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Inside Wal-Mart IT
prostoalex writes "Information Week magazine takes a look at Wal-Mart's IT infrastructure. Wal-Mart's yearly global sales are quoted at more than 250 billion dollars, their IT spending is less than 1% of that. At the same time, the company manages to pursue new venues in optimizing retail with the wonders of technology. And what about outsourcing IT for the sake of optimization? 'We'd be nuts to outsource,' a top IT executive at Wal-Mart replies."
... and she says its hell on wheels.. and they don't get paid well according to industry standards... i guess thats the walmart way.. makem work hard, dont pay too much, $$$profit
This is important news to CIOs. Walmart has traditionally been pro-business and strongly against organized labor and a "feel good" business approach. Therefore, when they don't outsource, they don't do so for the right business reasons, and CIOs elsewhere will take note. Over the long run, the market will do the right thing if you let it be.
Shop smart, shop S-Mart
It is interesting the head of their IT has a degree in architecture, I wonder what the stats are for IT in general, especially for sysadmin type positions? I.E. Degree in CS (or related), non-CS degree, no degree.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
"We'd be nuts to outsource..." ... "because we already have all the cheap illegal immigrant labor we need right here"
Walmart appears to know this reality.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I've read that if you take all the manufacturing companies in China that _only_ manufacture for walmart, and count them as a single company, it would be the biggest manufacturing company in China.
Wow, this amazed me, Walmart is usually all about cutting costs, ignoring quality, overworking the staff and destroying the small business.
Maybe they just haven't got around to it yet - or they're just paying the US staff Bangalore salaries....
#include <sig.h>
Thats not the point. Thats A LOT of money. Thats more then most countries make, really. BTW, I believe last year they made somewhere between 5 - 10 billion profit.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
I've been on contract at Wal-Mart for six months. It just seems like 60 YEARS! The ISD organization is a mess, and it IS a CULTure all its own.
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
Sure they won't outsource for the moment. But the second that it's easy and profitable enough for them to do it, don't think that Walmart won't just take all their IT jobs to somewhere cheaper.
They run a business for the shareholders, where profit, not jingoist sentiment, rules.
What would a top "Finance" exec have to say about it?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
It was maybe 2 years ago when I heard that Wal-Mart had massive system monitoring problems. They installed HP Vantage Point, then found out that it was a total piece of crap. It couldn't watch anything, much less their boxes it was installed on. I suppose they finally got all that stuff to work.
Before that, I remember hearing that Wal-Mart used to make every store identical - down to the IP addresses of the boxes. It was a great idea, until it broke all the software that used IP addresses to track state. Imagine: push software to a box, then go to the next store. But wait, the software's already been sent, so no push. Doh!
Overall, their business application people seemed really good, but their infrastructure people were less-than-stellar. It's an interesting environment nevertheless.
Oh, and they were really cheap, too. You'd think they'd understand the value of infrastructure, you know?
In case you haven't heard, Wal-Mart is evil
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Now, if Walmart's tracking is REALLY sophistocated, then they'll figure this out AND be able to track things back to the supplier, but...
One of the things that RFID would help with is the ability to not only locate a palette of some item in the stock room but also count the number of them. (Among numerous other benefits outside the stock room.) If Walmart employees (and you know how well-trained they are) get complacent about this and assume that what the reader tells them is accurate, then suppliers will try to take advantage of it. What happens if a palette comes in with more RFID tags than stock items (but not so many more that it's immediately apparent), and the supplier charges for the number of tags.
This would result in a loss for Walmart, and if it's subtle enough, it could take them a LONG time to track down.
The fact is, their main edge over their competitors is their inventory management system (just-in-time, etc.). If they outsourced this, what is to stop their outsourcee to take the knowledge and then shop it around to Target, KMart, Sears, etc.? Such valuable knowledge must be kept in-house if you want to maintain the edge.
On the other hand, if it plain labor, then Walmart _encourages_ their suppliers to outsource. They keep asking for price cuts till the supplier has no choice. Read for yourself.
Walmart IT pays less than industry average wages with lower chances of salary advancement and absolutely tepid compensation packages for most long term employees.
That said, it is a boring stable environment that you probably couldn't ever get fired from; guess that appeals to some.
(The above based on numerous employees at IT and WalMart.com)
--- I do not moderate.
But now, we see how centralized planning can work. With hourly updates, bar codes, online registers, and quick feedback to stores and suppliers, the American economy is now run from a central location. Bentonville, Arkansas. Wal-Mart controls more production than Gosplan ever did. They definitely control production; ask any Wal-Mart supplier.
Wal-Mart is more standardized, more controlled, and more centrally managed than the USSR ever was. In financial terms, bigger, too.
When you're Wal-Mart, you don't need to outsource, because you're already paying crap salaries. The slogan "Always low prices, always low pay" didn't come out of nowhere, you know.
