize theft.
One mistake that people often make when looking at industry is presuming that there is some "stopping point" at which the company has been tech enabled: How utterly insane. Business is competition, and if you're in a billion dollar field and spending $20 million on a new database system will allow you to proactively respond to your customers quicker, gaining more marketshare, then it's likely worth it. If you got replaced a database server with a new, super hyper database server that gives you a CRM system that allows you to capitalize on every call, and keep customer satisfaction at its pinnacle, then not only is it a good investment, competitively it is likely crucial for you to survive as a company. There are countless examples like this where competition is the driving force behind technology: Sure, righteously deride technology in a luddite fashion, but remember your words fondly when you're in the unemployment line.
Economic slowdowns cause a cessation in spending, and the reality is that often the spending reduction turns out to be disasterous for those companies that fall behind.
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.
Maybe these companies have realized the power of Open Source. The disproportionate amounts spent on hardware and software are a telltale sign of Free Software infiltrating the IT industry. This is a Good Thing for Free Software. If this is not a sign of increased use of Free Software, it will definately be incentive for IT workers to use Linux and other Free Software instead of commercially licensed software.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
'IT' may be a bit undervalued at the moment, that is to be expected after a long period of overvaluation, but not by much. In general, IT departments are dominated by badly trained monkeys who either couldn't make it in real technical fields, or wanted to make lots of money without doing any real work. (actually, there is a third category: the megalomaniacs looking for a way to lord thier power over the poor unfortunates who have to work with them) It is awfully hard to undervalue such folk.
The simple fact of the matter is that companies, even today, spend far too much money and effort on supporting their information systems. Some of this is due to the promulgation of inappropriate solutions (read: M$ bloatware). Some is due to the rank incompetance of the run-of-the-mill 'IT' worker (read: MC*E-bearing monkey). Obviously, a large part can be laid at the feet of CTOs and CIOs who don't put proper effort into either hiring or purchasing decisions.
So, the party's over and the bean counters are no longer willing to squander lots of money on faster machines to run more bloated software just to tickle some geek-wannabe's thirst for chrome. Boo-flippin-hoo! Good for the bean-counters! Putting 800MHz PIIIs on a secretary's desk just to type memos and emails was ridiculous in the first place. Now, anyone who recomended such silliness should be thankfull they haven't been tossed out on their ear.
As for how this will affect 'techies': don't make me laugh! 'IT' folk are not, in general, 'techies', they are administrative personnel. The real techies are off doing technical work and are in little or no danger from the 'IT' downturn. In fact, if the 'IT' downturn gets rid of the more obnoxious admins, all the better for the techs who don't have to deal with their crap.
</BILE>
Think about the "bad" IT spending (both in terms of dollars spent and dollars not spent costing productivity) you've seen in the last five years. Here are some of mine: A main file server that keeps filling up. An email server that can handle 8x the level of traffic it will ever see. An IP conference system brought in-house to serve 2-3 conference calls a day. Running fiber to the desktop at great expense to serve people whose primary application is email. Bringing in four different version control systems for one development effort. Replacing one outdated computer at a time, so that suddenly you're supporting a hundred slightly different machines.
I could go on, but you get the point. All of these are examples of "bad" IT spending that would have been prevented if you'd had good people and good managers, people who understand that the first rule of IT is to know why you need a given thing.
Now, it's hard to get people who are smart without being arrogant, careful without being overly conservative and etc. Moreover, even if you assemble a good team, it can be expensive to keep it together. The gains of a good group of people are realized in the long-term, and this is why so many otherwise intelligent businesses have incompetent people wasting money.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Just shows you that people who aren't activily involved in IT would rather beleive it's some magic that is always there ua know. like air travel, or the sun rising.
Best way to prove the need for IT? let the hackers and script kiddies run wild and then see what happens when this supernatual force of IT crumbles around them. Who is need then =]
(Don't mind me I'm going insane)
This was going to happen since nothing can stay badly broken forever, not even Microsoft Windows.
The success of IT rested on three assumptions:
1) The Internet was a cash cow that needed only to be milked.
2) Microsoft Windows was the key to all things in the computer world.
3) IT staffing is always needed to service the legions of PCs in business.
But each of these failed to pan out for logical reasons. The Internet was a cash strategy, but was abused by stupid people placing money into businesses without a business plan and no real product--dot-coms. Bye-bye, they said to their money. Screwed up the stock market, that.
Microsoft Windows was indeed the way to all things computer-related, from apps to training. And quite a few businesses contracted with "kitchen-sink" computer service companies who could buy, service, or administrate all kinds of PCs (unless you're Mac OS or Linux--that's another sad story in most locations). And training would guarantee most everyone with certification the chance to submit their resumes.
But this business was based on the fact that Microsoft Windows was ALWAYS in need of maintenance and companies would ALWAYS upgrade their systems for the "latest and greatest."
Enter Windows 2000--the first Windows OS whose stability and performance claims were justified. Microsoft built this OS with greater strengths as word spread of a newcomer that was free and just as stable: Linux.
As budgets tightened, managers again asked the budget questions, but weren't accepting the usual answers. "Why do we need to upgrade?" IT managers were able to answer firmly in the past that these upgrades would improve performance, or administration. But managers knew, now, from personal experience that their computer running Windows 98 or 2000 was just fine, and didn't want their copies of Office 2000 messed with for now.
As the IT monies dried up, IT managers (and contractor companies) tightened their belts and downsized, kicking out some experienced techs but quite a few inexperienced (but certified!) techs to the curb. Windows didn't need armies to support any longer. Servers didn't either--a few new technologies consolidated some sysadmin functions.
And now we're back to the availability of techs and sysadmins with real experience, talent, and diversity. You could be a Windows NT admin, but you may also know Linux. No longer was there room for "computer religion." You might do Mac desktops, but also know PC desktops. It's a screwy kind of Darwinism (no pun intended for the OS X folks), but the competition between the stable UNIX operating systems vs. all things Microsoft have brought a new (or rediscovered?) dawn to the personal computing world: the generally stable computer.
Are techs still needed? Sure. However, if all you have are a bunch of certification certificates beyond you and little experience, those papers and 50 cents are probably worth a cup of coffee at McDonalds.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
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.
"How do you feel about the cost benefits of IT?"
as compared to what...
A customer of mine had to capture a massive amount of data. Estimates showed it would have taken a 2-person team 700 days to finish the job. Instead, we thought about the problem a little, and devised an automated solution that took a single person 5 days to implement, and then 3 days to process. So instead of 1400 person-days, it took 8.
I guess if companies DONT want that kind of efficiency, they can ditch their IT departments. Just dont whine then the companies that exploit IT to be more efficient kick the shit out of the IT-less ones.
While I used my last post a joke I do have a real opinion on the matter.
I beleive this is an example of an "US vs Them" mantality. Non IT workers have unions and lobby groups crying for thier every little thing while IT workers don't really have such things. So of course thoughs without representation get shit on.
just my thoughts
Perhaps the CFO would like to go back to the days of hiring a room full of clerks with mechanical calculators and handwritten ledgers to balance the books?
The only people who think they don't need to invest in an IT infrastructure these days are idiots who take for granted all the positive influences computing has had on business in the past 50 years.
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."
1) Having them say it "isn't my job to do..." Bullshit. You're paid to support my machine. You can set boundaries (don't install chat software, for example) but when I need a tool to get a job done, or I need a machine running, damn it I need it.
2) Being told "I'll get on it soon," then waiting weeks for the solution. Hey, I'll do it myself. But if I have to do it myself, you're not doing your job (and I'm probably not doing my job).
3) Trying to help out by "fixing" working systems, especially during crunch times. Our IT guy decided to upgrade a linux kernel on a working laptops the day before a major demo. The kernel didn't work, and the collective blood pressure in the lab went up quite a bit.
4) Being a tactless prick. "Why are you using X? Only halfwits use X! Use Y instead." I use X because it works. Now fuck off.
I could go on, but for the most part it seems like IT people get in my way more than they help.
hrm
The middle mind speaks!
Steel girders are to a skyscraper as IT is to a large company. That is, IT is an absolutely must if a company is going to scale. There is absolutely no way around that. If your IT is insufficient or poorly constructed, your entire enterprise is on shaky ground.
