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What Would You Demand From Your IT Department?
ZombieLine asks: "The IT department at my company (approximately some 500 people) is showing signs of incompetence, and has been ignoring knowledgeable user input for about a year. Additionally, they haven't been able to sell needed changes to senior management. Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice. We users are staging a revolt to make IT more responsive to users by creating a group from the company divisions and IT to discuss needs and solutions. What would you put in our charter?" What services and responsibilities would you demand out of your IT department?
ZombieMime asks: "The non-IT employees at my company (approximately some 5,000,000,000 people) are showing signs of incompetence, and have been ignoring knowledgeable technology input for about a year. Additionally, they haven't been able to accept needed changes to senior management. Unacceptable computer usage, maxed bandwidth usage, and no common sense have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice. We geeks are staging a revolt to make users more responsable to IT by creating a group from the company divisions to discuss needs and solutions. What would you put in our meeting room to kill as many people as possible?"
Your company may have IT problems if any of the following has happened recently:
There are many more -- these are just a few I've experienced that exclaimed "improved [insert your favorite trait/characteristic here]" and had mostly the opposite and unexpected (to decision makers) results.
(btw, your "500" count is listed after the mention of your company, it's not clear if you're talking about a company of 500 employees or a company for which it's IT segment comprises 500 employees...)
The UK-based ITIL initiative describes in gory detail a collection of best practices that IT can follow to provide better service to their customers. They can do as much or as little of the whole program as they want, and it can even be driven from the outside by the user community if absolutely necessary. Obviously, if there's cooperation it works better, but if they roll their eyes at "another total quality management initiative" (which it's not) you can still use the terminology and methods and eventually drag them into it.
g y_Infrastructure_Library
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technolo
http://www.itil.co.uk/
Outsourcing to someone else?
:-)
Seriously, if you're going to have a department of lazy, inefficient slugs, you might as well have them for cheaper
In addition, the very threat might make your IT department shape up real quick...nothing like the threat of losing your job to light a fire under your butt and get working.
By the way raymondsimms@hotmail.com I'd be careful using fullnames around stuff like that. An IT guy at your company is probably checking the company database right now for names that match that...prepare for the vengeance of an IT Guy.
...in bed
You need to map out your requirements and then formulate them into an SLA, a Service Level Agreement. Then get your management to agree to it and take it to the barganing table. Make it clear that this is what they (the IT department) will be measured and evaluated against. If they can't agree to it, then get them to counterproposal. But, what ever you do, get it in writing in the form of an SLA, with the bosses on board... The particulars about what services and what responses and what responsibilities you want from them are details that go into the SLA. Once you hash out the details, get them locked into that SLA, though...
I have noted that this seems to be happening more often. Our IT department has been downsized and now it is almost impossible to get assistance so we have taken all our servers away from the university and kept them in our Computer Science School. We also contact them simultaneously to when we start fixing the problem and then post to senior managment how long they took after we had fixed the problem ourselves. Unfortunately it has introduced more downsizing as we have been shown to not require them at all. So what should really be done to ensure good service? Showing them to be incompentent doesnt work and neither does doing it yourself... but when you don't then you can't get any work done.
Well, the first thing I might demand would be *competence*... Everything else is gravey.
Sure are a lot of Ask Slashdot's today.
Rupert Murdoch has spoken.
Step 1: Find a Bofh
Step 2: Unleash the bofh into the IT department
Step 3: Rightly cower in fear and reverence of the new effective (and renamed!) Network & Systems department.
What do you consider knowledgeable user input?
In most user communities you see divisions that ignore the entire enterprise and base their knowledgeable input on what will most help them, but maybe dosen't work in the enterprise, or adversely affects other divisions.
This situation fits 90% of input from the users, and makes it hard for an IT department to isolate what is actually valuable input.
I personally think that the whole company revolting against the IT department would make a hilarious "The IT Crowd" episode.
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
I would demand less users.
--
make install -not war
Those are my demands!
"Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice."
I don't know your situation... but maybe more money is needed for people, equipment, etc etc. You can demand all you want, but if you don't pony up the resources... *shrugs* You get what you pay for.
set down what is reasonable in terms of expectations (not more than "x" minutes of downtime during business hours every "y" weeks, scheduled downtime compared to unscheduled downtime. I would have thought that data storage would be part of your record keeping requirements for your Quality management system, just as the system should spell out how you should be filing your correspondence, verifying your work, and all the other mundane bits of Quality in a business
I think that if your IT team have been beaten into submission by a tight-fisted upper management, they may well know that things are not as they should be, but know that no matter how hard they push, upper managemtn wont do anything until it becomes a crisis. More of a sense of resignation, and coping from day to day rather than implementing the best practise they know that they should have
my old office had a server die and take down all the files for a day or so during business hours due to a faulty power supply. no hot swappable power supply on that server. They were continually running out of server space for files (not due to massive mp3 libraries sitting on the server either), which seemed mad to an end user who just wanted to know that things would be able to be saved.
They also had two email gateway servers (i'm not in IT so i may be using jargon incorrectly) and periodically one would fall over, and every other email would fall into a black hole, with no bounceback or indication your email wasn't lost. It got so bad that i would phone people when critical emails were coming through so i could be sure that they were receieved.
the firm I am with right now has a really good internal help desk system which quickly answers user queries, and the system is set up so well that you become oblivious as to the system because you can just get down to doing your work rather than worrying about how stable things are.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
Incompetence? Check.
Ignoring front-line workers? Check.
Stretching resources until savings are overwhlemed by resulting inefficiencies? Check.
Don't complain -- your company sounds like it's ready to go public!
If you're writing a charter (cute!), just be sure to ask for some preferred stock options or a pre-IPO allocation from the underwriter. If you don't know what those are, just ask the IT department, they are clearly up to speed.
Not on tech, of course. More important stuff!
It's a moral imperative for IT workers to masturbate in the server room while perusing freebie porn. What else are they going to do the other seven hours and twenty minutes out of the day?
A smaller company might be able to get away with flailing around in the dark, but as you grow your business needs to become more structured. It's easy for 5 guys to know what the company needs to do and how they fit into the big picture. It's much more difficult for 500 to do so.
A good way to do this is a process wiki. Just get your IT guys to set up a... oh... wait...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Do you own work, or get replaced.
Do I win, Do I win? Huh? Huh?
If not then how about:
Hey, IT person, aren't you like takin this job security a bit to far?
Now do I win? Huh, Do I, Huh?
Ok how about....Give the IT department the money they need to upgrade the hardware and software.
And talke away their free soda's if they don't.
Well? Do I win now?
Hmmm, damn if I do, damned if I don't...
Ah, their I go... I win....
If those at the top have actually noticed a problem, and they know that the IT department is to blame, I can't imagine that you (as users) will have to do anything. I'm pretty sure they will take care of it, though not in a way friendly to the IT staff.
Probably, you'll be looking at a department totally torn down and replaced by something, which may or may not be better. Maybe try to get some input on what that new structure is.
Or possibly just going down there and talking to them face to face?
This is beyond a no-brainer. I actually doubt the authenticity of the story based on how the real world works. Or maybe the poster is really in a 25 person company or something.
Anyway, here is how it works. Your department has IT needs. These needs are written down. The IT department has guaranteed services it provides. These are written down. Your department takes a budget "hit" to pay for an internal IT department. These are the givens.
Now, if IT does not provide services you NEED/REQUIRE (like backup, duh), then you go to the whomever is above both departments (COO, VP of division, president...) and you show the mismatch. This is not a complaint, just a reason why you are increasing your budget next year to get the services you need to succeed.
Of course, you are keeping a log of all incidents that are occurring and a log of down time and a log of costs to you as a result, etc.
Look, business people are not idiots. The 3 previous paragraphs I write above are beyond no-brainers. Why is this stuff so non-obvious to today's geeks??
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
A magic wand.
Of course you could also demand three wishes, and if this is the case might I suggest using your first wish wishing for unlimited wishes.
Get on this quick because trust me, your IT department is planning similar action.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
and that means response while you're trying to get something done, not maybe someday. pager burps on the hour or on milestones with a contact number in case something goes critical suffice IMHO.
and forced reboots in a 24 hour operation must not be pushed out of the dayside's visibility to plague the second and third shifts work. there have to be two or three push-and-boot cycles, or IT deserves horrible fates.
we have had growing issues with getting choked-up servers and processes worked on, partly due to downsizing, partly due to offshoring. with thousands of paying customer stuck outta luck when this happens, it ought to be a primary concern for our operation. it does not seem to be.
that sort of thing ought to be run right up the flagpole to a VP. but you have to have metrics for them to pay any attention, or CEO escalations by multi-million-dollar accounts, or that sort of thing. metrics are safer and cheaper. draw them up with user input so they really mean something to the needs of the business, not just bullet points on a whiteboard next tuesday, and pretty colored dust on the carpet tuesday night.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
You need to come up with a list of exactly what it is you'd like from them. I don't mean a set of demands, either. You have to be reasonable. Beyond that, go out and do their jobs yourselves, hopefully just temporarily.
It's one thing to point out "unacceptable server down time", but that in itself is likely a useless thing to do. What you could suggest, for instance, is possible solutions. If the downtime is caused by the network being run on Windows, suggest a transition to a *nix platform.
If storage is a problem, then go out and contact reps from various vendors to get some quotes. Again, if you think you can do the job better than the current IT department, go ahead and do it. Present your findings to the management. If you are indeed more competent, and can provide economically-feasible alternatives, you'll get what you want, while simultaneously giving a kick in the ass to the IT dept.
And an iPod video for watching important, work-related tutorials.
It sounds like your company has other issues beyond an unresponsive IT department. You indicated that IT has been unable to sell necessary changes to senior management. Are you positive that senior management agrees that changes are needed or that they actually understand the seriousness of the problem? You might find that IT feels that their hands have been tied and have nowhere else to go since senior management isn't helping them.
A group of users making "demands" of the IT department is somewhat inappropriate. Yes, the IT department exists to help users with their work, but their priorities are set by senior management. If you plan to create some kind of IT Steering Committee, I would recommend a few things: (1) Lose the attitude -- all you'll do is put the IT folks on the defensive (and remember, since you're not in their group, you may actually have NO idea what priorities have been laid out for them by senior management); (2) Get the blessing of senior management before you try this; (3) Make sure at least one or two high-level people attend your meetings and buy-in to what you talk about.
Treat the IT folks like human beings. They may have perfectly good reasons for dismissing what you consider reasonable ideas. Perhaps they're seriously understaffed so that great desktop Linux rollout one of your users is convinced is the right idea just doesn't pay off for them, for example.
"Additionally, they haven't been able to sell needed changes to senior management. Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice"
It sounds like your IT department is not properly funded, and/or possibly undermanned.
How many bodies does the IT department consist of? Is it one guy, or twenty? How many computers and other systems do the IT dept handle? It's hard to tell you what to expect with so little info.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I want G5s for everyone, cron jobs for the coffeepot, and backup T1s so that my mp3 collection grows uninterrupted.
Also, please incarcerate the cartoon badgers, replant the aspen, and strap keyloggers to the hedgehogs, 'cause they've begun to warty me. Worry me. Whatever.
--No Backup Systems
--No Storage Space
These sound like budget issues. Do you think that if the IT staff, just tries really hard or is competent that they can just create File Storage and Backup Systems out of thin air.
"but when you go carrying pictures opf Chariman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone, anyhow."
Do you think you workin some kind of democracy? End users, have no budgets and as such, little influence.
Also, all of the issue you describe are operations and not applications-related. Unfortunately, if the PHBs are getting what they want from the apps (reports, closing the books, sales info, etc...), then nobody will give two cents abouyt bad ops.
The people you need to convince about your issues are executive management in your departments. If you succeed in doing that and enough of them talk to the CEO, there's a good chance that the CIO will be asked to come up with a plan to turn things around. If not, then either you and your compatriots did a poor job of making yoru case, or executive management is happy with the status quo. If that's the case, and you're really fed up with it, your only recourse may be to look for a new job.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I AM the IT department, you insensitive clod!
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Extra cup-holders for all desktops!