Wal-Mart dictates its pricing across the board: to its suppliers, and to employees. When you can pay an American the salary of an Indian and get away with it, why hire the Indian?
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If anybody is good at saving costs it's Wal-Mart. I don't agree with many of their business practices (such as screwing employees out of overtime pay), but saving costs is one thing they're really good at.
They are smart enough to realize that in software development, the real cost savings come from quality and productivity, not per-person labor costs. Hiring, training and retaining people who can produce twice as much per person is much more profitable than hiring people who each cost half as much to employ.
Outsourcing to cheap labor might work well for manufacturing toys or T-shirts, but cheap IT labor doesn't so easily bring your total IT costs down.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Offshore outsourcing software development is all about short-term gains at the expensive of long-term profitability.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that training people who will ultimately take that knowledge and compete against you isn't a viable long-term strategy.
I'm looking forward to seeing the faces of American executives when Indian software companies start competing against those same American companies who decided offshore outsource. "Gosh, we didn't expect them to compete against us after we paid them for years and years, giving them the crucial experience necessary to compete against us!"
Oh, wait. Those executives won't care. They'll already have stolen their millions from the companies whose long-term viability they destroyed, and be sipping drinks while counting their money.
Looks like people are confusing the two. Of course Wal-Mart is not going to outsoure its IT. They teach you in B-school not to outsource your core competency -- which in this case is their information gathering and optimization that allows them to be so efficient.
Offshoring on the other hand can be done without outsourcing. Wal-Mart just has to establish a developement center in another country that they fully control. Companies like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft are offshoring work to China and India, but they are not outsourcing since these develepment centers and employees belong to the company, not a third party.
It is interesting to see how outsourcing has quickly gained an immensely bad reputation.
Some are against outsourcing simply because American jobs should be kept in America. Some are against it because they lost their jobs to outsourcing. Others believe that outsourcing produces lower quality goods and services. And yet, others are against it because they are sheep.
Of course many forget that American jobs don't belong to the employees, but to the employers. Management has to do what it must to cut costs, and improve profitability. It's about the bottom line. Boycotts against companies will result in a poorer financial performance, resulting in more outsourcing.
And while, it is understandably tough to lose your job to Joe Third-World, I don't understand how some of the same people can support firing employees. Geeks aren't clamoring when big companies announce layoffs. Yet, outsourcing is bad, somehow.
As to those who believe that outsourcing provides poorer quality goods and services, it is interesting to note that a lot of manufacturing goes on in Asia. The majority of the products used to make the computers that the Slashdot audience uses to read Slashdot is made in Asia. Besides, who's to say that American tech support is any better? Tech support staff everywhere are given guidelines or sometimes scripts to help them work. If they knew better, they wouldn't be working in tech support.
Many years ago I applied to work at Walmart. I didn't plan to work in IT. I just wanted to work at a store part time. I was a teenager in search of money. There was, as I recall, a three-part process: a mini-interview, a questionnaire to fill out, then another interview.
One of the questions on the form was something along the lines of:
"Do you feel that everyone tries drugs at some point in their life."
The question wasn't specific. It didn't ask about "heroin," "marijuana," or even "aspirin."
Anyway, I am sometimes Honest and I felt I needed to answer the question truthfully. So, checked "Yes," and wrote: "Yes, I believe that, at some point during a person's very long life, one tries 'drugs'."
Yes, I was a dink.
The interviewer took my form to be "analyzed" and, to this day, I remember the anger on her face when she walked out of that office.
She said, "So, you think people try drugs, huh? Well, I don't think we have any place for a person like that."
I don't think I can ever work at Walmart. I imagine my "form" along with my name and SS has been filed somewhere.
Anyway, I suppose that Walmart's IT folks aren't pot-smoking, heroin-shooting, aspirin-chewing, drug-experimenters who sit in a daze watching Matrix letters melt on their screens, eh?
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Did you ever look at any of the walmart-branded products and see where they're made?
Actually, Wal-mart outsources it's IT needs at every chance it gets. I do alot of rollouts and installations of IT related stuff for Wal-mart around the state. They use Cisco equipment for most of their switches & routers, and NT4,2000, & AIX on their servers. As for the quality of administration, it's not that bad at all. We have to document everything thing and call in to home office for the simplest of things like swapping ports on a switch so as to keep things in order. I know those are typical things most organizations do internally, but for company this size, I think it's pretty good. The workmanship of some of the wiring around the stores leading to and from the UPC rooms leaves a bit to be desired though.
The people in charge of Wally*Mart most certainly received their degrees decades ago. I doubt there are any PDP-11s--or whatever they programmed their PIC projects on--still in use today. I also doubt they use Pascal/Fortran on the job, but your sundry 80s BS CS has some of that on her transcript.