You can't scale without it. It contains all of your business logic or "rules that your business runs on" and enforces them. It houses all your important data. It is a critical component.
Of course, outside of large companies, there is the angle you take on it, which is that IT is for a competitive advantage. In some industries, there are more advantages than others, and different degrees to which those advantages can be leveraged.
For example, financial institutions, who Id probably say have the best understanding of how much IT is worth, would be where I would look for an overall value of IT.
However, I do agree that companies are cutting back. I think there has been some overspending in IT where it really wasn't all that necessary. It goes back to internal controls and peer review. If you're putting in a new system, in-house, it is better to have two teams to compete for the best solution. Having your in-house guys do it by themselves ends up getting a lot of extra goodies thrown in. (And I'm not just talking about the Palm Pilots or UNIX workstations. But 4gb of RAM, when 2gb will do, for example. Or 600gb of disk when 200gb will serve the initial system size and a year's growth.)
We need a return to K.I.S.S. We need a return to bad metal bands from the '70s? .
You are absolutely right. The question therefore is:
a) does IT contribute to cash flow? (Over what term? 1 week, 1 month? 1 year?)
b) can we actually quantify it? Does a spreadsheet show (as the CFO quite rightly demands) this effect? What is the spreadsheet effect of you having a PC? A fast Internet connection? Email once every 5 minutes rather than once a day?
Not as easy as it soundsas first, I think.
Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
Where IT fails is when people start throwing around the pie-in-the-sky goals of "creating new marketplaces" and believing in the myth of "cyberspace" without having a mature plan before rolling out "the next new thing."
Let's face it--marketers love hype. They love those guru types who can jingle little bottles of snake-oil technobabble, producing a glassy hypnosis in the eyes of the corporate decision-makers. All the marketers hear is the sound of the till bell. Ch-ching. Unfortunately, some of us closet geeks really like the attention, and we can get caught up in the hype, too.
Maybe I'm cynical, and maybe my view is pretty short-sighted. But I think that information technology simply exists to cause an efficiency of the information infrastructure of an enterprise. Therefore, one can reasonably conclude that the "value" of IT is proportional to some factor of the company's value and the worth they place on their data. IT is more immediately important to a banker than it would be to a construction worker. Or better yet, IT serves a great purpose to the librarian, but could go totally unnoticed by the bakery chef.
That's one of the failures of the dot-coms--failure to realize the spurious and fickle expectations of the at-large consumer. Aside from not being able to create the consumer experience of a traditional storefront, the virtual world couldn't fully engage the consumer's confidence and euphoria. A quick personal testimony: I love to buy on impulse. It's a great feeling. However, I never bought on impulse when shopping online, which I do a great deal. Multiply my experience by whatever factor that you think is relevant, and that is the rate of growth that the dot-com world never matured enough to reach.
I hope that the lesson learned from recent years is that no product "just sells itself." The success of the IT factor of a company is going to be only as success of the enterprise that surrounds it. This means that it takes more than just knowledgeable engineers to make the thing fly; the executives have to be knowledgeable and make informed decisions. And they have to spend money. A lot of money.
A successful IT infrastructure is probably more valuable than its assets. A very efficient, mission-critical system like the one that runs the trading floor on NYSE is probably much more valuable than the assets/manpower that it took to create it. However, take that same scenario and make the IT solution very inefficient. In fact, make it somehow less efficient than the pencil-pushing system that it replaced. Suddenly, the value plummets from "invaluable" to "worthless."
There were many immature IT strategies in the last decade, and they failed to succeed. Hopefully, the successful IT stories will last long enough to convince another group of hypnotized executives to buy a bottle of snake-oil.
Of course IT is overrated... would you pay that much for a scooter?
I understand that it is hard to prove the value of IT departments, but that is because you have to show , somehow, all of the bad things that DIDN'T happen because IT was on the ball. So to that extent it seems me to be a lot like insurance. How do you justify the cost for fire insurance if there isn't a fire?
To say IT is unnessisary is like telling the Army they don't need seperate branches to keep track of troops, ammunition and supplies. If you are going to run a business with any sizable technology arm to it, specialist should be employed. Sure, you may be able to do it yourself, but then you're taking time away from the other tasks you should be doing. It's called delegation of authority. Or would you rather run shipping yourself? Sales? Accounts payable? All these duties are quote "nessisary" and somehow IT isn't? My ass.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
As an IT Manager in mid level of a multi national company i would like to see CIO's and CTO's held responsible for their actions. The company i work for made well over $200 million US profit for the region last year but because they promised $300 million to the market they embarked on a cost cutting orgy.
Im down to 4 staff from 8 and no budgets, none of mu guys or I have had a payrise in 2 years and our average bonus last year was $500 - that for an average (for me) of 74 hours a week. My guys have worked harder than ever before but they get nothing, training is promised and not delivered, and and all benefits stripped away and when they get better paid job offers my best staff have to leave as our CTO wont 'pay for his own staff like blackmail'
He of course gets shares... lots of them. In fact he got a payrise last year for his efforts.
Ho about this - when cutting costs the first thing to go is the management share vesting schemes, then the management bonuses, then the management take a pay cut - if i screwed up the way management here did i would be unemployed, they have all gotten bonuses.
Tell me, as a CTO, how am i expected to deliver support to a user base of 1300+ staff with 4 support guys (thats it - no helpdesk just 4) and still maintain some service level? Id really like to hear the wisdom of the wise ?
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
With IT going for $3000+, I think IT is far *overvalued*. I mean, c'mon! It's a SCOOTER!
yes, it would be nice if all us slashdot computer geeks could sit around here in a nice big circle jerk and justify why companies should be spending billions to keep us employed. The fact is - they did just fine without us before computers were invented, and then they fished around for 15 or so years before the "mythical productivity increase" happened, and then we got them over the Y2K hump. Now we're not needed anymore, at least not on the scale we were needed back in the 90's, so we'll be cast off.
"Tech people" like to think of technology as a steadily advancing tide the pushes humanity forward, and lifts us all up to some dreamed-of high-tech society.
While that may be true - you're forgetting who runs this world. The real world. It's the almighty buck, and the almighty buck doesn't give a crap about flying cars and moonbases.
It was nice that most of us were stripped of any wealth via the stock market crash prior to joining the ranks of the unemployed.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
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.
Only at some companies.
I'm guessing that some of the big decision makers got burned by some bad decisions during the heyday of the .com boom.
You have to admit they have a point. They were sold on something which
- they know absolutely nothing about (have an MBA, not an BS CS)
- which turned out to be a dud.
Why should they believe the next hyped up set of buzzwords coming from the IT community? (Certainly they should be skeptical of the same vendors that sold them that previous pig in a poke, whoever they happen to be - hopefully not you!)So first dispel any illusions that every new buzzword technology is a good thing.
Also, gain some credibility with those skeptics by validating their skepticism where it was well-founded. Yes, we sunk thousands of dollars into that supposed cure-all and it was nothing but headaches. It was mistake and you're right to call it a mistake. But also point out where things went right, or perhaps unexpectedly right (eg, Joe put in an open source proxy server that was the bees knees.)
If a vendor comes painting a picture, demand references to current users, and then dig down to the worker bee level in that organization to see if things really are working. Why dig? There's probably plenty of upper level folks in the showcase example company that want to look as if they made a good decision to go with vendor Y and technology Z. The CIO doesn't want to look bad to the other C level people, so definitely dig down. I can't tell you how much money has been poured down holes as a result of an uninformed decision coming down from on high, where there is too much insulation from everyday reality of things like hung servers.
You need to back things up with solid arguments showing non-IT folks how introducing some technology helps their business' bottom line.
A worthy competitor that has implemented technology X where you can show it has had a beneficial effect is one good argument. Another argument is a detailed analysis of a small low-budget prototype roll-out: eg, we created an XML based mechanism for tech-friendly Salesman Fred to access the manufacturing database so he could know how much leadtime to let a customer know he could expect. Etc.
In the big overall scheme of things I've heard an argument made, and I believe most of it, that the unexpected growth in productivity over the past 15 years or so has been largely due to the adoption of IT. (Some growth is due to improved business processes, but I would argue that many of those processes wouldn't be possible 20 years ago given the technology of that day.) If you believe that, then stopping all further investment in IT will likely lead to a stagnation in productivity growth and profitability.