Completely centralized IT should die a paintful death. I'm not sure where this concept of having to centralize all IT functions... but it seems totally idiotic to me.
If I manage a group of 40 people, I should be able to hire an IT person to service my 40 people. Their salary should come out of my budget. My IT person should have to adhere to corporate architectural guidelines. But this IT person should report to me and be accountable to me.
Internal corporate IT SLAs are a joke. If an SLA is violated, it turns into nothing but a moronic yelling match complete with finger-pointing, et cetera. Meanwhile... the end-user still suffers.
Down with centralied IT, I say. Put IT staff inside of each business function. Make them accountable to that business group/function... where it belongs.
users are always demanding most storage to store their MP3's and vacation pictures. And they want new servers, but their departments aren't willing to pay for it. If you want something, talk to your own department management and have them pay for your projects
If things have degraded to the point you describe, I suspect you have incompetent management, both in the business divisions and IT. If neither management group is in sufficient touch with their organizations to see these problems, then they are likely the "root cause". They are the problem you need to "fix".
Anyone who works there knows, this article sounds a lot like @yahoo.com
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
100% Uptime for Backup Systems.
97%+ Server uptime during working hours.
Sufficent Storage, and procedures in place to keep it stuctured in an acceptable manner.
90%+ of helpdesk calls resolved that day
Upgrades to core network and organisational wide systems when required.
Any manager who manages to neglect the signs of sure disaster needs to be fired.
Sounds harsh but managers don't get payed their cut for "dangerous" work conditions.
At my company, we have decentralized IT to a large extent such that each group has the resources they need.
This kind of organizational structure has worked out quite well. For example when our DBAs were in a centralized group, the DBs were often abused, and the DBAs didn't get much sleep. Now that the DBAs are in each group that uses the DBs, they can more effectively educate the users and keep things under better control.
Additionally, software engineers now work more closely with the business stake holders, and there's more effective communication: the engineers better understand what the business folks want, and the business folks better understand why what they want is not always easy to deliver.
At one company I worked for, upper level managment (bypassing everybody behind the scenes) got into a very expensive long term IT outsourcing contract with EDS that required them to take over all IT opperations. (kickbacks anyone?)
Anyhow, what happened was that once EDS was locked in, they went off and hired a bunch of hamburger flippers and called them "Senor IT insert_speciality_here". While the existing IT staff tried their best to train them, the results were rather predictable. I've herd EDS has dome something similar in a bunch of big government contracts too.
I've had friends in Europe claim that EDS are very respectable and professional experts, so perhaps there is something different in the US. But here, I was really unimpressed.
I find it interesting how often non-IT employees are critical of IT. In my experience, it tends to be a user (or users) who have mastered MS Access, created their own cool app and have determined that IT doesn't know it's head from a hole in the ground. We don't need pesky things like documentation, change management, proper design and architecture, data security, etc.--those things just slow us down!
Generally speaking, it seems that the many of the users complaining about IT tend to be part of the root cause of the problems.
Further, it's somewhat annoying how often non-IT people are perfectly willing to explain to IT what is wrong with their organization. However, if the shoe were on the other foot, would it be acceptable for the IT guy to explain why the accounting team doesn't know what they're doing?
Stick to what you know. Do it well. Let the other guy worry about what he knows best.
As a non-technical person with enough engineering friends to get to this site and have an iota of what might be reasonable to expect from IT professionals, here's my list of expectations:
-Security of data: obviously no data is *absolutely* secure if the computer is connected to the net, but enough security that I could feasibly work with medical records and HIPPA-privledged information without constantly worrying about crackers. For those of you who don't know what HIPPA is, imagine a very protective law about patient confidentiality that can result in serious jail time if it is violated.
-Continual access (within reason): If there are natural disasters, power outages, or personal emergencies, then certainly one can't reasonably expect 24-hr access. At almost any other time, however, I'd like to be able to turn a computer on at the workplace and not worry about downtime or have to call someone to fix the system (as my colleagues and I do now).
-Work ethic: Nothing pisses me off more than lazy people, especially those who try to use technobabble to hide incompetence. If there is work to be done, then I'd like to dial up the local expert/employee and know that the problem will be fixed *quickly* and efficiently. Certainly there will be problems that require more time than others and nothing runs smoothly all the time, but no one should have to brook crap from employees who pad schedules. If there are problems, say so and at least *try* to explain them, don't go into geekspeak/technical language in hopes that I don't understand and give up and let them go back to (insert game here).
-Keeping me informed of new tech without trying to be a salesman: Not every new upgrade is worth getting and keeping up with the Joneses can be prohibitively expensive. Sure, new tech is very cool and I'd like a wireless device to use around my office to tie labs/patient data together, but that doesn't mean it's worth constantly annoying the boss for tech upgrades
-Honesty: Don't overcharge me or bend/stretch/break the truth with me. Medical professionals *seem* to be a prime target for fleecing among computer folks and I've heard horror stories about people paying several times market rate for upgrade and basic tech services. If you work for me, please be honest about all systems or equipment. If I've made a poor decision and there's new data, say so. If there's a better program/hardware setup out there and I'm not familiar with it or am being blindsided by the saleswoman, make mention of it. I don't have the time or patience to micromanage, if your job is technical material than I rely on your expertise and expect to be able to trust you and your decisions.
That shouldn't be too much to ask and is what I will expect of any technical employees I'd hire once I graduate and get a practice up and running a few years from now.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
I do know what my only option is but its still sad the ceo can't see the value of IT, he only looks at it in terms of cost burden.
Your company may be totally average if those things happened to you. Pensions? Bonuses? Health Insurance? I think you're living in the 1980's. What you're describing is completely normal these days. I don't think that it is indicative of anything at all, actually.
I don't respond to AC's.
There seems to be more people out there who know a lot about technology but don't know jack about running a business. There is less people out there - who can convince the management (and rightly so) that spending $$$ pays off in the long run. Can you put a $$$ on the missing files because you didn't have a the proper backup strategy in place ? down time of the servers and the amounts of people who are sitting around and looking at the ceiling because their email and phone system are not working ? $$$ it would cost to recreate the work of a team which spent 3 months on it ? ) People in a company like that - cannot just create a "Committee" to see that changes happen - it just doesn't work - policies like that need to come down from the top. It only shows that either the people who are the heads of such departments are not speaking the right language to the top or are just plain LAZY (Incompetent, inefficient ...etc)- or the top (lower top) is refusing to listen - because they want to look like they are doing a good job by keeping the costs down - I've seen both. In either case - you need to start from the bottom and work your way up. Approach the IT Manager, and present him with your findings, ask him to take it up - if no result - take it a step over him - As a last resort approach your CTO/CIO or (CEO if you have to) with realistic numbers on the amounts of time lost due to server outages - multiply it by the number of employees affected and then by their hourly wage - $$ starts to add up...especially if you have ridiculous downtime rates... But I bet you - somewhere along your trip UP someone will start to listen. But get the numbers first...and get some "weight" behind you - get managers and directors of other departments to back you up on this...Even have them present this UP to the VP's.. etc.
I actually work for a public school. I would like to see adoption of F/OSS software (wouldn't we all?) OR adoption of commerical solutions that don't break.
I can't even begin to list the number of new IBM p4s w/ win2k on them here at my school that simply don't work because ??? (although kids can do some damage to anything, simple use should not render a machine inoperable due to software weaknesses).
I'd like more bandwidth too. I'd like better training of school staff so they can in turn teach the kids. Typing sklls would be nice too.
Being able to play WoW during planning would be nice too...
[http://it-tastes-so-good.blogspot.com] Are you hungry?
LART conservation has drastically reduced the effectiveness of my comany's IT staff. I demand more LARTs!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
This person sounds just like the person where I work where when an internal app crashes, she fires off 10 angry e-mails, won't follow steps to troubleshoot it with repeated "I already did that" protestations, Then e-mails back with "Bob the magnificent fixed it".
It wasn't the app, it was her freaking customized browser settings.
But of course, it's the IT's fault. Because like, She really isn't a corporate suckup bimbo who maintains her job not by competance, but by gossip, intrigue, and florishes of Drama Queen explosions..
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
First, I think you have to read a little booklet by Dale Carnegie: "How to make friends and influence people".
Making demands and staging revolts is only going to get *you* fired. It won't resolve any of the technical problems.
Oh well, what the hell...
Answers:
- Put senior management on the same file server and the downtrodden masses
- Put senior management on the same switch as the masses
- Put senior management on the same proxy server as the masses
When senior management feels the pain, they're likely to release the thumbscrews if they can. If they still don't respond, then you've identified your bottleneck.-B
The other thing to demand would be to allow me attach my [K]ubuntu desktop onto the company network, and use it instead of what is currently available.
It's simple. Lazy people are in charge. The whole committee/suggestion bullshit will do nothing, because in the end lazy people will still be in charge. One thing I've found is that no amount of processes will make up for someone who doesn't want to work.
Gather your allies and information. Details about what is wrong, why it's bad for the company, and how to fix it. Demand an audience with whoever is the highest person in the company you can meet with, and lay it all out. To be brutally honest, someone needs to be fired over this. Make this suggestion. Don't necessarily pick who, but make it clear that the people running IT aren't getting the job done. People outside the IT department shouldn't have to draft the job requirements of the IT department. If they know what they're doing, they'll know what to do.
If you can't get upper management to take action, then either suck it up and deal with it, or leave.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Some more information about our company. We are a company that has gone from 3 employees to 500 total in about 30 years. The current president founded the company, does not understand technology, same with most vice-presidents around him. The divisions in the company are run pretty much like separate companies, but IT comes out of every budget.
The CIO attempts to fix by bringing current problems by e.g. we're running at 95% of network storage, and we don't have backup email server if the power goes out (twice last month) to the board meeting. The vice-presidents who don't understand the technology or the implications say no to the cost without understanding the impact.
Me and other users would like to coordinate with IT so that before they go to the president and ask for money that they come through us so they can get the support from the us as well. But the other issue that we have is that they will roll out "upgrades" without coordinating first.
CIO - We're going to Office 2003, here is the upgrade schedule, it's been blessed by the President
US - We have customers that require Access 2000, and converting them back and forth is a good way to crash them
CIO - We're locking down the computers effective today so you can't install anything.
US - We create executables for distribution, we can't test on our machines.
Granted these problems can be worked out, but its better to do it in advance. How would you create the hooks so the IT staff is responsible to user requests, but still remains the clearinghouse for technology?
BTW - None of yagu's potential problems are here, no layoffs, bene's are great, and most people are generally happy. Senior IT management isn't that technical, but that's for another day.
I've been through this before, several times.
expect grossly inflated estimates for work items, accompanied by demands for increases in IT staff and budget
expect negoitated work items to be put aside for other more 'critical' needs and delayed indefinately
expect to need several passes to justify what needs to be done, as IT declares them imposible. the 'security' flag will be thrown at every step
you have entered the realm of company politics
...is to determine WHY the IT Team is having issues. It may not be the rank-and-file techies that support you, or even the Sys Amdins that handle the network, but something else higher up in the food chain, or even external to IT (i.e. - budget) that is causing the issue.
It is far more useful to have an ally in any person or group, than to make an enemy of them.
We had an issue at a past job where we got a new manager who happened to work from a remote site. He laid down mandates that were ludicrous in nature, including to stop stocking extra hardware. Mouse broke? Put in a P.O. for a new one, get it approved, order it, and wait for it to come in. User can't work? Too bad, not enough money in the new budget to have all that extra stuff we don't actively use, and wasted storage space. The kicker is that he also blocked complaints about this pratice, from both within IT and from the users, from getting above his level. It took an end-run around him from frustrated users and IT staff to get a VP to notice. (Why did he do this? Our guess was to save an assload of cash, look good, then pass the problems on to his sucessor when he got promoted.)
Before you say "The IT Team is not serving our needs," make an effort to find out why there is an issue. Ask one of the techs what's up. I'm sure you would not want someone saying your entire department (including you) was performing unsatisfactorily due to reasons you have no control over.
since I work there, I would demand a raise! $6.50 an hour just isn't enough....
I love NetHack.