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* PHBs and other people who don't know how to interview/judge an applicant's stillset abscribe "value" to a degree, but if you asked them exactly how that applies to the job at hand, you'd get nothing more than vapor lock in return.
Yeah, right.
I know a guy who has an IT job at Wal-Mart. He says they used to have decent health benefits there, comparable to the rest of the IT industry, but recently they were downgraded to the same benefits that the "associates" on the floor get.
In the article, it talked about Teradata providing their data storage. Teradata is more of a solution provider then a maker of storage systems.
http://www.engenio.com/default.aspx?pageID=394
But to get an idea of the hardware they might have in there.
http://www.engenio.com/default.aspx?pageId=61
I'd guess something like that?
Its not what it is, its something else.
A few years back I had a summer internship there... and it sucked big time. Here are a few things I remember (and keep in mind it was 4-5 years ago, so things may have changed):
- everyone was required to be at work at 7:30am... the earliest you could go home was 5:30pm.
- the pay was below industry standards, but it's in Bentonville, AR, so the cost of living was pretty low, too.
- salaried employees at the home office were required to work 2 saturdays a month. IT was actually an exception to that rule, because it was understood that if you're in IT, you're already working a huge amount of overtime.
- the #1 complaint from the employees while I was there was burnout. (big surprise!)
- at the end of the week, you got an email that was copied to your manager that listed: the # of emails you'd sent and received that week both internal and external to the company, the websites you'd visited outside of the intranet, and long distance phone #'s you'd called, the length of the call, and the cost of that call to the company.
That's one of the ways they can spend only 1% of sales on IT: they monitored everything you did and made sure you weren't doing anything non-work related. They offered me a full time position after my internship, but I politely declined.
Oh, and did you know that they have a wal-mart cheer?!
I have several large store chains as customers I support. Not a single one of them use the same bleeding edge methodologies (RFID, data warehousing, etc.) to use IT to grow their businesses like Wal-Mart. This is a really good article and really highlights how using IT can grow your business, versus seeing it as a "requirement" and treating it that way.
Some store chains "like" treating their customers like a vintage bank, i.e. do everything on paper, no redundancy, very low bandwidth links, long credit card validation times, etc. I think that Wal-Mart's success continues to hinge on them utilizing IT and that says a lot about their business.
Alternately, because of a lot of what they do is bleeding edge - they don't get the same level of application and vendor support because other stores have implemented the same systems. While the risk is a lot higher in adopting new systems (i.e. RFID), the gain from being the first adopter and being able to profit off the technology will make up for it if they are successful.
Pat
I can't despise walmart enough, and this is from someone who thought they were a good idea when they started out and used to be a regular shopper. They make MS look like a benevolent charity. They've had to resort to what in essence are a series of public propoganda commercials on the TV (seen 'em? pure FUD) in order to keep up what they are attempting to maintain as an "all amwerican" image with smiling happy workers. It's right out of kim ill dungs ministry of truth video factory.
a lmart.html
Here's a paste from this url http://www.familyfarmdefenders.org/whatsgoingon/w
" Wal-Mart Exploits Children in Overseas Sweatshops
Behind the slick veneer of success, though, there is incredible misery. Contrary to its "all-American" advertising hype, Wal-Mart sources over 80% of its products from overseas. According to the National Labor Committee, there are 1000 sweatshops in China alone supplying Wal-Mart - many of them owned and operated by the Red Army using political prisoners. Chinese teenagers get just 12 1/5 cents per hour for an 84 hour work week and at night are packed into squalid dormitories under armed guard. In Bangladesh, teenage girls receive as little as 9 cents per hour - far below the official minimum wage of 33 cents/hour - sewing Wal-Mart clothes. Wal-Mart refuses to reveal its factory locations to independent human rights monitors since, in the words of spokewoman, Betsy Reithmeyer, "This is very competitive. If we find a very good factory, we want to keep it to ourselves."
Wal-Mart Also Exploits Its Own Workers in the U.S.!
While, those sitting on Wal-Mart's board of directors earn a whopping $1500/day for their "hard work," the rest of the workforce languishes among America's working poor. Wal-Mart's vehement anti-union attitude means over half of its 720,000 "associates" qualify for federal food stamps. Wal-Mart employees average just $7.50/hr. - well below the national retail wage average of $8.71/hr. At 30 hours per week, a Wal-Mart worker earns barely $11,700 per year - $2000 below the federal poverty line for a single mother with two children."
Basically walmart says, we'll force you to lose your job, then please come shop at our store! It's the american way! Oooh, unions are evil commies, but our trade associations and our relationships with dictatorial regimes are fine!
ohhh..wait... this IS the american way now! How could I forget!