Nothing's ever that simple, of course, and there's no iron-clad arguments for adopting new technologies. There's risk, no two ways about it. But taking the risk earlier than others leads to more substantial rewards, if you can afford the investment.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
This one is pretty obvious - you have an IT network, you have to keep it running. You have existing software that is providing some sort of value, you must keep it running. Maintenance means replacing broken/failing equipment, it does not mean constantly upgrading to the latest gadgets. This type of IT spending is currently way to high. NT4.0 is good enough. Office 97 is good enough. There is no compelling need to upgrade to newer versions. When we upgraded from office 95 to office 2000 the only reason to upgrade was because of the compatibility issues. And this only affected about 1% of the office! This is not money well spent.
This is a bit more complicated. Actually it's a lot more complicated. Most businesses have been doing things one way since the beginning of time. When asked why they do something the answer is usually "that's how we've always done it."
Spend a few days looking around your corporation. Maybe you can apprentice with some of the Secretaries/Assistances for a few days. Learn their processes. Find out why they do things... question everything and look for redundancies. It probably won't take you long to find cases where people are re-keying information that has already been in the PC once. This type of work adds no value - if there is a significant amount of time spent doing this you can easily build a case to correct this. Start a project to extract the data from its original home, put it in a format that your clients will be able to use. These are the easy projects to get approval for - low political risk, high pay out.
Another way to find potential IT projects is to spend some time trying to trace processes from the original entry into the company, to the final delivery to the customer. Create a complete processes map. Find out what the original input is, and what the eventual output is supposed to be. As an outsider you should be able to look at the process and see major areas that could be improved. Anything that doesn't add value to the final product (in the eyes of the customer) probably does not need to be done.
Focus on areas where a customer request passes between many different people before it is filled. There are usually ways to improve or eliminate hand off time. Possibly there are many 'specialists' involved in a process when really they need one generalist and an expert system. These types of projects are difficult because many business units will need to cooperate to accomplish an improvement - but at the same time this is where the highest return can be.
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What I see both in the industry and from this question (and answers) is a complete lack of understanding of business theory (or practice). Not a single individual questioned how IT is valued, utilized, or perceived. No one mentioned competitive cost vs. advantage analysis or even the most mundane five force analysis focusing on IT.
No, the problem I see with proving the benefits of IT is the same problem I see in every department of every company I've ever consulted for. That is, a consistent lack of any real ability in those who hold any position of authority. Even when these directors, VP's, and presidents are given the right answers, they often fail to understand the questions.
No, the real problem with valuing IT is the mundane leadership now present in most of America's companies. And yes, I have the titles, experience and credits to my name to back this up.
Bad IT drags down a company and good IT pumps it up. The hard part is getting good IT. It is not a matter of just plugging IT into the organization. You have to plug the right IT in the right way.
It is a lot like picking stocks. If you pick the wrong ones and you are screwed. You pick the wrong balance/mix and you are screwed. If your expections are unrealistic about when and how, you are screwed.
The smart and lucky ones make good money off of stocks. Yet, many get F'd by them because they don't know what they are doing (and some bad luck).
Thus, stocks are not bad, per se, just some people's methods of picking and managing them are bad.
I see a lot of human effort in most companies that could be simplified with good computerized solutions. However, it just seems that the implementation is often fauled up or ill-conceived.
I often see the same mistakes being repeated over and over again and the same train wrecks over and over, but am powerless to do much about it. "I told you so" just gets somebody pissed at you. People don't want to hear the truth. There is no reward for wisdom and experience it seems. Thus, wisdom and experience don't enter into the mix often enough.
That is why companies wan't younger, cheaper IT workers: They don't see (or don't know how to see) the value in wisdom and experience. If you filter out wisdom and experience, you are left with almost no difference between a grad and somebody with 15 years of experience, so why would they want to pay more for that?
Table-ized A.I.
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.
- Greedy.
- Lazy.
- Incompetent.
Greedy. I constantly see internal web development groups quote even a tiny, simple web site as dozens of hours and thousands of dollars, a price that would have been outrageous even in the pre dot-bomb days. Then they have the never to say "Why do you care how much we bill? It's all internal chargebacks, so it's really just 'play money'!"Lazy. All too often, in order to complete a project on time, I end up building and maintaining my own servers instead of handing off server installs and maintenance to the in-house "server management group". Why should the internal sysadmins be pro-active when there is no penalty for slow response time, no competition for customers, and when they know that by doing nothing, the most demanding customers will eventually just go away and solve their own problems?
Incompetent. As firms cut down on staff and cut out the perks, their most qualified web developers and sysadmins are recruited by headhunters or flee to better, more stable positions as each round of downsizing takes it's toll on morale. In the end, with very few exceptions, the only staff who remain are those not talented enough (or too apathetic) to move on to a better job.
In my experience, in many larger organizations, IT staff might once have been an undervalued asset, but in the past year, most of the valuable staff have fled for greener pastures.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
"IT" always represented this flashy thing where the company was paying a bazillion dollars to move everything to platform X with some flashy vendor and new "in" technology. This type of IT is dead. It's dead because people started to see it as an end in iteself, and somebody finally asked "where's the bang for the buck in our core business operations?"
I've always felt that simply polishing the hell out of your internal apps is the best way to spend money on IT. It's pretty easy in most business system to find ways to take business functions that take a minute or two but are done by several hundred / thousand people a day (or more) and reduce them by 50-90% time-wise. If those take a month or two each of programmer time, that is big-time ROI.
Lets say the programmer makes double what the typical business process user costs. If it takes the programmer two months to do a project and the net result is that a business function/transaction occurring 480 times a day is cut from 90 seconds to 30 seconds, then the project pays for itself in four months. That kind of work isn't sexy, but it sure does pay for itself, especially when departments can delay hiring more people because their existing folks are more productive.
There are a lot of crappy apps out there that waste user/customer time, especially because IT managers were hell-bent to shove new apps out so they could claim victory in the time-to-delivery game. The whole IT industry needs to step back and focus back on the end user experience and business fundamentals: eliminate waste in core business processes.
IT has a reputation in corporate America as the most unresponsive and least human-centered department in any organization. Here are the stereotypes I've encountered:
1) IT people are more interested in their machines than in helping me do my job.
2) IT people have no understanding of what I do on a daily basis.
3) IT people are penny-wise and pound foolish. They won't pay $200 so I can have a Zip drive that will allow me to take my work home, but they'll spend $1.5M on a VPN that will take a year and a half to implement and won't work properly when finished.
I've been on both sides of the fence, serving as IT support and being one of those people griping at poor IT support. It seems to me that if more IT departments thought of themselves as enablers rather than as an end to themselves, they'd receive much more respect.
Want to see a good example of how it works in a good support organization (and IT is always support)? Go to your nearest Air Force base and talk to the pilots and crew chiefs. Sure, the pilots get all the glory, because missions are oriented around flying the aircraft and hitting the target. But the crew chiefs are given tremendous respect, because they are responsible for making sure the aircraft fly properly. They understand and take pride in their role.
Many IT folks seem to have the opinion that they're smarter than the people they serve. They may be smarter, but that doesn't change the fact that people above them in the organization have to make the truly difficult decisions about hiring and firing, where to spend money, how to stay competitive, and so on. It's not that IT decisions aren't difficult, but in any organization, the more important the decisions you make, the bigger your salary.
If more IT departments realized that they actually are part of a larger team supporting the same goal, and took off their wizard's hats, they might find a lot more acceptance on a human level.
That's where IT folks commonly fall flat on their faces. They don't realize that business people make decisions based almost exclusively on human factors, only secondarily on money, and a distant third on technical factors.
IT departments that grasp the human factors, take care of the other people in the company, and bend over backwards to help people go about their daily tasks are far more likely to get the money they need to conduct glamorous "innovative" projects.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Consider this possible scenario:
Optimally at company X, IT is made up of many "Operators", few "Administrators", and even fewer in "Management". Operators handle the Help Desk, the new user setup and other day-to-day repetitive low-key issues. Administrators handle the larger issues as well extend and improve the various services IT provides. Management (for simplicity, this includes "administrative assistants") manages all the paperwork, inter-group company communication, etc.
