Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
What about all of the power to power your precious machines? You ever thought about that? I'd guess that 80% of all companies today could *get by* without a computer system, just as they did years and years ago. I'd guess that 0% could get by without power. Yet, you don't hear the electrical engineers saying "I bet they'd appreciate me if I shut down this transformer". Please. Grow up.
Of course IT is overrated... would you pay that much for a scooter?
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.
Need a website host? Try out http://WebQualityHost.net
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
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!
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