This is what all these globalist goons want for the united states, this is how you will compete, so remember to vote for the NWO R.epressive And D.omineering corporate party this election, it will speed up the transformation to a glorius culture of low pay, dismal working conditions, and the cheapest designed and built crap possible! YaaaaY!
wonder if walmart has looked into opensource options?
Largest retailer on the planet? I'm thinking that somebody might have mentioned it to them...
From their business model its clear they value how much things cost...
And doesn't *not* choosing open source say something?
I don't respond to AC's.
"...sales are quoted at more than 250 billion dollars, their IT spending is less than 1% of that."
.01
Let's see here....
$250,000,000,000.00
x
----------------------
2,500,000,000.00
Just working with the 1% number, we can see their IT budget is ~2.5 billion bucks. With that much loot, I think it's fair to say, one can move mountains... and still make it back in time for afternoon tea.
---
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
How Wal-Mart is Remaking our World
By Jim Hightower.
Posted April 26, 2002.
From union busting to Chinese sweatshops, there are a thousand reasons to worry about Wal-Mart.
Bullying people from your town to China
Corporations rule. No other institution comes close to matching the power that the 500 biggest corporations have amassed over us. The clout of all 535 members of Congress is nothing compared to the individual and collective power of these predatory behemoths that now roam the globe, working their will over all competing interests.
The aloof and pampered executives who run today's autocratic and secretive corporate states have effectively become our sovereigns. From who gets health care to who pays taxes, from what's on the news to what's in our food, they have usurped the people's democratic authority and now make these broad social decisions in private, based solely on the interests of their corporations. Their attitude was forged back in 1882, when the villainous old robber baron William Henry Vanderbilt spat out: "The public be damned! I'm working for my stockholders."
The media and politicians won't discuss this, for obvious reasons, but we must if we're actually to be a self-governing people. That's why the Lowdown is launching this occasional series of corporate profiles. And why not start with the biggest and one of the worst actors?
The beast from Bentonville
Wal-Mart is now the world's biggest corporation, having passed ExxonMobil for the top slot. It hauls off a stunning $220 billion a year from We the People (more in revenues than the entire GDP of Israel and Ireland combined).
Wal-Mart cultivates an aw-shucks, we're-just-folks-from-Arkansas image of neighborly small-town shopkeepers trying to sell stuff cheaply to you and yours. Behind its soft homespun ads, however, is what one union leader calls "this devouring beast" of a corporation that ruthlessly stomps on workers, neighborhoods, competitors, and suppliers.
Despite its claim that it slashes profits to the bone in order to deliver "Always Low Prices," Wal-Mart banks about $7 billion a year in profits, ranking it among the most profitable entities on the planet.
Of the 10 richest people in the world, five are Waltons--the ruling family of the Wal-Mart empire. S. Robson Walton is ranked by London's "Rich List 2001" as the wealthiest human on the planet, having sacked up more than $65 billion (£45.3 billion) in personal wealth and topping Bill Gates as No. 1.
Wal-Mart and the Waltons got to the top the old-fashioned way--by roughing people up. The corporate ethos emanating from the Bentonville headquarters dictates two guiding principles for all managers: extract the very last penny possible from human toil, and squeeze the last dime from every supplier.
With more than one million employees (three times more than General Motors), this far-flung retailer is the country's largest private employer, and it intends to remake the image of the American workplace in its image--which is not pretty.
Yes, there is the happy-faced "greeter" who welcomes shoppers into every store, and employees (or "associates," as the company grandiosely calls them) gather just before opening each morning for a pep rally, where they are all required to join in the Wal-Mart cheer: "Gimme a 'W!'" shouts the cheerleader; "W!" the dutiful employees respond. "Gimme an A!'" And so on.
Behind this manufactured cheerfulness, however, is the fact that the average employee makes only $15,000 a year for full-time work. Most are denied even this poverty income, for they're held to part-time work. While the company brags that 70% of its workers are full-time, at Wal-Mart "full time" is 28 hours a week, meaning they gross less than $11,000 a year.
Health-care benefits? Only if you've been there two years; then the plan
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
...there would be a big problem. $2.5 Billion in IT costs? For a global supermarket chain? I mean, if it was a technology company with big R&D budgets (like, oh, IBM, or something), that'd be a different story, perhaps.
On the other hand, $250 Billion in sales is just that...sales of largely physical goods. A better indicator would be as compared to profits...or as a percentage of operating costs.
I was hoping this would be "Inside Wal-Mark 'it' girls", a follow-on to the successful "Girls of Wal-Mart".
What company in its right mind would do that to Wal-Mart? They're a company with more than enough money to effectively bury any of their little vendors who tried to defraud them like that. And that is exactly what they would be doing if they did that.