Instead, at company X, there aren't enough and/or properly trained operators working as operators, too many operators acting as administrators, the few administrators overworked and management merely creating more things to manage and causing the administrators to also perform management duties. Generally, pretty much making it impossible for Company X's IT group to be cost-efficient (or even helpful to users).
When company X was swimming in money, they got along by throwing more money at any IT problems. Hiring more operators, paying expensive consultants (who recommend what the administrators proposes, or worse, recommend a white elephant solution) and buying software and hardware based largely on which vendors played golf with the upper management of IT.
Now that they are no longer awash in money to throw at problems, they have to cut back. Cut back on management? Of course not. Consultants? University buddies and management doesn't trust the opinions of the experienced administrators. Use better vendors? And face him on the golf course this weekend? A lot of the "fat" is valued more than the "muscle" by the management and so when it's time to make the company leaner, they end up with little muscle supporting lots of fat. The remaining muscle ends up overworked and generally not skilled enough to handle a lot of the work assigned to it. To push the body analogy further, this generally only leads to three outcomes. Optimally, the management "Gets it" and the system is strengthened and made more efficient, or the company continues to work with IT on life-support or enough functions fail that the company goes under.
Luckily where I work is far from having a "heart attack" as it were, but I suspect that at too many other companies the situation is closer to "Company X" and that most problems are largely the fault of mismanagement (including problems of incompetance on the part of operators, as management hired them in the first place). Find and give more authority to management that "Gets it", and you'll likely find the "IT problem" will solve itself.
First, a disclaimer - I work as a software developer for a living, so I'm biased
I've seen projects that have no value - I've seen projects that had great value - it all depends. For instance, one project the department I'm in is working on will allow our end users to turn around their job in hours instead of days, and cut the handling of their product by about 50% - this will allow the company to do one of two things
1)Produce more product, or more sophisticated product
or
2)Lay off a bunch of folks
Another product allowed us to digitize a document production system, so we could reproduce the documents on demand - being we had a 7 year LEGAL requirement to store the documents, this was a BIG deal - you see, we got to eliminate 8 file cabinets in NYC, plus the off premisis stuff in NJ. Who cares about file cabinets, right? But when you realize that floor space costs $150/month/sq ft, and that horizontal file cabinet takes up 9 sq feet, thats over $16K in rent per year/cabinet - or 129k/year in savings just in RENT, never mind needing less staff to get those documents, and better turn around time.
The CURRENT project I'm on used to take 300 temp employees over 1 month to do, every 2 years. Now it's me and one other person, and I send a few months every two years updating the software and testing
It's harder to justify upgrading to the latest copy of Office - XP doesn't do much more than Office2k - but when it comes to custom software, sometimes it's a no brainer - particularly when you don't have to rely on customers, just on increased efficency
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Where I work, the trend has been towards the standarization of company wide processes, across all of the disciplines: engineering, HR, IT, etc. The hope was, if they can distill the proper process, they can make incompetent or semi-imcompetent people productive, and make competent people slightly more productive.
IT spending is viewed in the same way. Lots of companies thought that if they just implemented the right file server, or purchasing system, or XML based web services something or other, incompetent people would be productive, customer relations would be quick and helpful, engineers would be free to create, and everything would be puppy dogs and teddy bears and big red balloons.
Only problem: both of these assumptions are wrong.
Every company needs standard processes so that people can be efficient. But no amount of process makes incompetent people competent. Every company needs decent IT, but no amount of IT makes incompetent people competent.
What more companies are realizing, in both process and IT, and probably other areas as well, is that just spending more money (1) is not a good way to get work done, (2) takes resources away from business segments that produce products, and (3) doesn't necessarily make anything better.
IT is now just approaching it true value from the topside because we've all been under the impression that it could magically make our lives better, and it doesn't.
(And just to nitpick, while IT is tech, tech is not IT. There are plenty of tech jobs that aren't IT.)
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
Interesting point missing from the story is the response to the statement "'IT has now been proven to be a waste of money'".
Wouldnt this be a good time to whip out your spreadsheet telling how much you saved the company because you implemented a custom built app that filled a need the users had. Dont have one? Gee, what is your justification for building those apps then? Where is the business case? Where is the follow up to the business case that tracks the amount you have spent on the app in comparison to what you were spending doing it manually? Dont have either of those figures? Maybe you should start getting them.
IT was magical in the late 90s but now it's a bad word. There will be organizations that need lots of IT help and organizations that don't. Some companies will dump most of its IT budget and do fine and others will increase IT spending and find it gives them an edge. What's always been true is that the companies that match their IT spending to their true needs will come out on top. Nothing else matters, not the trade rags, not the media hype, nothing. In a few years we'll see articles about companies that surprisingly spend lots of money on IT and have an advantage in their market. Big deal. It's the same old story. The best thing you can do as an IT profesional is be useful. Just like anyone else.
I can't recall anyone referring to "IT" prior to about 1990. This term seems to be a fad that sprouted up sometime in the '90s - but now people are acting as if it's an established term that's been around forever.
My experience in the past few years has been an increasing work load with the same pay. Most companies don't fully understand how much work and responsibility IT has, even in non tech related businesses. Recently more of my time is spent doing tech support, when I need to focus on programming and network administration.
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!
Not only that, a lot of people are due to be fired. You can't have a period of very high employee demand w/o hiring a lot of incompetents/poor workers. IT was a "golden job" for a short period of time, great for workers. Now it's turning into a regular ol' job. You have to know your stuff, you can't blow obscene amounts of money, you need to do a decent job of interacting with other people.
And the people on Slashdot wanting to eliminate H1Bs to "protect" foreign workers (if they could get a better job overseas, they'd be there now instead of hassling with immigration), wanting to raise salaries more to "improve IT" (what we need are competent IT personnel at existing salaries...no more "I used a computer for three years and dropped out as a college freshman to go web designer/IT" types) and so on and so forth...well, they're just not being realistic.
Most of the people getting fired are just plain incompetent or overpaid (and in denial about same), and the company has been wanting to get rid of them forever...and as IT demand has finally dropped a bit, they can afford to do so. That isn't true of every last person, but if there's two people out of twenty fired, and allowing for a decent margin of inaccurate evaulation, the fired people are going to be the worst workers.
If you were fired, it's possible that, astounding as it sounds, the problem is not H1Bs, your company, terrorists, open source, or corporate corruption. It may just be you -- you might want to take a look at yourself, figure out how to make yourself a more attractive employee, maybe make your salary demands more reasonable, and then try again.
My two cents, unpopular as it may be.
May we never see th
Very well put.
I admin a network of around 50 machines, 3 servers (one is a monster dedicated SQL DB) and a number of nework printers.
I don't NEED a hugely powerful computer to admin the network. My workstation is a PII-400. If I need more, I take over one of the servers. The ONLY reason MY system has a sound card in it is because I bought it personally and installed it myself. It's mine. I don't NEED it to work. I wouldn't expect my employeer to buy me a radio.
The POWERFULL workstations actually ended up going to the data-entry people -- due mostly to the proprietary softwares ungodly hardware requirements.
Even the owner of the company is running a Celeron 333 (granted -- with a 19in flatscreen -- he has limited desk space and frequently views NASTY huge spreadsheets). It more than meets his needs and recognizes that he doesn't NEED more (at least yet).
His assistant has the most powerful workstation (even more-so than our servers). Thats due to her needing to do various publishing requirements (Adobe not only COSTS alot, it REQUIRES a lot to use efficently).
The oldest/slowest machines are used by the M.D.s who do nothing but read a report and click one of two buttons (release or re-submit). P100s here.
Spend where it's NEEDED.
One of the reasons for this bust is that people were spending money on IT stupidly. I'm sure we all know a few people who have insisted that they need a new computer because their old pentium is "impairing their productivity" when all they really do is word process. And let us not forget this sub-moronic idea that just because M$ comes out with a new version of office, you need to have it in order to keep up. The result is that companies have way more features in house than they can typically use, which translates into wated money.
Now tell me who out there is naive enough to think that the people running the show are sdmart enough to learn that IT is a worthwhile investment as long as it is well thought out and carefully implimented? Reactionary attitudes tends to be the norm in just about everything everywhere. Right now the pendulum is in the process of swinging back towards a cut corners mentality, which is good to a certain degree.