The PC was created exactly to get out from under the ossified IT Priesthood, and return power to the users. The wheel has now turned full circle, and todays IT regularly shows complete contempt for the users in a company who actually do work that brings in revenue. In this way they are very similar to government employees, except that at the moment most of them do not have a union.
The problem today is that there is no new "personal computer" on the horizon that will let workers just do their work without the "We Are Gods" attitude that many in IT bring to work with them every day.
I look forward to the flambe mod that I will recieve from those unable to accept any criticism of the Ivory Tower. The rest of the posts in this thread modded +5 which drip condescention at the "stoopid" users will prove me right. IT thinks that it exists to serve itself. The fact is that few companies sell IT as a final product. In most companies IT is just like the guy who services the milling center and turning center - important, but not in charge.
I have seen this scenario in many companies before and it is usually budget issues. Don't beat up on the IT staff they are probably doing all they can with the resources they have and if you annoy them too much they are not going to be too keen to help you any further than they absolutely have to.
I agree SLA's are worthless, for a variety of reasons.
However, I disagree that centralized IT should die. I have spent much time in my professional career undoing the nightmare of islands of systems where information is stored in multiple places (and only one is current), the same data value is stored differently (different customer numbers, item numbers, etc.). Attempting to reconcile differences in procedures, bring info together after the fact, etc. etc. is time consuming and error prone.
I can see having dedicated resources as long as the enterprise architecture is coordinated and reasonably centralized.
What do "401k", "pension benefits", and "medical coverges" mean?
First of all, accountability; having a person take on a task and be responsible for it, seeing it through and doing what they say they'll do. If they can't do it for whatever reason, present those reasons to you end users. Visability; get out of the office, walk around and talk to the end users, what kind of day to day problems are they having? Allot of times their frustration can be allieviated just by helping them figure out something minor; something they likely wouldn't have sub'd a ticket for. Plus when they need help it's easier to help ppl you have a repore with. Anyway, worked for me when I was a tech some 9 yrs back.
fak3r.com
...a f***** day off every once in a while. :-)
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I'd just round up some old boxes and lash them together with a bunch of open-source software and set up stuff the way I want. Don't waste time negotiating SLAs and buy-in. Consensus sucks.
Polite employees who don't talk down to the users in that "OH, you should understand this, it's so stupidly simple" tone. You don't understand Marketing, I don't understand Computers (Although I do probably more than they do)
More than once have I had to mediate a dispute between the IT department and the rest of the office because of their lack of communication and personal skills. An IT Ombudsman might not necessarily be a bad idea, someone who can talk tech but also talk business; but also just talk normal. The IT department works for the business, not the other way around.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
Statement #1 - They haven't been able to sell needed changes to senior management
Statement #2 - Those on top are starting to notice
When performance and availability reach the horrible levels that you describe, even a child could articulate the changes needed to upper management. So which is it? Is upper management taking notice or just ignoring your IT staff?
A quad-opteron box. /. reading sessions.
I real need it to optimize my
I work at a small company that, unfortunately, depends greatly on our IT dept. For years, they have been the biggest anal orifices around, mainly because the guy that was CIO was a bad-tempered cokehead. He used to be a close friend of the president, but after he poured out his bad temper on too many people, his friend (the prez) fired him. Unfortunately, his attitude infected the entire IT group, and even after getting rid of a large number of his cronies, the rest are still infected with his poisonous attitudes.
About half of these bozos won't even respond to emails. Even after one of the new guys developed an internal management tool (basically an electronic memo board where anyone involved in a topic can post messages seen by everyone involved), they still refuse to use it half the time. They have refused for years to put anything in writing, because they would then have to actually work instead of surf the net and goof around.
Whenever the sales team brings in a new customer that has special data needs that might require them to actually put in a couple of hours' work, the first thing out of their mouths is "we should charge them for development!" NO YOU BLOCKHEADS!!! IT'S CALLED WORK--IT'S WHAT YOU DO FROM 8 TO 5!!!
The main thing that IT needs to realize is that the rest of the company is their customer. They rarely do, because they're so insulated from the real world. They need to realize that they wouldn't have their hefty paychecks if no sales were brought in.
If I had my way, I would love to start outsourcing some of our IT functions. Maybe to India. Then, if we needed something special, we could ask our guys first, and when they whined like the spoiled children they are, we could say, "never mind, we'll get the guys in India to do it." Eventually, either they would provide better service to the rest of the company, or the outsourcers would. Problem solved.
Basically, an internal IT dept full of jerks is a monopoly, and competition provides lower costs and better service.
General Motors is much in the news due to them getting junk bond status and inching towards bankruptcy. Yet recently they "managed" to come up with 15 BILLION dollars to throw at new software and IT, a huge whopping steaming pile of it going to EDS a company they "spun off" before.
Whenever you see really strange things with corporations and money and decisions, something that appears on the surface to not make any sense, think high level board members, their drinking buddies, and corporate jets and trips to places with palm trees, lotsa cheap booze and wimmin.
That's why Ross Perot woulda made a good prez, he for DAMN SURE knows crooked and wasteful when he sees it. heh.
I don't get it? What's management at your company doing abt this? Too busy running the company to bother about internal department conflicts and inefficiencies? Looks like you "should' put your money together and hire a new CTO :p
.. of cos you would have guessed what I do for a living then :)
But seriously, I believe that all employees should be reasonably IT trained and not rely completely on the "IT Department"
"The AK-47. When you absolutely, positively have to kill every single mutha-fucka in the room, accept NO substitutes."
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
More cowbell
-- Mace only makes me hornier.
As I see it, the big problem with most IT departments (including yours) is their lack of accountability as a support organization to the end user. CIOs have grown big and fat on staff increases based on shifting control to their organizations, but when they screw up, there's no penalty. That's particularly true for things done to increase the "efficiency" of the IT department's staff (which is NOT a profit center) at the loss of efficiency for the end user. One of the best examples is locking down a PC so tight that you can't even move files using a USB drive. That's particularly painful for a computer located in a conference room, when everyone brings files to present on these devices, or you want a copy of the other guy's slides.
So, whenever you're unable to get your job done, you should have a charge number against the IT department. Even if it's just a "paper wash", this'll give them some significant measurable motivation for making end-user computing -convenient for the end user-.
That's my $.02.
dave
Your IT staff/computer ratio is around 1:50. I know IT Staff/computer ratio alone doesn't tell the whole story, but it seems very high from my perspective. Ours is around 1:300, and I've met IT monkeys from other places where it is worse.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Daily bathing, changing clothes, some rudimentary social skills.....
http://www.busyweather.com/
What you need to do is replace all of your IT staff with the Microsoft Paper-clip.
Unfortunately, 100:2.5 isn't seen as a terrible ratio of users:support by most executives. If you are truly overburdened (and I'm sure you are), then you need to make your case in terms the CEO can understand. Dollars. First, show that your team is 100% utilized (or very close thereto). Then lay out what the investment of another staffer would return. Remember, that you need to look at burdened cost for the new person, which is at least 1.5x annual salary. If you can show a plan that would return significantly over that (think 4-5x in 12 mos), then the CEO would be a fool not to make the investment. Who wouldn't spend $150 to make $400-500? Try to make your case with hard costs, i.e., things that flow to the bottom line, not hard to measure soft costs, like "improved efficiency".
Good luck!
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I am the IT Director for a smaller organization, about 300 total employees. Every little complaint you have there is something that I have seen a hundred times over regardless of the firm. Let me explain where you have started to go wrong here. First mistake, assuming incompetence, instead of researching the root cause of any service problems. It is easy to just say, "Well Bob over there is an idiot". When maybe Bob is following protocol that he didn't establish. Or that the IT resources are stretched to the breaking point.
Ignoring knowledgeable user input, ok that I have a huge problem with. Everyone in the IT community, programmers come to mind the most often, seem to think because they work in front of a pc all day that they know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to managing a network or a server farm. Sorry but that it the absolute truth. I have interviewed countless people for jobs in IT, well over 50% of them programmers trying to get Sysadmin positions. When asked specific questions about administrative tasks the answer is almost always the same. I know something about it but I have never implimented anything like that. Everyone wants to be an expert, trust me you aren't.
Unable to sell needed changes. Have you considered that management and accounting do not see the corporate finances in the same way that you do? Some changes are simply impossible to sell. Unless your corporate focus is in technology some of the upgrades needed to improve infrastructure will always be lacking. The exceptions tend to be when the powers that be are directly inconvenienced. But the IT Dept probably caters to them quicker than any other department so they do not see the need. They pick up the phone and Bob is right there, where as you submit a trouble ticket and you are lucky to see someone in 48 hours.
Starting a revolt? Wow you guys are arrogant. Plain and simple. What makes people think that they know another departments job better than they do? Much less "demanding" services. Just astounding. You efforts would be much better spent working with the IT department to figure out ways to get management to invest in more staff, more training and equipment upgrades. That benefits everyone, and doesn't just stroke your self-important little ego.
Management promoted people who nodded and said the right things; being flaming yes-men themselves, they had no idea how to select for quality of management.Also, they tended to pick leaders from the "business analyst" people, without critical thinking as to how good those people were; the tech types busted their butts to produce good results, and the donut leading the team gets promoted.
IT staff themselves were pretty competent, and (initially) hard working. Details like cutting the training budget - our supervisor at the time actually said, on a conference call, in front of us "We don't need to train anyone because we'll hire consultants to do all this work.". Critical decisions were moved to the head office, who forgot about branch plants' needs. Attrition at the plants was an opportunity to hire staff at the head office. Additional personnel who were contractors appeared - at the head office.
The opportunity to learn and work with new technology was given to outside contractors - who predictably, dissappeared with the knowledge, leaving inexperienced untrained local staff to pick up the mess.
Meanwhile, people who were hoping to learn and work with new technology find themselves traffic cops directing contractors who get to do the actual work with new tech (like .NET, Win2003 Server, XML, etc.). Without hands on experience, they feel their talents atrophying while the contractors get the real experience. And... the CIO talks of outsourcing the entire programming tasks to India...
After a time, apathy and irritation set in, and people just did enough to get by...
Your company sounds to be going in the same direction as my own employeer went ~5 years ago. 'Corporate oversite' is not a very good solution.
Basically what happened with us... we had an under funded IT department of 6 people for several thousand in the company. Backups and the like were uncommon. A quartely meeting was conviened where all the regional (basically different areas of engineering) managers would meet with IT and decide what IT's priorities would be and decide what resources would be allocated.
Immediate results:
IT got better funding. More staff for watching servers.
Bloat. After the original problems where fixed, the quartely meeting became a wish list. The IT department gained more and more control of individual users.
Now, this may not be a big issue in your company. In mine, 80%+ of the employees are engineers who travel a lot. We need control of their own computers. From IT's perspective, it was cheaper to lock down everyones computer rather than the few bad actors.
From a company performance standpoint, this caused issues with clients. When you end up in some random office at a client's building and need to print a new document you can't install drivers. We couldn't install test equipment software without 'dialing home' so IT can VPN in. We couldn't cleanup our own registry when an install/uninstall goes bad without dialing in again. Overall, if cost us time and lost us clients.
Currently the control is now swinging back from IT to the users. If you work for a technology company I STRONGLY suggest that you spell out IT's responsibilities AND IT's limits. My vague suggestions follow.
Responsibilities:
1) e-mail
2) webroot servers
3) local network servers
4) inter-office network (if you have one)
5) Helpdesk functions.
'Limits': (you probably want to call this requirements)
1) employees in group 'X' must have admin access over their machines, subject to periodic software audits
2) office managers remain responsible for telephones and other items not directly computer related (IT should not control PA/lights/etc)
3) office managers (or equivalent) dictate (and pay for) equipment to be purchased
4) Managers dicate/pay for software to be installed. IT is still responsible for company licenses.
5) An individual in each office must have admin rights for people not in group 'X'. This employee need not be (and need not be) IT related.
95% of user IT issues can be handled easily (and often more quickly) within a group of technically competent people. The IT department should provide support for the other 5% (which includes maintaining servers and the like).
"The IT department at my company (approximately some 500 people) is showing signs of incompetence"
The IT department at my company is incompetent. But I work for the goverment, so I guess that's to be expected.