Whatever gains they might get, Wal-Mart's vendors could never justify the risks involved. Suppose they only get a few more "sales" here and there. Is that kind of increase in revenue worth getting millions of dollars in legal fees and fines shoved up their ass? Besides if it is a largescale operation, the chances that Wal-Mart would catch on very quickly is very high.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Don't sell IT software or services to Wal-Mart. They treat IT vendors just like they do makers of physical goods. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.htm l
They'll negotiate you down to nearly 0 profit on your goods and service, and you'll sell because at the /next/ renewal you'll increase the rates slightly and make some of that money back... and Wal-Mart is a good reference account (just look at those seats man!).
Once they get you in-house they'll rape your internal IT support until they become your most expensive customer to support... after all their internal people are underpaid and undertrained. And if you balk, their lawyers will eat you alive. Then next year when you try to raise your rates to a level where you can at least break even, they'll find some other vendor stupid enough to think Wal_Mart makes a good reference company and tear out your solution to implement their. And the cycle continues.
Instead of landing Wal-Mart as an IT customer just give 2.6 million dollars to them and pound a nail through your hand. It's cheaper and less painful.
Disclaimer: I work for walmart.com so you can think whatever you want about my potentially biased opinions, below.
I've been working for walmart.com since June. walmart.com is wholly owned by Wal-Mart Incorporated; our computer systems are different from IDS's, the group mentioned in the article, but the company culture and mission are the same. I see a lot of misinformation about what Wal-Mart and walmart.com do or do not in terms of IT and jobs. Most of what I see is bullshit spoken by people who've never worked here or who have bought the "Wal-Mart is Evil" propaganda.
I've worked as a systems architect for some of the largest banks in the world, Nortel, Bell Atlantic, Sun Microsystems, IBM, start-ups, etc. Nowhere other than walmart.com have I seen an environment where the technology folks are encouraged to do their best like at walmart.com. While the politics in most places veer toward "it's not my job", here we are all encouraged to help and participate in addressing a problem and solving it. As a result, things get done very smoothly, people aren't afraid to speak their minds, and lots of sharp people keep joining the ranks (for example, one of the lead guys behind OS X now works for us).
As far as the tools required to do your job, the company will get you, no questions asked, anything that you need to get your job done, with a minimum of red tape. Our standard development environments are Linux and Windows. For various reasons I filed a special request for a Mac with the latest OS X to complement my other two, brand new--and high-end--Dell boxes. I got it within hours as soon as I justified what I needed it for. The company will also pay for mobile/cable Internet access/Blackberry/etc. bills if you're using those to accomplish your job. Even if that means that you only log on to work once a month over that cable/DSL/whatever connection to check an email. Special software that you may need is only a signature away.
After having worked at so many places, I can say that the people at walmart.com have a sense of mission and truly enjoy their work mainly because the company's and employees' goals are aligned. There are cases of people burning out, like at any other company, but even those who've left speak kindly of the company. I, for one, have a lot of fun with my work and almost immediate gratification when it comes to the sense of accomplishment.
We interact with the folks from ISD, the ones that the article was about. As far as I can tell their sense of mission is as vibrant as ours.
As far as salaries are concerned, nobody I know has any complaints. I make a 6-figure salary before a substantial bonus coming my way next year; you never hear anybody bitching about salaries at the water fountain or coffee station. The benefits are great. The salaries, benefits and perks are above those of most companies in Silicon Valley (we're located at its outer edge, in Brisbane, CA). We have the option to telecommute and/or have a flexible schedule.
In sum, it's a fun, exciting, and challenging place to work.
I posted this because I get tired of people engaging into Wal-Mart bashing without knowing what the hell they're talking about. I know as a fact what the work, salaries, benefits, working environment, etc. are like. We are at the cutting edge of technology and we are successful at it. While the article from InfoWeek may not fit some slashdotters' perception of the company, it is probably accurate in describing the goings on at Wal-Mart technology.
(Another disclaimer: I don't think I'm supposed to discuss what our exact infrastructure is; I will tell say, though, that whatever Netcraft is reporting about software from an Evil Company is wrong.)
Oh, before I forget... we're still expanding and continuously hiring smart Linux/Java/etc. people, in case you want to come and see for yourself. In fact, I know we're hiring at a higher rate and with much lower attrition than most places in Silicon Valley as well.
Cheers,
Anonymous Coward today, with aThe nucleus of the IT infrastructure Dillman presides over is a single, centralized, 423-terabyte Teradata system that churns data from 1,387 discount stores, 1,615 Supercenters, 542 Sam's Clubs, and 75 Neighborhood Markets in the United States, plus 1,520 more stores worldwide. "That's key to how we can leverage what we do into the future," says Dan Phillips.
This may give the impression that this is the centralized mainframe system for Walmart.