"We can't install the latest release of Windows/Office on our old k6-2? Why can't we just use the old version?" That's intelligent thought, and as techs, it should be up to us to answer that question. I truly believe there will come a time when we are no longer in a recssion, and invester confidence has returned, and when that time comes, the people who approve budgets might be willing to listen to and consider your answers.
Until that time comes, you're just going to have to accentuate the negative. If you need to develop some app, but there is no budget, then make sure you accurately predict how, in the long run, not devbeloping it will actually cost your company money. When enough techs are proved right often enough, then the pendulum will start to swing back the other way, of course this gives us all an even mightier responsibility; to learn from the lessons of the past 6 years and NOT try to solve every problem with something newer and "better."
IT still has value, but only as infrastructure for now. The B2B and ERP bread and butter (or was it pie in the sky) days will subside for a while.
But pull a wire on a laser printer and watch them jump for the IT support guy. Do they get out the old Selectric and carbon copy? Heck no. They're lost without Word and that HP5 pumpiing out copy.
What if the phone and voicemail system breaks? Do people get out the backup carrier pigeons? Bullhorns? Interoffice mail? Probably not.
These are just the technologies that the end users have figured out how to use. The flashy powerpoint demonstrations on all that whiz bang, expensive stuff looked good, and promissed a lot but the end users could not actually use the product.
They will catch up, someday, eventually. I hope...
.
What IT needs is honest, effective, and knowledgable management.
If Jane has no reason to be communicating with the outside world, do not give Jane access to anything outside the Intranet. Jane will still be able to collaborate on projects and use the corporate network, but she will spend less time posting on Slashdot and sending personal email. Jane may "waste" just as much time by talking to co-workers, but co-workers who are friendly and know each other well are better team players.
If Bob's job is to write reports, his PIII-500 will do the job. Jim needs to do graphic design, so he gets a new PC, while Bob sticks with his old one, or gets Jim's hand-me-down.
Harry the office temp probably doesn't need a computer at all. Don't give him one.
Unfortunately, managers are not always as knowledgable about their IT as they should be. There is a lot of money to be made in the IT consulting field just by being honest and not telling managers they need more than they really do.
What Future?
I'm reading this and do all my work on a PII/266. It's fine for compiling software and doing work.
Computer have become a bit of a status symbol -- most people don't get a company jet or car, but they do get a computer, and their value to the company is represented by how much the company blows on them. Ever since desktops become a commodity item, no manager would be caught dead getting a new desktop -- it has to be ridiculously expensive laptops.
In terms of CPU power required, I'd rank stuff on this kind of order:
video/modeling
heavy-duty 2d graphics (not web graphics, laddies)
software development
DTP
secretarial work (word processing, filling in forms)
executives
Now, the funny thing is that executives, who in my experience use their expensive laptops primarily for checking email, perhaps do a little bit of word processing, and maybe browse news sites, are the ones to get the most powerful computers. Well, no, the 3d modeling/video people go first, but after that, execs. And it's not that they need or use that many cycles...but they can exhibit their value to the company by flaunting their expensive business-class computers.
I can't imagine a system that a PII/266 isn't reasonable to compile, unless you have literally *hundreds* of developers constantly modifying files, and so have to recompile most of your project on each compile, instead of just a file or two. I mean, if you're coding on Mozilla or X, you still are only modifying a few files yourself, and you can happily deal with compile times there.
Of course, if you're recompiling whole projects every compile, then I could see the need, but in that case you're also doing something wrong in your design...
May we never see th
I think the above is what CEOs, boards and shareholders want to see. IT gives them this. Whether they are smart enough to admit or not.
I just recently read this article at InformationWeek.com. It refers to Cisco CEO John Chambers, Cisco's positive third quarter report, and most importantly, the referred to study by the U.S. Labor Department. I quote, "The U.S. Labor Department on Tuesday said workforce productivity increased 8.6% in the first quarter of 2002, up from a 5.5% increase in the last quarter of 2001. According to Chambers, increased productivity is the impetus for U.S. companies to spend on high-tech computing and networking products.". Now, certainly Chambers is going to be biased, but I don't think the U.S. Labor Dept. is (at least I don't think so.)
Chambers also brought up and interesting point in another article I read. He said something to the affect of (I'm paraphrasing here) from the statistics he had seen concerning productivity over the past 3-5 years (or so) productivity is on an upswing, which meant to him that we are just now learning to utilize all of this IT stuff we've bought in the past few years and what's more important, we're still learning how to be productive with it.
I think those that criticize IT should stop and ask themselves if they are more productive with it. Do they like having shared drives to collaborate off of? Do they like having word processors, spreadsheets and of course databases? How about faster mainframes and servers that decrease the amount of time spent finalizing a transaction?
Without a doubt, time is money. I see IT as saving loads of time and thereby loads of money.
Just my 2 cents. YMMV.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
In the late eigthies, you still had to write almost every application if you required something like a workflow and wanted the system to be used by mere mortals.
Today, one person alone can set up an integrated office system with document management, customer database, accounting, reporting, E-mail access, firewalls, printing, backup, telephone integration, banking, video and audio editing, ftp and webserver, dns, dhcp, wavelan, gigabit backbone, raids, computing clusters and mobile vpn access within weeks, and several hundredthousand apps are available for free or very little money. You can easyly afford a database software or an office-suite worth a few hundred million dollars of develepment effort, and get even millions of man -months delivered on a $50 Linux Distribution, including the source code. Or if you buy a Mac or a PC today, you can actually do useful things without even installing additional software - remember, what you could do with an AppleII out of the Box ?
So today, if you want to roll your own stuff, or even spend a few days on improving your customer database access, you need many thousand customers to justify even using a real database instead of MS Outlook contacts or a simple spreadsheet.
Trying to build a new 3D-Engine, a Web-Browser, a database engine or a new GUI library is almost insane from a business point of view, so the deeper you descend into the swamps of IT-Development, the better your justification has to be for shelving out that money and taking the risk of failure.
I try to ride Moore's law and aim for something unique that does not exist so far because it was impossible or too hard to do in the past. I try to stay current by spending a lot of time hands on new technology, and I steadyly improve my and my team's knowledge and skills, but I admit: it is increasingly harder to find and exploit those niches where you have both: Fun and Profit.
OTOH, there will always be the Linus way: Build something for the sheer fun and knowledge, and the worst case is that you are happier and smarter afterwards.
And if you don't mind to listen to someone who has been around for a while and covered some distance: Never do things for the only purpose of profit. It will minimize your chances, but even if you succeed, you will not be any happier than today. And probably have fewer friends.
parabyte
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
Therefore, free software must now look pretty appealing (but don't expect them to spend money on services and support).
Hardware's a given. It wears out, depreciates, etc. Software - the legal environment overwhelmingly favors the software company. So who wants to get bent over?
So go the free software route, and then you end up having to hire a geek. And I don't care who you are - the fact is, when you have someone put together a system like a database or a web server, you either double your cost to make sure procedures and processes are fully documented, or you soon have a situation on your hands where you have one person in the world holding the keys to the server, and you either bend over for that person, or you have to try to find someone else who can decipher what he did, and try to continue running things. These guys tend to put themselves into situations that make them unreplacable.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It wasn't that the equipment implemented was too much too soon. Had growth, or at least the perception of growth, continued at the rate it was, much of the equipment was exactly what was needed. The only misguided decisions were those assuming that the economy would continue as it was.
However, even if you had people that could predict the bust far enough in advance to make more sensible purchases with regards to equipment, they would then be perceived as falling behind the rest of the industry and would lose market share as a result. After the bust, making a profit was all that mattered, but you had to survive long enough to get there.
Worldcom and others have suffered from the same fate. Certainly there were unethical, bad, and quite likely illegal accounting practices by the some companies at the time, however it was a viable risk assuming the economy was going to continue at the same pace. Nobody cares if you're cooking the books when your stock price is going up, when your projected revenue exceeds your projected expenses, even with all the bookcooking thrown in.
