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Helping IT Save Money ... and Jobs?
An anonymous reader asks: "I work in a small, overworked and understaffed IT department at a profitable business. We recently got the news that we needed to cut costs. While every penny counts, simply turning off the computers at night and saving pennies on processor cycles isn't exactly a noticeable savings. I'm curious what measures other Slashdot readers have taken to save money within their IT departments."
I introduced a new way of thinking in my company. Let's automate more. We don't need grunt programmer's writing easily templatable code. We need smarter senior programmers writing templates.
We don't need to have senior management people writing emails every day reminding us to fill in our timesheets on time. We need one script to send out the alert. And we don't need manually maintained spreadsheet tracking hours and contract rates. It's error-prone, time consuming, and can be better performed by a database.
Anything I see people doing repetitively, I look to automate. After all, isn't a computer nothing but an automaton doing the same thing over and over again?
I've found Python to be perfect for automating a lot of my more mundane tasks. I keep looking for that higher level of abstraction.
The problem is the GUI (*cough cough* Windows *cough cough*) where people can't seem to get around clicking. They can't seem to understand that anything they click on can be written in a script instead.
Hey, but that's just me. If I were a business owner, I'd look to get significantly more from my employees by hiring a really smart guy to automate more work.
If someone automates himself out of a job, you bet your ass I'd find him 10 more jobs to automate himself out of. That guy is worth his weight in gold.
A lot of companies are on a permanent cost-cutting binge simply because it helps upper management look good with investors. Now, it's often true that these policies get started when a company's wasting money. But they will often continue long after the waste has been dealt with, or even when there was no provable waste to begin with. It's just another example of how corporate policy is set by numbers dweebs, you justify their jobs by the fallacy that every reduction in cost is an increase in profits. It does work because (a) you do have to spend money to make money and (b) as often as not, the apparent cost reduction exists only because of some accounting silliness.
A couple years ago, I had a workstation on my desk that wasn't quite up to what I was asking it to do. A lot of my time (and thus the company's money) was being wasted while I waited for the system to stop thrashing. The standard solution is to request a new workstation. But I thought that was just a little too much to spend. (I'd like to say I wanted to help control costs. But the truth is that I'm fundamentally a tightwad, even when it's not my money being spent.) Instead, I decided to request a RAM and disk drive upgrade which I calculated would make the system much more usable. Here's how it went:
- I put in a request for the purchase. It's only about $300, but as a cost control measure, even $300 purchases have to approved at the VP level. I wait.
- Weeks pass. I threaten to buy the hardware with my own money. For some reason, this threat, though often employed, is usually effective, and I'm told that approval is emmient.
- The purchase is approved. But then my boss tells me that I'm in violation of a new cost control measure, because my workstation has been amortized and now makes the numbers look bad, because of IT costs. I agree to withdraw my previous request and put in a request for a new workstation.
- Weeks pass. A date is set for the replacement of my workstation. But then upper management decides it doesn't like our numbers (we're solidly in the black, but costs are too high. So they impose a spending freeze. No workstation, no RAM upgrade.
- Weeks pass. Freeze continues.
- This goes only for something like six months. Finally, another issue causes me to leave the company.
Is the company making every penny count? No, they're actually wasting money by working inefficiently. They wasted a lot of my time, then tried to buy a workstation I didn't need. But the numbers look good.As you no doubt know, your expenses in a system - be it software or hardware - are not only the initial purchase, but also its upkeep, both in terms of ongoing direct costs (upgrade fees, purchase of parts or media), but in time. Every hour you spend working on something is an hour the employer had to pay for you to be maintaining something existing instead of making something better. Employers like to see progress. They're much more willing to pay when they see you're making progress.
So, this means you need to do two things:
1) Reduce the amount of time you spend on maintenance.
2) Document everything you do.
So, let's look at these a little more closely.
Reducing time spent on maintenance
Examine your obvious unnecessary expenses and see how you can eliminate them.
Having problems with viruses and spyware, or spending time on antivirus and anti-spyware software? Replace IE with Firefox and replace Outlook with... well, anything you like, really. That'll prevent a lot of viruses right away, and that's an enormous savings. It cost my organization $45,000 in staff time every single time a new Windows virus hit the net, and that's AFTER installation of antivirus software. The antivirus software never seemed able to keep up. Also, start replacing simple desktop stations with Mac Minis. MacOS X doesn't get viruses or spyware. I'm not saying you should take perfectly good stations out of service to replace them, but as you replace older systems with new ones, start putting macs in instead of new Windows boxes.