Actually, Teradata is used for Walmart's Datawarehouse, which is one of the most efficient uses of datawarehouses around. It does not process online transactions, it only does decision support type of work, with massive amounts of data.
Others like Oracle and DB2 sure do beat it for online transaction processing (OLTP), but for Decision Support work on very large databases, Teradata is king. This is the major source of confusion when Teradata is mentioned, and the comparison is not apples to apples.
Here is an an old comment by me with some details on Walmart's use of Teradata.
Here is another comment by someone else on Teradata.
Disclaimer: I still work for NCR, but not with their Teradata division.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
comunities who let Walmart's in see a dramatic rise in the number of people claiming government benefits (medicare/caid, welfare, child care, etc). Walmart pays so little and their benefits suck so much that just about anyone who works there qualifies. They're nothing but a leech on the communities they move in on. Yeah, you're getting low prices now, but they long term impact sucks.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Businesses are always looking for _any_ way to increase profits. It doesn't matter how. It's because that's the CEO/management's job, and if they don't do it every chance they get then the short-term thinkin' fucks who drive the stock market will replace them damn fast. Think of it this way, if I'm a CEO and I save the company 100 million a year by outsourcing, chances are good I'll pocket serveral million as a bonus. 'Strong and stable business'? What do I care, I just pocketed 10 million bucks!
Moreover, companies (and CEOs) are increasigly global entities. They move and operatate on a global scale, and can therefor skirt localized nastiness like recessions in one country or bloody revolutions in another. Marx predicted this, but all anyone can remember from him is that Stalin and Mao used his books for rhetoric.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This is an interesting article.
The Navy decided to outsource their entire network (not just the IT component) via the Navy Marine Corp Intranet (NCMI) contract. A 8.9 Billion, dollars which is best described as a system design in a vacuum at the top with no input from the working level, emphasizing centralized control and is centered around Microsoft core products.
Dissension is strictly forbidden at all levels - even constructive criticism. All press releases are rosy. But from the inside the situation is anything but rosy.
Some at the upper end forgot that Scientist and Engineers work for the Navy and need a wide range of tools to do their job and be innovative. Very little open source software is on the approved for use including dangerous software like Apache or Firefox. Strangely we are required to use IE instead of Mozilla or Firefox.
In practice what is see happening is that the old "legacy" netowrk is staying around why everyone just uses the NCMI network to read email and access the web. So in effect the Navy just hobbled its budget by $8.8x 10^9 dollars. Great winfall for Microsoft and Dell though.
A while back Cringely had an interesting article on the comparision of the NMCI venture and the way Walmart does IT. In a protracted war he placed his bets on Walmart winnng.
I used to work at Stream and I supported a variety of applications to do things like ocr, document layout etc (and I got paid like 9$ an hour to do so...).
Anyhow one day I got a call from a customer at WallMart who was having trouble ocring a document that was made in word (she told me this right at the begining). The problem was the program wasn't picking up text inside grid like cells. I found later on the OCR app was marking all the grids as artifacts (ie pictures that can't be captured). I then made the mistake of asking if they could just get the word document and make that into a pdf if it would be a better work flow.
Turns out the only reason they bought this ocr application was to move word documents from a machine across the room. Reason? They couldn't email the document from one computer to another, the computer's floppy drive was locked down, the computers usb port was locked down. So someone had the brilliant idea to spend thousands of dollars on an ocr application, print the document out, capture the document on another machine, which made it into a pdf, where they would take acrobat and save it as a word doc and correct any mistakes. Yes Wallmart's wonderful IT department is saving them money and time.
I'm not kidding in the slightest - I swear on a stack of bibles this is really what she told me.
Building on clay is fine, as long as you have good drainage and ventilation between the house and the ground.
It's building on *sand* that proverbially leads to danger.
Perhaps you were thinking of "feet of clay", which is a metaphor about virtue, not prudence.
Since I don't work for Wal-Mart, and my butt was the one 25ft up in the air running cable, I would call this outsourcing.
...it will be... blissssssssss...
I will say this. Yes, they pay low wages. Yes its a burn out. IT for retail, is *generally* very high stress for penny-pinching companys. I would rather have that stress working for a dominant company than say for K-mart.
But yes they have a great can-do, really make it work attitude and if you implement something for wal*mart and it works, it will probably work anywhere. I know several folks whose careers were made at wal*mart. Almost any competitor will gladly snap you up with a big, big raise if you have made your credentials in wal*mart IT.
Oh yeah, and did anyone mention how nasty wal*mart can be if they find out you plan to leave them? (* if you quit and you are useful they figure you are going to a competitor *eventually* So therefore you are a "traitor" *) Most folks who quit try to leave as quietly as possible. Its the only place I ever worked where I saw that sort of behavior.