But when the economy goes sour, projected revenues drop significantly, but projected expenses do not, and poor bookkeeping will come back to bite you in the ass. Worldcom, in the middle of the dotcom boom had to grow. And grow they did, despite whatever it took to carry it out. Now its time to pay the piper.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
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
If I had points today you'd get them: I think there is a lot in what you say.I;'ve been around a while as well and think your analysis is correct.
The point that needs expanding is the "do not do it only for profit" one. Of course companies do do everything for profit, cash flow, shareholder value. But in IT, a lot of benefit is derived from playing. Not "Quake 17" type of playing: I mean driver/OS/kernel/Office XP/Apple II type playing. A lot of the benefit of IT is in measurable productivity enhancement, and that is enhanced by deep knoweldge - deep knowledge that is enhanced by playing. So, two birds with one stone, job satisfaction and corporate benefit.
Michael
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
Can't....Resist.......Flamebait.......
:)
People who think they can show up to work dressed in a suit and tie, and people will respect them whether they know their ass from their elbow?
You must be in marketing...
Spoken truly. If I wasn't inexplicably perma-banned from moderation, I'd mod you up.
May we never see th
And in doing so, you'll probably make his point beautifully. If you did that at any office I've worked in, everyone would just carry on typing their letters and filling in their forms. They would do so unburdened by a flood of pointless e-mails about "funny" circulars and porn sites, and the incidental viruses that come with them. People in the office would actually walk down the corridor and talk to each other for a couple of minutes when they needed to know something, instead of wasting hours typing e-mail memos back and forth, and then worrying what they could write because it's on file and if it goes wrong they might get the blame. All in all, people would just go back to what used to happen before corporate multi-million-dollar networks became the absurd centrepieces they often are today, and the myths about increased productivity due to silly IT budgets would be exposed once and for all. But go on, you pull your connectors. Just make sure you've got enough in the bank to pay the mortgage while you retrain as an accountant.
It's also usually not true. IT can certainly make things much more efficient if competent people organise it, and those who use it are well-trained. But with equal certainty, I claim that this is not the case the vast majority of the time, and that consequently the vast majority of IT spending really is just making you liable to failures that never existed before for little to no actual benefit.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I ask the users, my clients, what business problems they need help with. I don't ask them, do you want the new Yoyodyne 1.27gigawatt laptop?
I ask them what process or capabilites they need or want to do their job better. It's my job to translate their needs into a actual plan for implementing technology. Sometimes they do ask for specific technologies, like Blackberry PDAs. Unless there is a good reason not to fufill their requests, give them what they want.
Let me say that again, 'Give them what they want'. I'm not saying make your facility insecure or wasteful, but playing the BOFH gatekeeper of technology is a bad place to be.
You may not think that all the requests for laptops or special applications are absolutely necessary, but for the most part you need to trust your clients that they know their business needs.
Compromise is the key. Having an ivory tower attitude toward which technology you use will not help you show value to the organization.
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The obvious conclusion is that it, Microsoft, is the root cause of the problem, because the things that corporations are complaining about are in fact characteristics of Microsoft Products.
Microsoft products are used through out the industry, and are the standard. Are they not? Whose software is left to blame?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Companies that do not focus their IT on the bottom line, and spend what it takes to achieve that bottom line, lose. Period. Just ask K-Mart. They spent all their cash on nonsense such as bookstores and home improvement centers rather than on matching Wal-Mart's IT spending, and the result... well, we know the result (Chapter 11 bankruptcy).
I'm confident that savvy companies will continue to spend as much on IT as is necessary to hit the bottom line. As for other companies... (shrug). They'll be road kill soon enough, so I'm not worrying about it.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
My company, a major regional healthcare provider, is about to spend 8 figures on standardizing and upgrading our infrastructure- clinical apps, XP everywhere, mainframes, gobs of disk, and jobs jobs jobs for years.
We can do this because our organization watched the bottom line like hawks, IT helped them do that, and IT gained management's trust by doing more with less and cutting when the organization needed it. We even won accolades like Information Week Top 500 under fiscal duress (hint, we are in the top rankings).
We are also looking at the whole patient/doctor interaction with the hospital and will optimize our processes, not just the software (in other words what happens offline is more important then what happens with the boxes).
The competitive business world IS a bit different, and thanks to the greying of America healthcare will continue to be a growth industry, but doing the basics would work in any business.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
I work for a sub $100 million dollar a year manufacturer, and our IT department is just warming up.
Any IT project I or anyone else has proposed has had to have a rock solid cost analysis with it, and it's that analysis that makes or breaks the project. Good projects can always be justified on a spreadsheet.
For example, we're implementing a wireless network in Operations for use with hand held terminals, for doing location management (mainly a lot of barcode scanning). Our current system works in batch mode, with hourly downloads. The cost analysis pointed out that the labor alone from downloading was costing the company $150,000 per year that could be directly saved, and more than recovered the investment in a wireless network and new PDTs.
A new computer for someone is also easily justified. We had people running Windows 98 on Pentium 133s. Assume they waste ten minutes (in increments of 15 to 120 seconds) a day waiting unnecessarily (compared to a new computer) for files to open or close, operations to complete, and to reboot from the occasional crash. I think you'll agree that's conservative. That's 45 hours a year. A clerk costs at least $15 an hour ($12/hour + benefits), usually more. That's $675/year wasted. A new Optiplex GX50 from Dell is around $900, and has a lifespan of at least three years. The computer pays for itself within 15 months, providing a net savings of over $1,000 over the life of the computer.
The president is definitely not a gearhead. But taking the time to justify the costs has always paid off for me, and now he trusts me with more speculative projects, like an in-house TV network, and control units for injection molding machines that are just Win2000 workstations running a VB app with a touchscreen.
So, no, IT is not undervalued in companies that are generally well-run, and have a very rational approach to the profit and loss statement. I suspect that the same companies that now denigrate IT are the one's that jumped hardest on the bandwagon when it was hot.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
No the GUI was invented by the RAM companies ... it just explains so much doesn't it? ;-)
Bitter and proud of it.
Patrick: believe it or not, that is what I wrote - like most other news channels, slashdot editorialises posts. I noticed a few other changes from my submission too.
Michael - in Oakville, believe it or not, i.e. not a million miles from you.
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
If this were true, please explain:
why we are using word processors instead of typewriters or movable type presses.
Why spread sheets are needed? We could use register paper instead of an expensive computer.
Index cards are cheaper than databases. Lets go pull the plug on that expensive DB server.
Customers and vendors don't really need to do stuff with our web site, they can call in to our customer service lines. Oh, we'll need more bodies in customer service...
Who needs e-mail. Snail mail is fine for what we do...
Why should we search the web for the best prices, just order catalogs once a year and go to the public library more often to do research.
Now that we've deflated the hype around computers, lets talk about telephones, fax machines, pagers, and cell phones, and why we don't need them anymore.
After that, if they back off, then ask a simple easy question: Do you think any of that stuff runs itself?
Seriously, if anyone said that IT has been proven to be a waste of money, I'd look for an ulterior motive. Fast.
Now, if they mean that a lot of people went overboard, well, I don't think I could argue against them there. One only needs to look at Darwin Awards to see that a lot of people do go overboard... and kill themselves doing it. The trick of it is not to be a lemming.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
On the contrary; I think I work for some very good companies, which is exactly why pulling the router wouldn't stop us from working.
I'm a professional software developer. The IT support staff at all of the companies I've worked at recently were pretty competent, and obviously the "office workers" were computer literate. That is exactly why we don't need absurd amounts of connectivity. If you pulled out all the networking, you would...
That is it. There is no more. The important two of these things -- source control and backup -- would have worked quite happily over a bog standard office network from ten years ago, without any of the expensive new hardware everyone seems to be installing.
As for everything else, I think the benefits of Internet access in general, and e-mail in particular, have a long way to go before they are proven to be cost-effective. Right about now, I reckon in most offices, you're losing an average of 1-2 hours per employee per day to surfing, just because they can. Add to that the amount of spam they have to clear out (and I'm including all the internal rubbish as well as UCE in that) before they can start work in the morning, and you've probably lost another half hour.
And of course, there's the small issue of losing half your customer base if the wrong virus sends the wrong confidential documents to your whole address book before the patch turns up to stop it for you to worry about, too. That's a hell of a liability to accept just so Joe Blow can e-mail his Aunt Mable from his PC (on company time, probably) and yet many places do so without even taking the most basic of security precautions.