Macs also tend to stay current several years longer than Windows boxes. So, you could amortize the purchase cost over an extra year, or perhaps even two, and save money on desktop machines that way.
Wasting time setting up software on desktops, or maintaining the software on desktops that were already rolled out? Get a Ghost server so you can just ghost the machines. If someone's software is malfunctioning, don't go muck with their system in person, just ghost their system remotely and move on to the next task.
Lots of your time sucked up by idiot users on repetitive problems? Spend a little time writing a how-to white paper, and when they call to ask that same old question, get the person doing triage on incoming support calls to just give them the white paper so they don't have to bother a tech. The faster you get that person off the phone or out the door, the less dollar value your employer spent on your time dealing with them.
Spending time administrating servers? Reduce the number of servers. A smaller number of larger (expensive) servers, well backed-up and with substantial redundancy, is much cheaper to maintain than a large number of smaller (cheap) servers, because you only have to do each maintenance task once for one large server instead of umpteen times for umpteen little servers. I've actually seen organizations that literally had more servers than employees, and they couldn't figure out why they were spending so much on IT. Yeesh!
Problems with viruses and security on servers? Servers going down from time to time? Replace your Windows servers with Apple XServes. They're fast and easy to configure, can integrate into your existing LDAP login environment, can support both Windows and Macintosh clients (your users never have to know), and can easily be set up for RAID and redundancy. Apple also has superb offerings for on-site maintenance agreements.
Documenting all work
Employers often think they can get away with making you cut a person in IT because they don't understand what IT does, so in their mind IT doesn't actually do anything. You need to show them how much you really do. This means very anal-retentively documenting EVERY action of EVERY staff member, and indexing it to the customer as well.
I mean, if the phone rings, there should be a record in the computer of who called and who they talked to and for how long and about what. Got a stupid user who requires constant hand-holding? S
We saved a crapload of money by not renewing our support with Cyberguard. I always disliked their firewalls, and the one we had was expensive to maintain. All we basically used it for was NAT to the Internet- a previous CTO had lofty dreams that included some hypercomplex firewalling. Obviously those dreams never made it near reality. So we had this $20,000 NAT that we could have gone to Best Buy and picked something up for like $50. I talked the current CTO into letting the support slip on the Cyberguard, and the next time it broke (did so regularly) I'd install Smoothwall or just a vanilla install of RedHat and let IPTables sort everything out. I guess the firewall got wind of that, since it never broke after that. But it saved us a few grand in support costs.
"Having recently repaired a 5 year old computer -- a K6-2/350 running windows 98, there's no damned way you could get any productive work done with that thing. Just browsing the web is horribly slow. God help you if you have to run any real office applications (word, outlook, access, etc.) 2-3 year old (1GHz+ processor speeds) machines might be passable if your company is flat broke, but those machines are costing the company some employee productivity."
Okay, then go get a machine off a two year or three year lease. These can run Windows 2000 *gasp* Windows XP if it's your fancy.
By the way, running a business-normal 350MHz machine puts you squarely into Intel land. I loved the K6/2 line, but that was because for the same money I could buy a 550MHz processor when I could only buy the 350MHz or 400MHz Intel P-II. MHz for MHz the Intels were ahead. My employer has 25,000 PCs on the desktops of users and only around fifteen people to do field work on them across a hundred sites in a metro area. We have machines still out there as slow as 75MHz that are officially off the supported list, but we still support machines down to 300MHz. Take that 300MHz Intel P-II and put 512MB RAM in it and it's capable of doing all required tasks in a reasonable time. I know this because our accounting department is still using them because they're the last PCs we bought in desktop form factor cases, and they don't want towers.
What task using say, Microsoft Office 98 can not be done that can be done using Microsoft Office XP? Don't go to marketing literature to answer it, answer it off of the top of your head. Cop-out answers like "file versions are too new for it" don't count either. I want to know what actual features that real people use didn't yet exist in MS Office 98 that people depend on now in Office XP. If you can't think of any then running that computer from 1998 or 1999 with an OS dating back to when the hardware was reasonably new (NT, 98, 2000, hell even Millennium) properly security patched, updated, or secured behind proper firewalling, and a proper replacement web browser could do everything that the user needs as fast or faster than the user needs it.