Have a NICE day.
core competency: +14%
supply chain management: +15%
primary differentiator +12%
competent IT department: +35%
Try to work in "leverage," "enterprise class" and
"java" next time, ok?
If you really think about it, Wal-mart is not evil. In fact, Wal-mart gives almost all of the benefit attained through their relentless cost cutting initatives back to consumers. Wal-mart's margins are actualy very small compared to most other businesses. Profits seem big because Wal-mart has sales of $250 billion, but margins are tiny.
Wal-mart does not force people into their stores at gun point. People shop there of their own free will so that they can get the absolute lowest price possible. This behavior has consequences.
Pay a higher price at your local store on main street, and suport their higher cost structure (buying american manufactured goods, higher wages and benefits for employees, lost productivity due to unionized labor force, etc.) or support the Wal-mart way.
Most Americans choose Wal-mart. This is what sends jobs overseas to cheaper labor, encourages "big box store" suburban sprawl, and low quality jobs in the store. Wal-mart is simply supplying what the american consumer wants. this is not evil, this is meeting demand. Wal-mart would not be sucessful if people valued quality jobs over low prices always, in fact, they would be out of business very quickly (remember the low margin thing?)
I work for a company that sells various products to Walmart. In the last couple of years we moved from a mish mash of paper/fax/edi to full blown AS2/EDIINT connectivity. Of all the partners we have made this transition with, the Walmart team was the most knowledgeable about their own software, AS2 connectivity, and their partner expectations.
Yes, setting up with them was not about user friendliness, but trust me, they were the partners we have had the absolute fewest issues with. For any issue, they are knowledgeable, helpful, and consistent. The folks I spoke with at 1st and 2nd level support were polite and all about resolution, not blame, or fault and took ownership.
As I said, I work for a company that does a huge amount of business with them, but I can't say all the above things about any of our other partners.
I have contracted at Walmart.
Wal-mart has the worst working environment of places that I've worked at bar none. I have heard of worse places, but havent experienced such horror first hand, so Walmart is at the top of my shit list. Let me list a few observations :
Other than the above list, there are other considerations too that may apply depending on whether you are conservative or not. For example, at the time I was there (1997), one couldnt get MTV on cable, because the consensus was that MTV was satanic ("work of the devil" was the actual quote I heard). The number of churches outnumbered the number of gas stations. And when the neighbouring town of Fayetteville ("First home of Bill and Hillary Clinton" states a prominent billboard as you drive into it) was subject to a new ordinance outlawing the sale of beer in the biggest titty bar in the region, that proved to be yet another nail in the coffin for many contractors who were working there from out of state.
Plus, if you cant take being located in the middle of nowhere, dont work at Walmart HQ.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Sounds like a 2600 magazine article.
It hauls off a stunning $220 billion a year
Wal-Mart banks about $7 billion a year in profits, ranking it among the most profitable entities on the planet
7 billion in profit on 220 billion in sales is a miserable 3.18%, making WM modestly successful for a retailer but SAD, SAD, SAD when it comes to a lot of other companies in terms of profitability. And speaking of retailing, plenty of specialty stores have much higher profitability but just haven't grown so large as WM because less people want whatever specialty.
Have you been reading 'No Brands' or similar nonsense again?
That's sad.
"... looking like a junk heap." It's amazing what a mess the stores are now.
It's even more amazing that a huge company was so dependent on just one person for good management.
A famous venture capital manager said that there is plenty of money and plenty of ideas. The biggest shortage is not enough good managers.
--
Bush: Borrowing money to try to make his administration look good.
...products on the shelves at walmart represent products that one generation ago or less were manufactured inside the US. My beef isn't with the workers at walmart, and no idea how or why you would infer that, so I'll officially dispell that notion right now. My beef is high level collusion, bad foreign policy, supporting massive human rights abusers, and the notion that destroying the US economy and security just to make much less than 1% of the population a ton of loot is a good idea. Nuts to that!
As to folks who lost their jobs over the past 20 years due to outsourcing, I sincerely doubt that ALL those people willingly begged their bosses to please close the factory and take it to china, so that they could shop at some store like a walmart while they looked for a new job. For some folks it has happened multiple times so far. Comes a point in time you got to say "ok, enough" It just happened to them. It was sold to us as opening up global trade, "everyone wins". Yet we CONSISTENTLY run trade imbalances, especially with china? Why is that? Give me an exact answer to that if you can, why the trade imbalance? shouldn't it have settled out by now? (My pov,hint: china makes more money, and a very few very wealthy people make more money with things like that), but I'd still like to hear the official approved version of why this imbalance with "free trade" exists to such a huge extent.
25 years ago, the USA was the worlds largest CREDITOR nation, now we are the worlds largest DEBTOR nation. True facts, look 'emup. Exact same time frame the walmartization-the outsourcing- of the economy occurred.