Accountability.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice.
Do you work for blizzard on WOW?
This sounds like such a hopelessly bureaucratic response that my guess is that you are doomed to failure from the start. You want to discuss a f*ing charter ? How about a bussines person comes up with the IT related three things that are in the way of driving top line revenue growth. What does it cost to implement. PV positive? then "Hey IT... Do it. Do it." Rinse, repeat.
IT works for and serves the company, not the other way around.
macs. mac support. for them not to roll their eyes when i ask for a mac. for them to get that it is UNIX. UNIX! this is not bill gates trying to jerry-rig a replacement to DOS. it's g.d. unix!
and some hot chicks to come fix my computer. that sort of thing.
go get it
Fair enough. Gotta love post-call...
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
Not trying to sound like a troll...but please.
/. for advice on how to "take over" your companies IT dept.
If you are asking
You have no place in taking over your companies IT dept.
lets pull this little ditty to bits...
/. because of server downtime, they're running around like headless chooks trying to patch up an obviously ailing (underfunded?) system.
"The IT department at my company (approximately some 500 people) is showing signs of incompetence, and has been ignoring knowledgeable user input for about a year.
Hmmm...well lets get to that 'incompetence' thing a little later.
But as for "ignoring knowledgeable user input for about a year"...lemme see, you've been harping on about something for a year to the IT department?
Well, what is "knowledgeable user input" anyway? "At my old company we used to..." or "my friend who is an IT genius says..."
Seriously, if you have a suggestion, detail it and submit it to the IT manager and cc it to your manager.
Berating some poor schmuck when he comes to help you format a word doc is not an effective change management strategy!
Additionally, they haven't been able to sell needed changes to senior management.
LMAO...but somehow you and your band of IT-vigilantes is going to change the world? Good luck!
So IT ARE going to management with suggestions, but are getting knocked back?
So somehow you equate managements lack of willingness to resource your IT department to be a failure of the IT guys lack of bargaining skills...not a boneheaded lack of foresight on behalf of your management team?
Wow...tough crowd...
Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice.
GOOD! Now "those on top" need to find the money they should spent on protecting their investment in the first place.
You do realise that IT guys dont just down servers for no reason, dont you? You probably do...or you think they do it on purpose just to piss you off.
And while you're sitting around moaning about how long it's taking for you to be able to get back onto
From your comments so far, I'm assuming you are not one of the "knowledgeable user's" you mentioned before.
We users are staging a revolt to make IT more responsive to users by creating a group from the company divisions and IT to discuss needs and solutions.
Yeah, you go girl!
Nice of you to harass IT some more. After all they have nothing better to do than sit in on your moanapolooza.
Why not form your little revolt and march on the guys that will have to OK and pay for your demands...oh wait, lemme guess...'cause if you did you'd get your ass fired!
Face it, you dont want a solution or you would go to the people who can effect change. You want to vent. Well, you have...does that feel better?
What would you put in our charter? What services and responsibilities would you demand out of your IT department?
Well, first up...I'd want suitably qualified and trained professionals in charge of the decision making process.
And as your "knowledgeable user's" are neither...I'd demand that they get trained or STFU.
Then I'd demand that the reasons for management knocking back IT requests be made public.
Im hoping the moment management have to front staff and explain why there will be "no increase in storage" or "no funds for disaster recovery" will be one of those life changing events for you...when you realise IT budgets have to be approved or people (like you) wont get what they want, so that you then take the fight to those with the money and leave your nerds to get on with keeping your sad little network up and running.
If you really want to help your IT department effect a postive change, quit harrasing them and take your fight to the people at the top who are ultimately responsible.
Find the guys that sign's off on the IT budget and ask them why server space hasn't increased to meet demand.
Because the answer is either your IT department is siphoning off $$$ to day-trade with, or there was nothing budgeted to allow for it.
A wise man once said: Whatever you don't understand, must be easy.
What I would suggest is to look at your IT Strategy. SLAs are useful for IT Management as a measure of how things are operating, just as is downtime, percentage usage, and costs of operations. Don't listen to anyone who suggest decentralization. We had some of that at my job. It is a nightmare. Incompatable "Best of Breed" systems and finger-pointing results. Costs rise quickly with decentralization too.
Sit down with your IT management. List out facts. Don't fingerpoint. Just say: we are lossing x amount of cash due to issues with our systems. Have use studies on how you do business. Have predicted growth forecasting on systems load. Have your internal controls (audit) department monitor the disaster recovery plans and get an outside consultant to look at those plans. Get your IT Management to see your issues. Get a data retention policy and remove that data once it is too old.
That said, realise that you might be the cause of the issues. How many years of journal entries do you really need? How much customization do you insist upon to make the systems work with your archaic business processes when you should be changing your business processes to work with the systems? How many times does your senior management hamstring IT's budget and capital improvements? Listen to what your IT Management says and if they have a compelling reason for something; then by God, give it to them.
In God we trust, all others require data.
While it's definitely nice to have a dedicated IT person for a small group of people is that person going to be responsible for ALL of your IT needs or just the desktops and group-specific programs?
Remember that IT means running the file and printer servers, the email, the HR and accounting systems, your web site, your internet connection, your firewall, etc. etc. etc. Don't forget purchasing and provisioning all new desktops and servers. Throw in backups and 24/7/365 coverage and that person will burn out pretty quickly. (Also what do you do when they're on vacation?)
I suppose there has to be some happy medium between everything being handed down from on high and every small group going their own way. What's really needed is a good support group that is responsible for set groups of desktops, an IT consultancy hit-squad that can come in and launch projects, application owners, and the infrastructure maintenance people. Beats me how many people that works out to be.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
This is about the dumbest thing I have heard in a long time. You seriously think that would help? Without central IT who manages the infrastructure? Would each individual department manage a seperate segment? Ummm no... Who decides on security policy, everyone decides for themself? Ummm no... Who manages simple organizational tasks like anti-spam, anti-virus, and e-mail? Would you have a mail server in each department potentialy all running something else? Ummm no... The IT staff should answer to you? Ok for that one I'm just going to call you an arrogant prick. If you have a group of 40 coders what makes you think you are equipped to manage IT infrastructure? What because you read Slashdot? Please...
Instead of trying to "punish" the IT grp is there an attempt to form a steering commitee to "direct" ITs goals and resources?
It sounds like the problem may be the IT grp is being pulled into too many directions, and is failing to KNOW what the priorities of the buisness are.
A steering commitee may help direct the floundering IT department, and be able to set goals and requirements that match the business and customers goals.
Was their BUDGET cut years ago, and never brought back up.
A lot of people I know tend to blame IT staff for lack of space, lack of bandwidth etc. when problem was that IT dept could not afford to purchase equipment to upgrade a service, and they just tend to use all the budget to maintain status quo. Trust me all IT folks out there LOVE to push out new technology, increase storage, better networks, and reduce helpdesk calls. But a lack of staffing and money can put a damper in the best of IT staff in the world.
This is funny. The ussers who cant even figure out how to press a power button (no joke had this happen) think they know more of whats going on then the people who went to school for it really funny. There are more things that go on behind the scenes then people think.
Sounds like you have a bunch of folk with too much time on their hands but here's what you do.
Get your committee together, take all there names and... now this is the important bit. Sack the lot of them for not concentrating on there own jobs and stepping into an area where they don't belong. Take all the salary and benefits savings and re-invest those into the IT department so they can get that SAN and those backup tapes they've been needing for a while. The plus side is when they delete your email accounts and home drives that should free up a little bit of the disc space too.
Everyone's a winner. Problem sorted. Thanks for coming. Where do I collect my prize..
Seriously if they came round and gave you advice on how to sweep out the warehouse you wouldn't be happy would you? I think you will find there will be a vast number of reasons for this and unless you're in senior management there will be absolutely nothing you can do about this. I suggest you leave well alone and hope the IT department senior management don't find out about this.
The curse of IT is that guy who fixes all his extended families PC's and thinks he's gods gift to the IT world and just cant understand why they don't do things his way.
Is to annoy a vindictive sys admin.
I worked for a small place a few years back as their developer/net admin/engineer etc etc. Had a guy lodge a formal complaint that I was unhelpful (he was a serial pest. The only problem with his machine was between the chair and keyboard). It motivated me to notice the amount of time he spent on the internet, for personal, completely non work related use. I felt it was my duty to report this, in accordance with company policy. He was gone shortly after the proxy logs were produced.
And you're right that the cost of *immediate* repair on demand would be high, especially on weekend or holidays, and immediate is not what I'd be looking for. Assuming I went into private practice though, I'd probably try to hire one IT person for that practice's needs. If the practice isn't that large (otherwise more IT people get hired as needed), I'd figure that if the system were down and that got prioritized, that work could at least get *started* right away.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
Sounds great in theory, but I can pretty much guarantee that the centralized IT folks will always look upon your IT guy with distrust (no matter how de-centralized you get, you must always have a centralized staff overseeing the satellite folks and making sure standards are kept). Since this guy is answerable to you and not to IT, it's pretty much a given that he will be asked to compromise corporate policy, bending or breaking the rules from time to time in order to further your own department's agenda.
Usually when an IT department is falling short, you can attribute it to some very common problems. Perhaps the IT department really is incompetent or apathetic. But more commonly, the IT department is just underfunded and as a result demoralized. Using some of your political capital to help the IT team hire to appropriate staffing levels and get the equipment they need will go a lot farther towards your goal of getting decent support. Hiring your own IT guy is a pretty sure fire way to get you blacklisted by the IT guys and create more problems.
This is a story one of my friends told me about alarming incompetency about their IT department.
They are a large cellular mobile operator and he is a senior manager. I'm using Linux for years at home. I have never experienced a viral, spyware, etc. activities in my home computer.
Last December, I introduced the Tomahawk Desktop to my friend and he was fascinated with its features (especially security features) and has emailed to their IT department about Tomahawk Desktop and asked them to evaluate the Tomahawk Desktop to see the feasibility switch at least their laptops to Linux.
Now more than three months gone still they are so much reluctant to write a report on that.
According to my friend they no F idea how viruses operate. They have not even heard the word Pharming before.
We were discussing how narrow minded they are, there is no other world for them other than Microsoft. They have no idea that there is another group of people do the same thing even better and securely at a far more lower cost using tools that they have never heard before.
This criteria for password is fairly secure except for the slight problem - that they're really difficult to remember. The only way I learnt passwords like this was when I had to type it in every 30 minutes - cos that's how often the system I was working on crashed, and at least the IT dept wasn't mean enough to make us learn a new one every six months.
The rate of passwords either written down or programmed into the function keys (anyone else remember Wyse terminals?) was really high. Especially among the bosses.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
It is not the job of the IT department to sell changes to the senior execs (unless you are speaking about infrastructure), it is their job to implement the changes that the business has deemed necessary and have gotten approval (and funding) for.
You mention having "corporate architectural guidelines" that your IT folks would adhere to... but if they're not accountable to corporate, and the person they are accountable to wants a new Blackberry/VPN access/porn hosting/you name it service that's against the guidelines, do you really think they're going to tell their source of funding to sod off?
How much is your company spending on IT? With a centralized structure that's an easy question to answer. When each department is responsible for their own IT funding, it becomes less so. And what level of return are you getting on IT investments? Same thing as above. Okay, now what about resource pooling? Discounts come from bulk purchases, but if every department is running their own ship you'll never achieve the volume needed to achieve those discounts. And 24/7 tech support? You think you're gonna get that out of your department's lone IT guy?
By our nature, IT personnel are independent and generally take poorly to being told what to do by management who are clueless about technical issues. So decentralizing IT appears to be a good solution. It gets those damn suits off your back so you can do your job of supporting users, right? But, if you had a good manager in place to run interference the suits wouldn't be a problem. The only way you can have experienced IT managers in place is to have an organization for them to manage.
Centralized management of IT isn't a panacea but it can increase the visibility of IT costs/benefits, increase company-wide standards compliance and even lower some hardware costs by enabling the pooling of resources. Like everything in life, it's a trade off between flexibility and control. But in the best case, centralized IT will outperform distributed IT in almost every business setting.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I want my IT department to open a port so my vendor can access the software they install. IT says it's too dangerous. I quietly say they're not knowledgeable enough.