Many of the other gadgets are more of a liability than people realise as well. "Great, a phone that uses the network, we can all plug into the same sockets now!" they cry. And then the power goes out, and they can't call the power supply company to fix it because all the phones are dead. No, really, I have seen this happen. Now tell me, wasn't it smart to spend 300 on each of those nice new phones rather than 15 each on a set that, well, just work?
And of course, we mustn't forget the productivity benefits of letting Word turn "12 August 2002" into "12 August 2002-08-12" for me every time I write a letter, and doing away with the ability to create a new document from a template anywhere in favour of "smart" tags, task panes and such that know exactly what I want to do and make it really easy -- unless they're wrong, as they frequently are. It's a great comfort to me, though, that I can now have a 2.2GHz P4 on my desk, because it needs all that extra horsepower to run Office XP compared to what Office 97 took five years ago to produce much the same results.
So, I stand by my original position. IT can, if used well, make a big difference; that is beyond doubt. However, most places do not use it well, and would indeed have been better off with their PIIs running Win2K and a simple network connecting them for backup, etc.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Now, video editing, or hi-res graphics, or gamez, those can actually use up horsepower. And I really am happier recompling large applications on my PIII400 than on the P60s, but half of that is just memory size...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In my case (consultant / systems engineer) my primary environment is a laptop, and we need new ones every ~2 years because they get beaten to splinters hauling them around, plus our Corporate IT Bureaucrats keep giving us new Microsoft Bloated Office and Operating Systems, so we at least need to upgrade RAM and disk space every 1-2 years, while if we were using Unix it wouldn't be such a problem.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This whole market bust is a boon for some. Right now I have 3 techs that just paid their own way through getting their MCSE's. I've trained them each extensively and each has been assigned specialties that is extremely effecient for our company. As long as I keep rolling out new systems and allow them to get hands on real world experience installing and maintaining the latest and greatest, they are likely to actually STAY here!!! The thought of having employees that actually know what they are doing stay here at their current salaries would have been unheard of 2 years ago. And this isn't such a bad gig being 10 minutes from the beach...
In my previous tenure as Director of Engineering for, yes, a dot-com, I valiantly tried to utilize sensible ideas from my newly received MBA in software/hardware investment decisions. That was basically useless because I was routinely given directives routed from various department heads to "above me" and back down. These directives ranged from stupid to insane. Most were gigantic wastes of money because everyone making the decisions ignored what we (in engineering) had to say and the decision-makers were completely non-technical.
Salespeople would come in and sell other managers on "this software just plugs right in" -- we would be handed an invoice and a consultant and be expected to "plug it in" with obvious results.
Now my impression is that people might actually care about the value one receives for IT investments. Maybe people will actually listen to IT business experts and review their analyses. Seriously, I think 75% of the waste would have been avoided by just thinking for 5 seconds.
And if you're interested in analyzing and researching IT investments before jumping in, I'm available on a contract basis!
Incidentally, a friend of mine just told me last week that he read a study (and if that's not authoratative, I don't know what is) that said IT spending is inversely related to employee productivity. That's right: the more a company spends on IT, the less productive its employees are. Of course, I have no reference.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I work for a small company, where I am the only IT person. The owners KNOW they don't really know what needs to be done, and leaves it all in my (IMHO, capable :P) hands.
On the flip side, I also consult (because of my grueling 40hr work week) for an ex boss with an accounting background. He's one of those guys who will say, "I need Email, what does MS do for email." :( -a MONTH after the face...
Everytime he calls, I can tell by the tone of his voice if it's Microsoft Software, or Non-Microsoft software failing. The MS tone is bewilderment. While the non-MS tone is exasperation, as if the problem is normal. For example, I changed the IP address on the mail server (BSD), and 'partner' companies have some sort of 'non-updating' DNS- so it was my fault
That's one of those guys who WILL pay for endless software, because he BELIEVES it's less trouble. Even as he's re-installing Windows, telling me Microsoft produces the best of everything (I will give him Office, and Developer environments), he still doesn't 'get' it. He didn't 'get' it the next day when he was rebooting his Terminal Server, and his NT production server because SNA was being screwy (of course, he used SNA for 3270 emulation, because pure IP isn't 'Microsoft-enough').. It's like talking to my 8 year old..
Rant Off
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
During the same period, we were seeing the transition of business systems from mainframes and superminis to rackmount PCs. That was a tough transition, but it, too, is mostly over.
There's nothing wrong with this. It's a good time to fix the trouble spots in your systems, clean things up, and concentrate on reliable service.
That's happening. And it's good.
Remember when online shopping was flakey? (The most popular early implementation of online credit card processing, ICVERIFY, worked by emulating a dialup merchant terminal. Hence the early "wait up to two minutes for your order to go through, do not hit reload".) That's gone.
Remember when AOL was losing about 5-10% of their E-mail messages? It was so bad that Time-Warner people, who had been ordered to use AOL at work, demanded a real E-mail system. That's fixed.
Remember when you used a web site with a database, and about 10% of the time the thing broke? Even the big search engines used to be down now and then. You don't see that any more.
And if you were an early DSL user, you remember the hell of installing the thing, the random disconnects, the downtime, and the lame customer service. (In California, the Public Utilities Commission had to lean on PacBell hard.) That's mostly fixed.
Maintenance programming isn't as much fun as new development, but there's a time for it.
It was not because of tech people saying oh I can make $$$. It was because non-tech people saw they could make money. And why is that? Because investors though they could just make money by selling stock at a higher price disregarding the actual cash flow (in the .com bubble I'd call those "drawings").
If an invesment in a dt com should go like this:
1) 1M start-up -> 2M for next 3 years -> 6M for 5 years -> breakeven -> lots of profits
They just did it like:
2) 10M investment, sell stock for 1000M in 6 months -> 50M investment, stock value jumps to 5000M -> 1 year later, profits vs. market value are ridiculous -> buble explodes
The shame is that some good companies wanted to go the 2) way but couldn't. The couldn't choose the "spendings roadmap" because they needed to actually BURN the funds so that they could issue the IPO. Once the IPO was up and the initial investors laughing whatever happened to the company could only hurt:
- millions of individual investors
- the IT industry
So the people that set up the bubble are really happy and the only ones I see have survived are the companies that wanted to be in business for the long run, had plenty of their OWN cash in sufficient quantities so that will not need anybody elses money before break-even (6 or 7 years). Some other managed to survive because they where able to cut costs inmediately and as they where overfunded after IPO, the remaining cash at the new spending rate was enough to reach the shore (but VAN of these projects was a disaster).
unfinished: (adj.)
Small correction: The shame is that some good companies wanted to go the 1) way but couldn't...
unfinished: (adj.)
IT as it was during the .com was a bust and a failure. I was part of a department that paid 80,000 dollars for tape changers to eliminate the need for IT people to take five minutes out of the day to change a few tapes. There was a line of Sun Enterprise servers, the cheapest of which shipping with a price tag of 45,000..... There were 23 of those damn servers... Ultra 60 workstations were being phased out for Ultra 80s for software developers just for the hell of it. The ratio of IT support people to users was about 1 to 4.5..... Damn cushy job with all kinds of brand new high end hardware all the time. Supporting fewer than five people is easy...
.com mess that is just flat out worthless. There is a point of diminishing returns, particularly with concern to equipment. Even with people, quality IT can go a long way with few people. That place folded fast when the bubble burst.
That is the kind of IT spending associated with the
Now I'm making more at a smaller company that has pretty much stayed at about 25 people or so total for the last 15 years and has pulled in about 14 million this year. Equipment is purchased usually refurb, upgrade cycles usually wait for about a 3x upgrade, and leans heavily on intel architecture machines for cost reasons, only as many non-intel machines are used as are necessary for testing. When a second internet connection was needed, I took a retired PC and put linux on it, not requisitioned some high end cicsco hardware. Same with a backup for our SonicWall gateway (purchased before my arrival), made out of a P60. VPN is FreeS/WAN powered, not hosted on a PIX. I am the only IT guy supporting those people, and really one good IT person is all you need for most situations with 25 people involved. Good IT people can support a lot of users with fewer resources. Upgrading Ultra60s to Ultra80s for code monkeys won't help them code faster. Having a humongous team of IT support people that spend more time thinking someone else will fix it than doing anything themselves will not help things.... And this realization is hitting the business world, and in this light it is a correct assessment. To say it is completely worthless would be foolish, but to say pouring money into IT works would be equally foolish.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"Less online phone directories more online report generation from divergent systems. Moving data from paper booklets to online is cute, but what does it save?"