You may think it's a coincidence, but I sure don't. I wrote and predicted way back then what is happening now would occur. You'll have to take my word on that, but it happened. It's OBVIOUS as all get out what happens when you open up the labor market intenationally WITHOUT opening up the housing and whatnot true "cost of living market" internationally and simultaneously.
I don't claim to know every human who works at walmart,but the three I know personally all had much better jobs that evaporated, and took walmart jobs out of *desperation* to have any income at all. I will grant that it's most probable that humans have an incredible variety of reasons for seeking employment most places. I think though it would be fair to assume that most folks working there would rather have 40 hours with better pay and some bennies, like most "middle class" jobs used to be inside the US.
Like I said, I used to be a supporter of walmart and shopped there, back when it was first open and sam walton ran it and it had mostly all USA products. Now that it's switched to being merely the arm of the Peoples Republic of China-retail division*, I can see that it is harmful to our domestic economy, because of the raw hard observable data, and from the perspective that a truly strong and independent nation *must* have a fully integrated vertical economy. It is an incredibly boneheaded move to fund, develop, enrich the one nation that is most likely to be your biggest global competitor (and most probgably military antagonist) once the oil really starts evaporating. It's a strategic blunder of almost unfathomable proportions. That is my opinion, but it is shared by many people of geopolitical and scholary bent. People who are only concerned about short term financial profits, no, they don't share that opinion. Some folks just have different priorities.
****WHY any nation that values freedom allegedly wants to do business with a one party total dictatorship, with NO RIGHTS whatsoever for it's people,and who have verifiably murdered millions of their own peoples is beyond me. In ww2 we fought against such a system, then we had a massive and expensive cold war against a similar system, but now, an extremly similar situation and nation, differing only in language, ethnicity and gross physical size becomes "most favored nation" trading partner with every big "american" businessman
If you live in Podunk, USA, you probably don't have a choice. This is because Wal-Mart will artificially lower their prices to force out any competitors, once they've wiped everybody out, they raise 'em again. There's an excellent program on PBS recently, see it if you get a chance.
Pay a higher price at your local store on main street, and suport their higher cost structure (buying american manufactured goods, higher wages and benefits for employees, lost productivity due to unionized labor force, etc.)
True, workers in Safeway make $18/hr vs $8/hr for WM. But it's not just that. The PBS show gave some interesting insight into how Wal-Mart works. They get communities to give them huge tax incentives by showing how much sales revenue and jobs they will "generate". What the small towns don't realize is Wal-Mart doesn't "magically" create any more revenue, it just cannibalizes the other stores, so that in fact, total revenue goes down, especially if Wal-Mart headquarters decides they don't need the store anymore, after 10 years or so and closes it. Further, the bulk of the money goes elsewhere, out of the community, back to Bentonville.
Now back to the original point about insurance and pay. It actually turns out worse for the towns, that still have to provide care for their now non-insured population of workers. So they are basically subsidizing Wal-Mart in this way, not just in the tax benefits.
Wal-mart is simply supplying what the american consumer wants. this is not evil, this is meeting demand.
That's what you would think. But now you see it's just another tax loophole essentially, just as the mall sprawl was partially because real estate tax benefits, i.e. I invest my millions in a mall, and get a great ROI, regardless of whether the mall does well or not (see excellent New Yorker article about the history of Malls in the U.S.). Blame it on the accountants.
Let's just say that I may or may not work in a retail IT shop as well. I'll tell you why they don't want to outsource as it will be the same reality in every IT production shop where the business is very competitive and dollars are super important.
.com bust the IT industry has shrank and technical decisions in IT have been left to people who only know how to cut costs without maintaining integrity of work. If compliancy works and we finally might find people accountible for decisions like "Well can you change these dollar figures for a couple of days to make our sales look better?" You all know the kinds of requests I'm talking about. Someone wants to bypass every concivable business rule just once because it's a special situation. It's brutal. Oh and always there's a manager who will think that client is right. Too.
Most businesses like retail don't want to wait for work to get done. Fuck (first time I ever swore on a bulletin board, forgive me) delivering effective solutions, deliver efficeincy. Ok, let's think about this. You have an efficient process that is not effective... you just have crappy system no one trusts. The next thing you know your clients want report after report so they can manually pour through and determine if the IT process is correct. Oh and of course in the end, strategic or operational decision making will be based on someone's uneducated gut instinct. Which makes you wonder why you built the stupid system in the first place. This is reality. It happens where I work, it happens all over it really is bullshit. In the end everyone wants a piece of the good old capital budget so they can capitalize on some operational costs so the books look good.
I don't know how many of you stay read about Sarbanes Oxley and the whole compliancy thing but things may finally change in IT. Ever since the stupide
Ok, enough ranting for a post that won't get read.
Oops, how did this get here?
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