I want Information and the Technology to utilize that information. Without
bells and whistles which detract from the job at hand. It would be nice to
have valid data too.
It would be nice to have an IT department with no politics and one that is immune to the whims of management. Long term planning. Not band-aid fixes.
As an IT pro in a fortune 500 company, our IT staff globally is in the 20,000. Here at our regional office exist 800 IT workers. I recently quit and found a job in a medium size firm. The reason why in many IT depts fail in large organizations because there are simply too much politics and incompetant management. At the end of the day my manager wants me to perform ridiculous tasks such as writing documents such as how to turn on a monitor for the users and sell that to the business as good productive work. I've been in the industry for over 10 yrs and have performed difficult tasks such as an Active Directory migration and managed Exchange Servers. In a big company, the IT dept is like the government, they leech the business creates all sort of red tape to cover themselves from doing actual work and waste lots of money and resource on endless meetings. Some meetings are about other meetings and never about who actually does the work. Many times the work is never done and they simply hire consultants to do it. The reason why many IT pros defect from big companies because you simply become dumber and dumber.
And if they can't work as a team, they should be fired and security should escort them from the building. And if security can't work as a team, then they should be fired as well.
I even love saying the word team. You probably think I have a picture of my family on my desk - it's not. It's the A-Team. Bodie, Doyle, Tiger, Jewellery Man. The whole lot of them.
Task Mangler
The outsource service salesmen will definately listen, but whether you get what they promise is another story.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
'nuff said.
I am an IT consultant, and I make my living cleaning up the mess left behind by incompetent IT staff and management.
Many times, an organization starts out small, and the most 'IT savvy' person in the office cobbles together a 'server' and 'network' from some old PCs and some network gear they bought from the office supply store on the corner. I arrive to find a Windows Workgroup (ugh) or poorly implemented Active Directory with a host of replication issues, orphaned objects and broken name resolution. Today I worked on a production network that was running their directory services, print queues and files shares off of a 120 day evaluation copy of Windows server!
There are usually local user accounts, local printers shared off of a workstation, no redundancy, broken or no backups, physical layer problems (bad wiring) and a host of other problems. Quick fixes that were implemented over the course of years are now recurring problems that suck up the majority of the IT staff's time.
These same kinds of problems can plague a large organization, albeit they may present as slightly different symptoms. The cause is always the same: inability of management to see the big picture. This lack of attention to detail starts with management and trickles down.
The way to fix this is to get upper management to recognize that there is a problem. Unfortunately, this often would require somebody to admit that they aren't doing their job. Good luck with that. 90% of the time I find that this type of wholesale cleanup and reengineering only happens during a regime change.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
For some reason, when the core business isn't "tech", the business managers can't grasp the concept of IT. By the same token, the IT folks don't tend to grasp the concept of the non-tech "business". The end result is chaos. Those businesses need a bridge between the business and the tech. This requires a person who understands the core business, understands IT, and has the leadership skills to bridge the gap. Those types are true gems when you find them.
This sounds a lot like the situation I am in, except form the other side. We ran out of network storage (1 year after management was notified that we were running low), we no longer offer backup services (because management will not give money for a backup system that holds anything close to the capacity we need) and we have experienced system/network downtime because we are using equipment that twice over it's lifetime span (you can guess why we don't upgrade, and it's not because we are too incompetent). On top of that we have to deal with users who waste our time thinking we are there personal IT people and bug is with their personal questions.
Maybe the problem is not with your IT staff, maybe it is management. To the users it probably looks like we are incompetent but, we are not, we just are not given the supplies/resources we need. Not to mention we work 60-80 hour weeks with no perks/over-time/bonuses at all.
Many of this is probably because I work for a Dept at a big University, but I'm sure others are in the same situation.
Make sure it is actually the IT staff that is incompetent and not the management who does not respond to their needs. I have made many pleas to management explaining the severity of problems but nothing gets done until the right "top" people complain to management. The day the "correct(top)" user complained about storage I was authorized to buy a new file server/storage, even tough for a year I was telling them we needed to this. Then we were rushed and had downtime.
Maybe you should complain, just make sure you are complaining about the right things. It is very possible that you need a charter for the management about how they need to listen to IT and respond to their needs.
Someone else's or a fake name!
It would be safer for you to use an old box to set up a GNU/Linux server to meet your immediate department's needs than to be caught spending company time writing charters. A change in IT might be a sign of worse things to come. Save your skin by getting your work done while others get mired in the IT morass. Mepis, $400, and 20 minutes of your time will yield you more than a terabyte of SAMBA/SSH server to relieve most of the problems you are talking about. Fix it at home, then stick it under an unused cube.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
- Email access to the local system through something like IMAP or POP, but I'll settle for Lotus Notes in a pinch.
- Network filesystem access for my workstation, either direct or VPN. No remote terminals! My software is needed to do my calculations, and if I can't store the files on "your network", then I'll store them on my hard drive and too bad for you.
- Filesystem access from remote locations (home, other offices). I travel a lot and can't get much done if I'm limited to working in "their" office.
In return, I promise the customer:- To provide a PC with all relevant security patches installed, and virus protection enabled.
- To use Client sanctioned applications where, in my professional opinion, they are capable of performing the tasks. This usually means Microsoft Office and usually means I get in a scrap with the IT guys when Excel is mandated for doing material balance or matrix calculations - both duties it is not suitable for. (Anybody able to explain to an IT dude what a Singular Matrix is and why it is not Invertible, in spite of what Excel does?)
-AD"Additionally, they haven't been able to accept needed changes to senior management. " A bit of a non-sequitur there but assuming you mean "sell needed changes", your statement begs the question of what you have done to help sell those needed changes to senior management. It's not the job of I/T to sell, as much as professionally advise management on the risk-cost trade-off involved in various alternatives. It may be that senior management is perfectly aware of whatever problems you're enduring, and for cash-flow or financial reasons does not see your problems with the same perspective that you do. So the blame must ultimately rest with the senior management and sometimes the ownership of the company - as long as I/T has shown a trail of advising them on what they should do. One of the key problems is that management is typically not aware that entropy will make a given network/ hardware/ software infrastructure fail over time. This failure is not the result of mechanical/electronic parts failure, but growing incompatibilities in hardware-software layers, and hardware and software components as individual system elements are added, upgraded or changed over time. From my experience this is the key problem in maintaining system reliability over a period of time.
Who funds IT? Do you think they've been turning down funding to improve storage and the network? Are they all idiots? Probably not.
Dont make demands of IT, ask how you can help them get their projects done. I'm not talking about working their cases or helping id the bottlenecks, I'm talking about learning more about what their problems are and talking it up with your mangament.
If enough employees start complaining about the situation IT is in and not in IT itself, something might happen. Complaining to management that IT are idiots sounds like bitching because that's all it is. Chances are there is some idiocy in IT but it's probably in it's managment and complaining about the rank and file IT employees is counter productive.
And no I'm not a IT employee but I work closely enough with them and have for enough years to understand they deal with a level of crap unlike anything most other employees understand.
The IT department at my company (approximately some 500 people) is showing signs of incompetence, and has been ignoring knowledgeable user input for about a year.
..and those on top are starting to notice.
I setup a Linksys wireless router at home, which in my mind equates to 5 years networking experience, but those bastards on the Help Desk didn't take me seriously when I told them they should enable WEP on the network.
Additionally, they haven't been able to sell needed changes to senior management.
Why the hell are we still running Windows 2000 around here? We should be standardized on XP, and power users such as myself should be allowed to install the latest Vista builds to help work out the bugs!
Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems have hit the bottom line...
They told me I had 18 gig of email and needed to delete some, then later on when I realized that I hadn't saved that chimp smelling his finger and passing out video they wouldn't recover it for me.
My boss liked that video too.
We users are staging a revolt to make IT more responsive to users by creating a group from the company divisions and IT to discuss needs and solutions.
We can avoid work for 3 hours every other week by doing nothing more than scheduling a meeting, getting together and bitching about whatever IT did to piss us off that week, and throwing it all together into a Word document along with several indiscriminate, pointless policy change suggestions. Not since the demise of the Wellness Committee have we had a time wasting opportunity this good!
What would you put in our charter?
You geeks are good with buzzwords, right?
1 3x the power they need (wall socket) 2 a rack of cattle prods 3 coffee machine snack machine soda machine sandwich machine pizza on speed dial 4 extra servers and bits and bobs 5 a door to the server room that LOCKS and stays locked 6 2 days a month with no contact (roll the ranks) (the bargin is the other 28 is On duty or on call) 7 the ability to print an IT BIBLE that is required reading for the company
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I come from a long helpdesk background and am now a senior developer at a mid-sized company. Unlike most of you nerds there's one thing I enjoy more than "being right" and that's "being lazy." That's why I love stupid users. I loved having a job where the biggest problem I faced in a day was telling a user to turn their monitor on. Or turn their capslock off. The worst job I EVER had was working with some very bright and very motivated individuals who were not geeks but were extremely competent in everything they did. The one thing they didn't know well was computers, and in that business you didn't need to know computers to make a crapload of money. But because they were all so brilliant, every little thing was nitpicked. Everything had to be done now now now. There were no easy problems and every day I was challenged to learn and perfectly perform something that I'd never done before with technology. There was always some shit on the line: huge fines from regulatory institutions, huge investments of money, hundreds of employees counting on your work. If the worst you have to deal with is someone dumber than you, you have it made. Make friends with your users, treat them like people, and soon you'll be in middle management, making bad decisions for a big salary.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
That's not security. Even the most fascist, anal-retentive, destroy-before-reading organizations in the world wouldn't need security this tight (and it wouldn't be effective if it were). This is just insane. He was clearly making a point of being absurd.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I think I have worked with you before. Well not really but you (no offence) seem like one of those users we all hate to get a calls from.
I work in an IT department as a Systems Admin with about 650 users, over the last few years we have lost about 1/3 of our staff due to cutbacks. (People have left, and we cannot hire replacements due to a hiring freeze.) Management has informed us that we need to pick up the slack for the missing people.
The result of all this is that we are stretched way to thin and the stuff that seems like a simple fix for the end user sometimes has to get put off to the side to resolve bigger problems. I now spend a majority of my time putting out fires rather than focusing on the future needs of the company.
I guess all that does not have a lot to do with what you posted about except to say that you might want to make sure that your IT department has the resources that it needs to do a proper job.
Oh and this is my last week, I am moving on to be a programmer for another company.
Can't you just see the IT dept at his guys company looking for their cattle prod.
remember the It dept motto: we dont do things for users, we to things TO users.
I've seen this a number of times, and it is almost universally caused by a management team unwilling to invest in IT. Revolt against IT all you want, it won't get you anywhere unless you can convince management that the services you need are worth the investment the IT department will need to support them.
I'm the only IT guy at a small business (35 people), and I run completely without a budget. Costs are kept to the bone. People were starting to bitch about spotty email service (below-bargain-basement local provider who was friends with the family owning the business), downtime when a server would fail (no redundancy), and slow Internet access (it turns out that forwarding 15MB videos to all of your friends DOES make a difference).
Before anyone came for my head, I drew up a list of the dollar costs of doing everything properly and presented it to the owner. He just laughed and said "I thought so."
Now, when anyone whines, I point them to the boss, and he tells them to get over it. Of course, I got him to pony up for a more reliable nationally known service provider, but there's still no redundancy. God Bless Free Software.
1. 5 nine uptime for all critical and non-critical systems
2. Instantanious response for all problems
3. Hooter's girls to replace all help desk staff
4. A total budget outlay of $10000 USD for overhead and $2500/year for supplimental requirements
5. The servers should provide a constant waterfall of cold beer whilst in operation (see req. 1).
If things really are that bad upper management is not or cannot give IT what it needs to function either in leadership or in money. Having a user revolt isn't going to cause the money to be produced. Your organization is in trouble.
If the need for IT, by the company, was really there, you would get the resources you need.
Someone does not want you (IT) there anymore, and the easiest way to kill you off is to strangle you, letting you hang yourself.