I'm writing this on my 700MHz Celeron based laptop with 192MB RAM. I surf the web, check my email, write papers with a word processor, play DVDs with no hardware accelerator, work with spreadsheets, and work with a graphics editor. Yes, I have to be a bit careful with that last one, but it does just work to the point that I haven't really considered a need to buy the newest/latest/greatest other than because 192MB RAM is maxing out what this machine can handle.
My work computer was a 400MHz Celeron for a long time and it still let me use the workorder system (written with Access), use a word processor, a spreadsheet program, email, web browsing, and the like. The only reason that I got a better computer was that they offered us upgrades because we had some parts left over after a project.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
If you go in health care, the reason a lot of doctors and on call staff are carrying pagers instead of phones is because they are more reliable. I have witnessed and been attested to by health care IT who can get zero reception in the middle of a hospital on their T-Mobile/Sprint/Verizon/Cingular phone, yet are able to reliably recieve pages. Plus, the units are cheap, last a long time on a AAA or AA, and are fairly idiot proof.
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Also, on the salary/overtime thing, one thing to give your full time salaried folk who would be losing overtime, give them possibly something else. What we did was if they are call, we gave them paid internet access (a number upgraded from dialup, and also reduced the questions coming to our helpdesk). Those who were not on call then saw an advantage to being in the rotation, which increased the space in between people being on call.
One thing we did when I was working at helpdesk was to work on our "own" projects in the company that supported undocument company needs. As a phone support guy, I had times where I wasn't really doing anything (I'll call that time "slashdot time"). During that time, I'd approach other business units (say, the mailroom because they tend to regard you with awe and humility) and see if any of their processes could be automated through some simple programmatic way. As it turned out, they were hand-parsing outgoing mail addresses for capitalization and formatting errors that were fairly uniform in their imported excel documents. By writing a macro for them to insert into their docs on import, I was able to parse and fix the file in 30 seconds where it had taken them 4 days of 3 people working on it all day. Someone calculated that the company would save something like 280,000 a year in overtime and allow those overworked people some time with their families. If your company recognized this as a gain they could capitalize into your department, you could afford to hire a couple more guys and take some of the work off the dudes who are overworked...or give them bonuses or raises (as happened in my case). A lot of the time, people don't even know they can be helped unless you ask them and by helping out other people, you end up helping yourself....PLUS the mailroom reacted with hyperspeed next time I needed a little something mailed out.
Salaried employees don't get overtime. It's rare (from all the surveys I've seen) for IT staff to be hourly workers -- for this very reason. As an "IT guy" and knowing many more in IT, it's rare for anyone to care that they're working more than 40hr/wk. (spouses, on the other hand, complain a lot.)
/etc/hostname to the company's web address and until I found it completely borked my attempts to set up Samba) and actually left the first time saying he had to "go home and research" how to do what he was hired to do. When he called back a month later saying he found (read: subcontracted) someone with the knowledge, I told them not to bring him back and that I could do it in less time and certainly less money (inevitebly on overtime) since I know exactly what we need.
I can be added to your list of people who get overtime. Yearly I get paid a little less than average salary for my experience level around here, but since I work 50+ hours a week they stay very competitive. I work at a printing company, and I am one of two people that manage the IT operations of the company as well as do typesetting and health care printing. The other guy is IT by education, and I'm a programmer by education, and between the two of us we can handle pretty much everything they throw at us. Well, except that we're slowly getting behind in our work despite the 10+ hours overtime we put in every week. God help us if this trend continues and we need to find a third person with the credentials to do everything we need.
Back on topic, being on the ground floor of a rapidly expanding company, we have the good fortune of basically have an unlimited IT budget. For example, about 2 months ago (before I was hired) they bought a brand new XServe and RAID array just to be a domain controller and do some file and print sharing. To go off on a tangent, they contracted its setup to some momo who broke it horribly (set
We can pay $1500 for a color laser jet printer and after we got it all hooked up (just a few days ago) all our boss says is "wow that looks great hey don't show anyone this they'll want to come in here and start using it". As far as management and finances goes, it's really the most absurd (and the laxest) place I've ever worked.
(Side note: 'Laxest' is a strange word. I would have assumed 'more lax' if I hadn't just looked it up)