I manage the directory team for a large multinational. By moving from multiple island directories and scrapping paper based phone books for 120,000 staff, we have saved well in excess of $1 Million per year. What is more, it is an essential pre-requitise for developing the applications you describe. Once this is done, you can add additional feeds from accounting, building managmenet systems etc. in batch mode and real time. Over 100 applications now take feeds of that data in batch mode or using LDAP queries, and their life is much better.
If we had started with this end goal as our initial objective, we would never have run this project. By building the phone book first, we got something which everyone likes and uses and has provided the basis for a very successful meta directory project. Real time reports are perhaps two years away, and I don't see the major advantage, but we will get there.
This is what makes IT fun and useful, upgrading routers and desktop productivity apps isn't. Lots of us are still adding value and having fun, some introspection is useful but don't get too dishartened yet.
Firstly remember this is more certainly about company politics than facts.
1) Ask to see the 'proof that IT is waste of money'. The critic won't be able to produce it because the dot-com crash was about the failure of the venture capital system not IT. Dot-com's failed when they lost their VC stream, which is why e-commerce is still growing volume, at a reduced rate. Indeed done well you could use this insight to decry the critics lack of perception/insight even 'deception'.
2) Recognise the critics are almost certainly using this as a tactic to increase their own [Dept] prestige, position and budget during difficult times at your expense.
3) Try to build bridges with the IT critics, try to enlist them to your cause, leverage your department's abilities to aid your allies. When the IT critics come to you for some, reply sorry no budget. Consider giving them some outage, make sure it's planned and during work hours because you don't have the budget to pay overtime.
4) When they come to you for a project, leverage your co-operation.
5) Learn some accounting how to prepare and manipulate cost benefit analysis, learn how to capitalise your expenditure.
6) Cannibalise your existing budgets, particularly closed licences, thin out some of the dead wood.
7) Reduce what deliverables your are prepared to make in keeping with budget restrictions imposed.
I'm a programmer with a 3 year old computer. I'm not planning to upgrade soon. I am thinking of buying a new chair (probably not an Aeron). I think a better chair is likely to improve my programming more than a new computer would (I'm typing this with horrible posture due to my crappy chair).
I'm not saying you're full of it about the productivity gains since you didn't give enough specifics to find anything right or wrong with. I'd like it a lot if you posted more details. The exact nature of the upgrades and productivity gains are squarely on topic for this thread.
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.
Companies are spending money - but they are being very conservative about it. There are many "everday" tasks and projects that are, of course, going to continue to be there. I saw one comment posted here about the market being saturated with less-than-qualified people a year ago because there were big salaries in it. This is true to an extent, and if you are one of those people, then sure, maybe IT/tech/whatever just isn't for you.
Guess what : the money is still there, there is still work to be done, there is just a lot less of it to go around. It's still the same routine though. Companies still need IT stuff to get done - they just want guaranteed results (or damn close to).
Those certifications people love to mock (whether it be Cicso, Sun, MS, or whatever) combined with years of ACTUAL experience are big decision factors. It reduces risk. Personally, I am completing my Master's of Software Engineering - a few more months of work and hopefully a lot less worrying about the collective budgets of the IT industry.
There will be work. I will find it. I can deliver results.I'm a 2000 man.
Then God help the company he works for... as a CTO/CIO your *job* is to make the business cases, to help the organization understand where the real value is. Sometimes it isn't easy, but dammit man, that's your freakin' job!
You work with the business users, you work with your peers, you coach the folks that work for you, so everyone is in agreement on where the value for your IT spending is, and then you go do it. You don't just built sh*t for fun and to keep you buried in your IDE for 10 hours day... You have to have good reasons for upgrading your bandwidth. If you can't fully and clearly articulate a good business reason for it (more transactions, better data integrity, better security, more informed business decisions, decreased cost per X) then you probably shouldn't do it. Just writing it off to corporate luddites and ignorance is weak, and it's a cop out.
maybe you should look for another job.
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
It's not that IT is being *undervalued* today, it's that it was so *overvalued* yesterday that it seems bad now in comparison.
But old habits die hard, and IT is still a money sink for a lot of companies. I work at a state college, and we just spent over $600,000 (of student IT fee money!) on three huge Sun servers and accoutrements, to fill a need we don't have, never mind that we could have matched their power with some Linux clustering.
The thing is, putting P4's on the desktops of workers with decent P3's isn't going to make anyone more productive. What might is getting them software that doesn't suck, better input devices and bigger monitors. But good luck getting your CIO/VP of IT/whomever to understand that.
As for spending being restrained on useful projects like in-house apps, that's a real shame. But it's something of our own fault for preaching for so long that technology was a business miracale. Think "boy who cried wolf", we've bulshitted the suits for far too long and now they don't believe us when the company has a true IT need.
Hello, "this guy" here:
Valid points of course: an IT organisation should prove its value, as should any activity in a company. Goes without saying, and I am not arguing that. Resources are always scarce, and need to be distributed on a basis better than "I say so".
But there is more to it than that.
First, mine was a general observation - not my company, but throughout the industry. My company is OK, thanks, as indeed we have representation (me) at the most senior level. But many companies are not so lucky.
I get the impression that IT is being singled out especially to prove its value - when is the last time you saw accountants, or marketers, or janitors whip out the spreadsheets to prove each quarter why they should be there? As an activity that has fallen into disfavour, IT now gets this all the time.
Thing is that this type of value is often hard to prove. An app to do something very specific: OK. But what is the value of a spreadsheet? Of a web site? What is the "value" to us all of slashdot? IN dollars? That's open to interpretation, which is why even the US government is not yet convinced IT contributes to productivity. And even if you can demostrate that it does: then over what time period? I venture thath the initial PCs took more time that they gave benefit, but still, were a worthwhile investment.
Another thing that bothers me is the lack of vision I see. In the dot com era, vision was everything, to ridiculous extremes. But now the pensulum has swung back too far and there's not place for it at all. Competitive advantage comes out of "vision", "R&D", "trying and failing and trying again", etc. I suspect if we took the spreadsheet approach every time there would BE no spreadsheets, PCs, airplanes - or slashdot.
Michael
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
Though I'm not familiar with the details of their reports, some research economists are beginning to discover that there WAS no productivity growth during the tech boom, or at least no more than the trend line (3-4%).
/investment/ instead of an /expense/. This made billions of dollars of software spending look like "productivity".
I can tell you ONE of the reasons for this. In the USA's GDP figures, software was counted as an
(* Maybe I'm bitter about this, considering I was all but tossed out on the street during the dot-bust from my old position at a well-respected company [ibm.com] because they wanted someone younger who could "think outside the traditional box." *)
I am surprised there has not been a huge lawsuit over this. It looked like a pretty strong case from what I read. But sneaky things can muck it up.
Did they even give you a chance to "think outside of the box" before they canned you for being old?
I usually get reprimanded or fired for thinking outside the box. They want somebody who tells them what they want to hear, or at least what they think they want to hear.
I need more kissing-ass skills, not tech skills.
(* There will always be a need for these people. After all, you've gotta have someone there to clean up the mess when the next wave of bright-eyed wannabes gets weeded out. *)
Yes, but that is *after* you get your foot in the door. The hard part is playing the impression game properly so that you can get in to do that bangup work. They will just see the grey hair and immediately think "medical leave, COBOL, and experience premium expectations".
Table-ized A.I.
You're illustrating the point I'm trying to make. Personality and "human factors" are, for better or worse, more important than any other factor in business. Far from being trivial, they're at the core of everything that happens in a business.
Your minimum effort approach may work, but you may also just be reinforcing existing beliefs about IT people as mercenaries who get along better with machines than with people (not to say that you get along better with machines than with people - I'm talking about perceptions here). Having been in a similar position before, I understand where you're coming from, but there is a difference between being a slave and being helpful.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