Someone wants IT outsourced, and wants a case for doing so, and know you will do the deed yourself by poor service.
You won't do that. You also won't DEMAND anything from IT.
Some of those guys might not really be "incompetent"
You really don't want to experience "pwn3d" in real life. Treat you IT folks like humans and not servants. Treat them like servants, and you're in for a nasty suprise... and more thank likely so is your credit rating, your bank account, and more.
Outsourcing is bad. You make enemies here who can destroy you, and you give people who give not a single shit for you in a far off country complete control over your company's data.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Additionally, they haven't been able to sell needed changes to senior management.
That statement says it all.
Being unable to sell needed changes to senior management usually has little or nothing to do with competance or ability of the IT staff, but rather the entrenchement of the senior management and their minds being as open to allowing IT to flourish only as much as that senior management sees fit.
That's where I'm at with my employer right now. Information Technology is not a fully supported organizational department but rather it's an arm of the accounting department, and is micromanaged to the Nth degree. To our senior management, having a main server dead for a complete day is perfectly acceptable downtime, as in their minds, keeping expensive spare parts on hand in inventory for a piece of technology that has a forced premature end of life by its hardware vendor of 3, maybe 4 years... is a complete waste of money. So is a 24x7x365 onsite 4 hour response service contract for any piece of technology unless they think someone's life depends on it. It's a drag that the 3-4 year lifespan server will be actually expected to be run for really 5-7 years once those initial 3 to 4 years are up and suddenly no money comes available for replacement because that money is more desperately needed to fund the "golden parachutes" for senior management instead.
You did not just mess with your IT staff?!? You are so screwed. Just like you don't mess with the people who prepare your food, never mess with your IT personel.
Haha... you're so screwed.
This isn't by chance BLIZZARD we're talking about here, is it??
One can only hope....
Gee, no backups -- you better start with some nice distributed backup recovery solution, tested regularly...
Big question:
if a boss screams, does the IT staff come running and spend hours fixing the guys mouse, or latest windows UI gizmo the boss installed?
Basically, have the bosses been slow to notice because they have personalized IT staff?
At my last place, the higher ups thought a person who left was god, because he would come up and fix things for thier workstations. As Head of Systems, he'd spend a morning fixing a PC, or installing a new widget for the IT head. Not that any of the servers could have been better configured, managed, etc. or more importantly, better documented.
Organization was partially because the PC group lack competency in mananaging a large group of workstations, and it grew separated from systems. Main problem, communication.
What worked for a single higher up PC, failed in a managed group. When the head of sys got sent to work with the PC group, he flopped. No communication, so no experience fixing things on the managed workgroups.
Exit interviews. Evaluate who left, where they are, and
who is left, and why have they not left, and ask are they incompetent? or overworked?
"The IT department at my company (approximately some 500 people) is showing signs of incompetence
The first sign of incompetence is the willingness to install & support MS-Windows. That blows open Pandora's Box for ALL SUBSEQUENT IT PROBLEMS. But the core problems started sooner, see below.
and has been ignoring knowledgeable user input for about a year.
Such as, "Ditch Windows and 90% of the IT problems will go away" perhaps? Well, you did say knowledgeable...
Additionally, they haven't been able to sell needed changes to senior management.
OK that's the real problem. Senior management typically dictates that the company will run Windows. I assume this is because all the secretaries and salespeople need something they've been intimately familiar with for years, such as viruses, trojans, adware and Blue Screens Of Death. Top Management gets into the business of making IT decisions whether they know it or not, and that's where the real problems begin.
Unacceptable server down time
Windows servers are characterized by high downtime. But companies who keep throwing money at this doomed platform are effectively voting with their dollars. The dollars say huge amounts of downtime are acceptable, because the money keeps flowing to Windows.
When will companies learn?????
maxed network storage
Smells like legacy storage from non-64 bit versions of Windows... get a 64-bit OS and have the option of a 17TB journaled filesystem, like we *nix folks have enjoyed on the desktop for 10+ years.
and no backups systems have hit the bottom line
Here's some hardcore Windows Administrator logic: "Who needs a backup? We have the installation CD."
and those on top are starting to notice.
Sounds like "those on top" are the last to really know things. Like I said, that's where the real problems start. At the top.
We users are staging a revolt to make IT more responsive to users by creating a group from the company divisions and IT to discuss needs and solutions.
OK you're saying, there are too many cooks in the kitchen, so let's everyone who isn't a cook go charge the kitchen and we'll all show them how it's done.
What would you put in our charter?
Microsoft products will be strictly forbidden on company premises.
Open Source products will be thoroughly considered as a part of every software acquisiton.
Software and hardware reuseability will be a high priority.
An actively hands-on IT person will have a seat on the Board of Directors.
Departments making IT change requests will be required to donate budget funds and provide an objective mechanism for auditing the cost-effectiveness of any requested change. For example, if a VP of Sales blames the computer system for not meeting a sales goal, and the IT Department makes the change he specifies, but increased sales fail to materialize, then the VP of Sales must be specifically held accountable for wasting IT resources on yet another stupid project.
What services and responsibilities would you demand out of your IT department?
Oh, the usual:
Responsibility for de-virusing the boss's daughter's PC.
Responsibility for changnig the color ink cartridge on the boss's secretary's PC so she can print up baby shower invitations for her friend.
Responsibility for taking the blame for top management's bad IT decisions.
Responsibility for ensuring that bug-ridden, insecure OSes such as MS-Windows get widely deployed within the company.
Responsibility for taking the blame whenever bugs manifest in closed-source bug-ridden OSes such as Windows.
Responsibility for taking the blame whenever security gets breached in fundamentally-insecure OSes such as Windows.
Just the usual.
Only 97% uptime? That's 14 minutes of downtime per 8 hours. Is that acceptable?
Assuming it's a Windows server-based IT shop, then you really have no other choice and are lucky to achieve that much uptime, and should be happy with that.
> Why have 7 departments get a database guy, when you can have two guys run DBs shared by all?
;)
When you can install MS SQL express on all server
There is no such thing as a "knowledgable user base". You are all a bunch of know-nothing cable-unplugging keyboard-drooling morons who are not worthy to speak of, much less to, your betters. I'm sorry that you can't install your favorite spyware package on your workstation but maybe if your IT department wasn't spending 90% of its time dealing with dumb users it might be able to actually make progress on one of the 5000 projects on the task list. Guess what, if you take everything in the company that is vaguely related to "the inter-nets" and dump it on an understaffed and underfunded department that is by corporate fiat not allowed to refuse your unreasonable demands you'll end up just a little bit unsatisfied. It's ok though because as a user you couldn't tell the difference between getting exactly what you asked for and a steaming pile of shit with birthday candles in it (unlit of course, God knows what you fools would do to yourselves with an open flame so easily within reach).
My keyboard back.
Look, I said I was sorry!
You want your budget to remain unscaithed? Here are my demands:
I'm sure you'll agree that my terms are cruel but fair.
My name is Karlo Takki, and I am an IT Manager.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Thanks. I'm writing this post-call, never good for spelling.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
Make sure to ask what should the non-IT department demand from the IT department.
Generally speaking, the solution to incompetence is to fire people. Generally starting at the top, and replacing them with competent people. They will generally proceed with the firing. Meeting to discuss their lack of competence isn't going to help. It's generally a situation of the blind leading the blind (if you were really good at large scale IT, why don't you actually work there, short of previous experience, running a corporate network generally has little to do with personal experince on a home network. If it really is such a problem, you should apply for the job with seriously good incentive based pay). As someone who was one half of the IT departement (SA, programming, help desk, DBA duties) at a fast growing company that went from 10 to 150 people in about 4 years, I can assure that most users outside of IT have no idea what is easy, and what is hard. The number of stupid requests put in by "knowledgable users" was insane.
Lack of backups is a serious problem. However, you haven't described why. In my experience, it's a lack of budget or priority. Generally speaking, good backup units are one of the single most expensive pieces of equipment an IT place will purchase (backups generally scale with the type of IT equipment you buy, if you buy $10K servers, your buying $25K backup libraries. If you purchase $1K servers, you buy $2-4K tape drives. I've never been purchasing $100K+ computers, I'm not sure what type of tape solution they need). The next most common reason for no backups, is literally not enough hours in the day, or backups are such a tremendous strain on the production systems that they can't be run during business hours. Which means that they can't finish. I've seen a fully justified case of not making backups as it literally wasn't cost effective. We could have made backups, but just regenerating the data was far more cost effective. The hardware and software we needed just wasn't justifiable for the volume of data. Critical data we made backups of. The scads of other data we had that turned over regularly wasn't worth it. In the end, we ended up building a hot spare and kept short term online backups on it. Getting a tape unit capable of the storage requirements was too expensive. We generated about 1-2TB/hr, 99% of which would never ever be needed again and after two weeks it was so outdated it had no value. We processed the 1% upon being identified. So backing it up was just stupid. Unless a bug was found in the identification algorithm, then it was useful to have the other 99%. Generally, you just started with the oldest data still of use and processed it all again.
Lack of storage space, is generally attributable to users if users don't have a quota. Given a group of 2 people, at least one of them is a digital pack rat. I'd say given a group of 1, but I've seen a handful of non-pack rats. For the record, I'm a pack rat, but when I am good about cleaning up when disk space gets tight. In my experience, the solution to storage is to parcel it out by type of usage. 80% of the usages will have no problems. The others will use petabytes of storage if they are given access to it. At which point, it's strictly a budget issue and resolving the issue with the users. Generally speaking, near-line storage on CD or DVD that the user could burn themselves, or spooled for an IT professional to do was the solution. We did all CD's of data in triplicate. The original user got one, their supervisor got one, and the IT department held onto one. CD's go bad, and people tend to lose them, hence the three copies held by independent people. What is needed is an archival plan for moving data from online to offline, or deleting it.
Kirby
This might be OT BUT
I have several websites for my business and the domains are all based off of www.directnic.com a major registrar.
All of my e-mail goes through my domains to my home ISP POP account via a redirect at the rgistrar level.
Well the morons at my ISP - rr.com (Road Runner) did an upperlevel blacklisting of iris.directnic.com the mailserver of the registrar. So now, and many of my business partners and even clients, cannot get their e-mails.
I did the process to have it unlisted and the peckerheads told me that it "could take up to 36 hours". I am losing THOUSANDS of dollars because of their asinine screwup and over zealous attempts at spam-blocking. There are too many false-positives to block a MAJOR registrar.
That chaps my ass like nothing else does! In fact I'm madder than a queer with hemroids. (and no I'm not gay - I just like crude analogies)
Libertas in infinitum
Let me start off with some Russian folklore. A man brings a fur skin to a tailor and aks him to make a hat out of it. The tailor looks at the fur and names his price. The client asks if the tailor can make two hats from the same fur skin. "Yes, sure", says the tailor. "What about three hats?". The tailor agrees to that too. Finally they both decide that the tailor will make seven hats out of the fur skin. The next day the tailor presents his client with seven tiny fur hats.
When a customer requests seven new servers but provides the budget for only one, then it is hardly reasonable to accuse the IT department of incompetence. This is not to say that everyone I ever worked with in the IT field was a genius, but professionalism and common sense usually prevailed. Conflicts with users are unavoidable. However, when a user starts questioning my technical abilities, I found that disabling his account for a day or two helps to steer the discussion in a more constructive direction.
As we all know, little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A manager would think twice before cutting the budget for R&D or manufacturing. All these integrals, infinity, and big noisy machines with hydraulic arms - these are things most managers hope they will never have to understand. IT, on the other hand, is not that complicated (I mean, c'mon, everybody knows how to use Excel and Outlook). And so the process begins: outsourcing, consolidating, downsizing, and streamlining.
Be it incompetence in the IT department, in the management, or among the general user population - it is all really the management's fault: who else hired all these morons?
If they don't have backups they obviously don't give a shit about your work and can afford to lose it. Why are you wasting your time with these losers?
Additionally, they haven't been able to sell needed changes to senior management. Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice.
The first and second sentences here are mutually exclusive. If IT's asking for needed changes and upper management won't buy into them, then either upper management isn't noticing problems or upper management is the problem. You'd be well advised to investigate the actual constraints and mandates IT is operating under first, else you may find that some Bastard over in IT has his ducks in a row and his written evidence in order and instead of those "incompetents" over in IT you'll be revolting against the CFO or some other extremely senior executive. Senior executives, BTW, don't like revolts by the rank-and-file, nor do they like being backed into a corner where they've no choice but to publicly admit one of their decisions was wrong. Ponder the concept of Career-Limiting Move carefully. On the other hand, if you get down off your high horse and work with IT to provide the business-side leverage needed to pry some of what IT's been asking for for years out of senior management, you may find IT solidly on your side in the future.
No it's easier as an end user to just sit back, and play both ends (Management and IT) against the middle. Perhaps just for once you and other end users could try working with us instead of against us. Just once try and understand that the easier we make your life the easier it makes ours and vice versa, meaning I'm not suggesting the change to bother you, I'm doing it to protect you.
My fear is that in your company, end users and management deserve each other. One group to bent on the right now bottom line. The other group bent on using IT as an excuse for not being able to meet unreasonable demands made by the same management that can't see past todays ink.
The first step in any situation like this is to ask yourself the question. What am I doing wrong. Stop trying to fix others problems before you bother to fix your own.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
I am 25 years old and have been a consulting systems engineer for 6 years. I'm sure some of you are going to feel that this is in no way enough experience to put a lot of input on the subject, but I can't make time go any faster. I have been in charge of some pretty large projects over the years. I am currently managing a sizable Novell to Active Directory migration. These projects, of course, have to be done in a very timely manner. This migration, for example involves 18 servers and 5 locations. I started 3 weeks ago and I will be done on Thursday. In my experience working with IT departments on these projects I have a complete lack of inovative ways to save time and money. My rant is that when a crew of people work on the same damn network every day there is no reason it should have any problems. If I was in charge of a companies network I would make sure that the question of the users not appreciating the network never comes up. I just don't understand how IT departments can let themselves work on such a small budget. I would personally write up a very informative presentation on how spending more on IT saves MUCH more money in every other department at the company. There is no excuse for a user to be without a computer for more than an hour. I guess that's what I would demand out of my IT department. I don't want to be without a functional workstation for more than one hour, and I don't want the servers to be down during business hours, EVER. There are so many cost effective ways to avoid serious problems that I almost never see implemented. Don't even get me started on IT departments not taking advantage of GPO's. I apologize for trolling on. I probably posted too late for anyone to notice, anyhow.
You talk better than you fool!
I should have reviewed my post before postings ;)
Correction:
I have found a complete lack of inovative ways, by IT departments, to save time and money.
I'm tired, give me break.
You talk better than you fool!
I think that you're missing the point of the question.
"Your department has IT needs. These needs are written down."
The poster's question was (essentially) "What are some needs that we might write down?" The poster is looking for suggestions as to
1. Phrasing of needs, e.g. instead of saying "keep servers up most of the time" write down: servers have less than 1% unscheduled downtime and scheduled downtime is limited to Sunday nights from 1 AM to 6 AM.
2. Identifying needs, e.g. 90% of user requests should receive a response within two business days and 100% within seven business days. A response is defined as one of a solution, a request for more information, or a denial of the request (w/ explanation). What other needs have slashdot readers noticed? Sure, some of these will be inapplicable to the poster's situation. However, some things we could suggest might be applicable but not obvious.
3. Realism of needs, e.g. are 99% uptime and 90% response rate within two days realistic? Is it required?
4. Requirements of needs, e.g. is seven business days too lax? Does a requirement that lax cause operational issues? Should it be tighter?
You're right, writing down needs is a no brainer. Note that the original post said that that was what they were trying to do. To define the requirements on which they wanted upper management to sign off. The request is for help *generating* that list.
It's important to get the right list of needs the first time, because it will be hard to get management to change them upwards (which requires more budget). Once the list is settled, it will be much easier to get budget for that list than it will be to change the list. Getting the list right the first time will be hard, as obviously they don't have an existing list from which to work. In fact, they may not be measuring things like uptime and response rates.
It's also important to be realistic. For example, if the list says 100% uptime, it's going to quickly be obvious that that is impossible. The net result is that management will get to pick an uptime. Otoh, if you pick an uptime of 99%, that at least seems reasonable. If the actual uptime is 98%, then you can demand more resources to push up the uptime.
Is today April 1st? This write-up has got to be some sort of joke, yes? For the past how many years have people been proud to wear the badge of being computer illiterate? Ask yourself, do you think that people 100 years ago walked around BRAGGING about not knowing anything about the tools they used? Do you hear people saying, "Oh, its ok officer, Im book illiterate, so its ok I went through that stop sign"
See, now is the time in your life where that thing called 'personal responsibility' comes in to play. Now, learn how to use a tool, or accept the fact that YOU are the incompetent one that needs a baby sitter just so you can backup your own files.
You want to fix the problem? YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.
sounds like the submitter has a case of armchair quarterback.
We, the members of the IT department, reserves the right to beat senseless and sell to arab slavers any end-user that comes to us with stupid requests based on their assumption that they know more about computers and the network than we in IT do.
We also reserve the right to laugh in the faces of indignant users who want us to increase their disk quota on the file server or to recover their mp3's from the corporate backup for them.
We furthermore reserve the right to drop any members of management down the nearest elevator as soon as they try and use corporate buzzwords when they are really talking about staff and funding cut so they can increase their end of year bonuses
*** I had a
Sound like an over-worked IT group. You needs to hire more people to handle the loads.
May the machine gods be merciful.
As a lower-middle-level IT guy, I have heard this type of BS before. I have been accused of incompetence by half the managers in my freaking company. The other half think I'm a saint. Lots of luck on your commitee. That really is the best way to come up with new ideas. Or at least blow a week without working.
All IT department are ultimately bottle-necked by the willingness of management to commit to ever-increasing levels of service.
That's fancy talk for "They're a bunch of tightwads."
I can't imagine a bonafide "incompentent" IT department. It's pretty hard to fake technical knowledge for long (between technicians), and we constantly test each other for dominance in our work groups, whether we see it as such or not.
More like, the described IT department is understaffed and/or underfunded. That, or the mangement refuses to upgrade from ancient, widely varying production systems on the grounds of costs or other "difficulty". I once supported 5 completely different production systems, and a host of secondary systems, running on different hardware and software, spread across 13 locations all over SoCal. I did it alone for 1.5 years. There were entire weeks when I couldn't have described what I did to keep things working after the fact, because I was totally and completely fried. Not conducive to producing orginal or innovative ideas, especially when they had no audience.
Thank goodness we finally converted to a nice centralized system, added staff, and got things relatively stable. Now when people complain, I tell them the story above. Our system is FAR from perfect, but it's better than it was, and apparently that's the best I can expect from my crap company. Without a truly serious commitment to improved software, the system we've built will ultimately rot. Development is key, and if your oganization doesn't have developers working on your system EVERY DAY, whether they are in-house or out, then your system is rotting as we speak.
Which of course is all very compelling to management, until to lay out the costs involved in constant development.
For the management: You get what you pay for.
For the IT guys: A good boss could be worth your sanity. Know any?
Shaw's Principle: Build a system even a fool could use, and only a fool would want to use it.
I'm sorry, but what you have said is a total stereotype. Look at police and fire departments.
Every neighborhood or region has its own department and/or precinct. All of these serve a very specific area. These "satellites" pretty much run themselves. But they still are held accountable to all the policies and procedures. They are held accountable to "the law". There are audit systems in place to ensure compliance or investigate lack thereof.
Having one huge department that doesn't answer to any business function directly... yet is responsible for all business function related IT issues... makes NO sense.
Every person in the IT department should be reminded daily how much it costs to waste the user's time.
Example:
IT: "Hmm let's save 100$ and order computers with little less memory".
User: "I think my new computer needs more memory".
IT: "Bring it here for a day I'll inspect it" (.."I'll have time next month..")
User: ".. but I need my computer all the time.."
IT: "Bring it here".
User: "ok"
IT: "Nothing wrong, see.."
User: "Well see I use these programs all at once.."
IT: "Well don't do that!"
User: "Fine". (Well I'll go and buy that memory myself then).
Cost of memory upgrade: less than 100$
Cost of wasted worktime: the request process: 500$, slow daily work: at least 50$/day, not to mention the grinding of teeth..
Above example is from a large global company where my wife works. I checked her new laptop, it was swapping heavily. I bought her the memory as it was a pain to work on that laptop.
I joined two users too late.
It's funny to read the responses. You can almost see the IT guys circling the wagons, taking a defensive stance, even though none of us understands the situation. I mean, yes, Mr. IT-Slashdot-reader, it's possible that the IT group is underfunded and misunderstood. But it's also possible that, exactly as described, the IT group is incompetent.
I worked at a company that was both -- the head of the team was incompetent, but completely trusted by management. So we had a fine budget, but internally, the team was failing to execute over and over again. The biggest issue was that the leader measured his employment with the company in decades -- it was a battering ram for him: "I've been here for sooo long, I have serious experience! Trust me!" Of course, the day I suggested that the years of being insulated had left him with no concept of how competiting companies were run, I knew my days were numbered. It was frustrating to work in an IT department that had never heard of Linux, Apache, Open Source, and a lot of other stuff that has come onto the scene. At a certain point, I delivered to them a working intranet, running LAMP. After deployment they took it down for a month while they swapped it out for Solaris, Oracle, etc. Cost in the hundreds of thousands... to replace a working system that I assembled for just a few thousand. Ugh. But at least they used Solaris, so I got something Unixy to use. We ended up regularly mired recoding things to the language-of-the-week, paying out near-millions for commodity systems, and taking direction on algorithms and programming from managers who couldn't write pseudocode, much less the real thing.
There are bad IT teams out there. I've fled some of them. If you are in a good IT department, hold onto it. I think it's rare.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
If they can't sell needed changes to senior management, then the management is the problem.
If that's not the problem, then your problem statement is wrong.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
amd chips are better and cost much less. linux on the desktop!
How about beginning with 'We, The People....'
Then you can throw all their tea into the river.
And then you can start killing all the Indians and stealing their land.
However, what is just as important and often overlooked is that they need the AUTHORITY to implement it. Otherwise, IT's job is just to be a scapegoat when things DO go wrong.
You want security? Fine, give IT the authority to set password criteria and set system policies accordingly for EVERYONE, not just those people who aren't high enough up in the food chain to request an exception. Give IT the power to reprimand people for obvious and intentional breaches of security (like installing file sharing software against corporate policy, or storing sensitive data on a laptop against policy and then getting it stolen). You want reliability? Fine, give IT a reasonable maintenance window. You want SOX compliance? Give IT the extra time to complete the paper trail. You want system capacity/performance/space? Give IT the power to reprimand those dorks storing their personal MP3 collection on the server or constantly sending back and forth the latest 4MB funny commercial or slowing down your 'net connection by downloading personal stuff.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
Dude we have 100 desktops, 25 servers, SAN , Disaster recovery site , shit load of buisness critical applications and only 2 admins. Plans for this half a year to add 10 more production servers (and DR for them ) , 3 more buisness critical applications and on top of that boss is fucking micromanager who drowns down productivity in endless meetings ,which concentrate on uber important stuff like "how we name servers" . This is also financial shop where down time is not accepted and maintenace windows are scarce to get by.
You are freaking lucky out there.
You really don't want to experience "pwn3d" in real life. Treat you IT folks like humans and not servants. Treat them like servants, and you're in for a nasty suprise... and more thank likely so is your credit rating, your bank account, and more.
Demanding things from people and treating them like servants is rude; your suggested likely response is illegal. Are you really saying most IT people are criminals? I'd take a pretty large exception to that, personally...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Why does anyone get to choose? This just encourage people to use names of pets etc.
I stopped trying to choose passwords that would be secure enough for my college login, and instead choose one of the list of suggestions. You'll remember any password soon enough if you use it everyday, and if forgetting it means getting locked out / having to go and get it reset..
my password really is 'stinkypants'
my advice, dont do it. I was in a similar position, wrote the director of the department lambasting the IT and saying I could save them 2.1 million a year on repetitive and costly customer calls. anyways wont go into that, but basically their new objective was to get me out. and they did. Companies are not looking for guys like you to rock the boat. It might seem like the right thing to do and even heroic and romantic. But it will get you fired and without a referance every time. Take it from me I did it 3 different times and 3 diff. companies and got outsted or fired every time. I am still learning to keep my mouth shut. I had to start my own business just to get a job, as I had no references and had to rely on my employees refs to get in the door.
just shut up. its so much easier.
So... some shops take Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) very seriously. Their corporate auditors have informed them that they need seperation of duties. In their mind this means that the guy who controls the access control mechanisms cannot do anything else - his job is to grant rights to others so they can do their job. The system administrators do just that, sometimes they're even more restricted i.e. only financial systems or only HR systems. Then you have DBAs, also highly restricted as to what they have access to. On top of that are the application developers - they can write code, but can't do anything about pushing it to dev/test/prod systems without a release engineer. Then you get networks -- they maintain the switches and routers, but security is responsible for the firewalls and ACLs.
On top of all these people, you layer a change management process that requires a manager approval for all changes - possibly with execution required during a downtime window.
Ok... with all those pieces, here comes a competant user (lets call him santa clause) requesting access to an application on a system that is considered secure. First that ticket goes through an approval process to determine whether the user should get access to the app (in really streamlined companies, these are granted by role and not by individual ID - you're hired as an accountant, you get systems x y and z, purchasing managers get x, p and q etc). So now you have approval, the access guy grants you access, but on top of that the security guy needs to modify an acl on a router and get that approved by the change process for the network guy to push the change to the router that controls the access.
That doesn't even begin to get into what happens if procurement is needed.
In your "group from the company divisions and IT", I really hope you have division managers present. Since you already mentioned having representatives from the allegedly incompetent IT department in your group, why n ot start by asking them the reasons for your outlined concerns?
If the IT people can explain the reasons for these problems, then your division managers should be able to successfu ly bring these underlying reasons (e.g. budget constraints) to the executive office. Start by listening and don't be so pompous in your attitude until you have all the facts.
translation:
i have been reading slashdot on the job for ooh, ages and i like to think i know what's what about all this technology stuff. so i pester the it guys about how they should do their jobs.
they are resistent to this harassment, and since most of them have 'asperger's syndrome', are quite good at ignoring people.
what should i do?
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Pretty simple actually, Government can step in, raise the expectations and not fund it. We can call it the "No IT guy left behind Act"
We IT people also have to keep ourselves on the bleeding edge of technology information (we read alot) and therefore can not be expected to do that while plugging in power cables and fixing local servers and keeping a datacentre in order.
karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
I've worked at a company where the IT department at our location was notorious for being incompetant and largely ineffective. However from what I was told by other employees who had been there far longer than I that it didn't always use to be that way. When the company got bought out the new parent company crippled our IT department and turned them into a group of people who hated their jobs. The problems we experienced had little to do with the IT department itself but rather with the people managing the IT department. They gutted their budget to the point where making purchase orders for new parts that were 100% justifiable and necessary was like pulling teeth. They introduced dozens of prodcedural hoops that had to be jumped through anything was done that reduced response time to a snail-like pace. So really it's not that the IT department was even incompetant (many of the people who worked there when I did had been there before the company had been bought out and had performed well at one point), it's that the senior management tied their hands and made getting the tools for their job a nightmare (in the name of saving money in the short term, but it lead to loss of money in the long term). It isn't always IT's fault when they don't perform up to the users standards. Sometimes they just don't have the resources to do so even if the people working there are top notch.
Bungo!
You're getting your head handed to you here and it may seem unfair, but by asking the question the way you did you demonstrate that you have no clue about actual IT responsibilities. Thus, it's impossible to take your idea of "knowledgable user input" serioulsly, much less your diagnosis of IT incompetence. Your IT department may be incompetent, but you have demonstrated that you are in no position to judge at present.
The answer to your question? SLA or Service Level Agreement.
It is reasonable to ask management what you should expect from IT. Find out what the SLA is or help create one. This will be a lot of work. You will encounter resistance, for no more sinister reason than that is hard. Just make sure this SLA takes into account senior management's requirements of IT as well. Perhaps IT incompetence isn't the reason management isn't providing the needed upgrades. An SLA provides some metric for performance. If the SLA is unsatisfactory, that is a matter to be taken up after performance against it is measured, but what amounts to a formal job description is a reasonable starting point.
There's good literature on all of this, and it's easy to find if you are interested in improving IT in your organization, and not just playing Napoleon. If you'd rather just whine and make everything worse, ignore everyone here and stage your little petty revolt. It will be easier, but if management has a clue at all, this will be a career limiting move for you. Cynically, either way, the SLA is the starting point.
I don't deny that IT can be incompetent, but it is rare in my experience. It occured to me that you were a troll, posting here. Regardless, there are others who really think IT is incompent because of their own ignorance, who would benefit from gaining a little insight into what IT is about.
If I worked with you, I probably would tell you this in person, and tell you who might have more insight into the actual priorites set for IT. I've had plenty of similar conversations with people over the years. It's just another part of the usual perception problem for IT.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Now we know where BOFH is working at..........
the weenie who lost an argument to me has two mod points left to spend.
I stopped reading after seeing the words "knowledgeable" and "user input" in the same sentence.
I know that seems like flame bait - so I'll add a couple of real life examples:
User: My computer is dead. It's broken. I need you fix it right now!
Tech switches the PC on - it starts up without problems.
Tech: What's the problem with it?
User: Well I never switch it off.
Or:
User: My monitors dead.
Tech switches the monitor on.
It's worth noting that these were different users, both University educated. One of them is an award winning writer for a national newspaper.
There are plenty of other examples beyond this where "knowledgeable users" find difficulty with power switches let alone with the intricacies of software design. Requests for software to be installed without wanting to buy the license (well can't I borrow it for a bit?). The usual cry of "but WHY does it work like that? Can't you change it" with the reply of "no, that's the way Microsoft made it work" is more than familiar to most technical staff.
Not to mention these "knowledgeable users" using the IT staff as their own private technical resource to sort out all their home PC problems - usually self inflicted ones.
Yes, we do have some users who know the difference between their arse and their elbow - but they honestly are in the miniority. That is why we are in IT and they aren't. We know and understand our job - they know and understand theirs. We may make it look easy but it doesn't always make it so.
So if you'll excuse me I'm going to check our XML upload to convert it to the new structure so the "knowledgeable users" won't have to sit wondering why the news feed no longer works (after changing to a new back-end system at head office).
TTFN
Have you tried being in your IT Department? - You might say they have neglected to sell projects to senior management, but are you sure it is not a money issue? - How big is your IT department? - How skilled is the IT department, again how much money is set aside for education? - How is work in the IT department organized. Myself we are a staff of 3 and 2 part time students for support (for 200 users + guest groups of various sizes), and even our "clients" are complaining that they need to file a helpdesk report rather than we just take notes over the phone. etc. etc.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I work in a hospital's IT department as a low level employee. I can agree that there is a lot of bogus that goes on.
:sigh:
We have a lot of unplanned downtime, things break constantly, and there I am answering the phones without any say in how fast things are going to be fixed.
And you know what? It is rather unacceptable. We have systems that are ages old, raid arrays of 10 gig hard drives that fail constantly as part of a network storage system that relies on equally unreliable, EXPENSIVE, proprietary software. It probably costs more in electricity alone to keep the thing running a day than the upfront cost of buying a shitbox with a raid 5 array of 50 dollar staples 200 gig hard drives and installing samba. That shitbox for under $1000 would be faster and more reliable than what we have set up now.
Most of the server software and interfaces are custom and are written in visual basic 6. Don't even get me started on how often this stuff goes down.
I could go on, but I'm not going to. When I get calls, I try to be as helpfull as I can. I'll reset your password, I'll come look at your printer or computer, I'll call the oncall people if you have a serious issue, but don't expect magic out of me, I'm not the one who set up our retarded systems, I don't have all the access rights I could use either. Blame the slow response times on the bureaucracy most corporations have set up, perhaps coupled with some higher ups' being lazy.
At all three companies where I've been an IT worker, there has been a common problem: managers who are generally good managers - good people skills, organizational skills, ability to look at the big picture - but who advertise their "technical ignorance" to anyone who will listen. They let the IT department and all other departments know that they will defer to the IT department on technical matters.
So, you end up with technical decisions that serve the people who deal with technology, as opposed to serving the users who are doing the main work of the company, or serving the company's goals as a whole.
I'm not sure what causes effective managers to decide to take a different approach to technical issues than they do with others, but I'm convinced that's the root cause of the sort of problem described by the poster.
I believe top management - and department managers, following their lead - should be pressing IT managers to break down technical issues to the point where they can make effective decisions. When the IT manager says "it will take 3 months to set up a new mail server" and the sales manager throws her hands in the air, their boss should sit down with the IT manager and make them explain what the factors are that will make it take that long. And if it's too technical and they don't understand, they should SAY so, and make the IT manager explain it again. Until they understand. Then, they should say things like "what would it take to do it in 1 month?" and by that time, they should be informed enough to reject bullshit answers like "we need another $75k employee."
"technical ignorance" is not an excuse, when you have people on staff who are capable of educating you. And IT workers who perpetuate the myth that it's "beyond a non-technical user's understanding" merely for their own convenience should be...fired.
If your management doesn't see things this way, there's probably not much you can do about the problem.
Pete Forsyth
Respect - plain and simple. Too often it seems like IT can become the domain of little nazis and control freaks.
*** Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice.***
These are all major indicators of a serious LACK of funding: if the IT department had the cash, you'd have the space/servers/backups.
Maxed out network storage is the best indicator that your IT is underfunded. Network storage is the easiest and cheapest thing to provide for users; that yours is maxed out tells that someone 'up top' made the decision to not pay out for more storage.
Server down time is an indication that your servers are old. If your servers are old, it'll cost quite a bit of money to upgrade them/add more. It isn't just the cost of the servers, but the cabling/the routers/the additional licenses for each and ever user/the extra floor space required to house your new network that has to be figured out and into the equation. No, it's not just a question of buy new Compaqs; the servers are just one part of the network. Server down time can be indicative of an old/overworked network. That your network is old and overworked is another indication that someone 'up top' made the decision to not pay out for your network to be upgraded.
No backup systems means someone up top does not see the need for backups. The first thing ANYONE in the IT department wants is a backup system; you have NO idea how many problems are easily solved on the IT side by having viable backups. But you don't even have a reliable network, let alone persuade the boys upstairs to fund a backup system.
That YOU think this is IT's fault indicates that only IT techs desperate for a job, any job, would work in your company. Up top won't fund the needed infrastructure, and the clients blame the IT techs for any and all of their woes. And no, 'the guy in charge of IT keeps voting upgrades down' won't cut the mustard as an excuse for your reasoning; any decent CEO and his team would be aware of the need for a backup system/up-to-date network and should be able to get the network upgraded and backups implemented despite the efforts of naysayers within the company.
My advice; without blaming the IT department, press for a backup system to be implemented. It's your first priority and work WITH the IT department on getting them the funding they need. Remember those in IT who seem to be willing to work with you the most and do what you can to help them out; those are the folks you'll need to keep around and encourage.
Anywhere that lets passwords run for 3 months does not really consider security a high priority.
28 days, 8 character minimum and 2 non alpha keys is a minimum. Any weaker than that and the sales dept must be in control of security. If not them some other technical illiterates.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
My Spouse works in a Pseudo Government Business and has had the same problem. It's as though Competence has gone out the window. What' with organizations in non-IT fields not hiring IT people with IT backgrounds (backgrounds as far as Degrees, Certifications, etc)? Here's what I'd expect: 1. Someone from IT has to be involved in the parts of the business that require Acquisitions of New Technology, Maintenance of Existing Technology, and Interface with Technology. 2. Customer Server, wow, we haven't heard that lately, have we? Responsiveness from the Helpdesk To customer concerns, Answering the telephone when people call for help. 3. In some cases, the training aspect of the Non-IT folks has to come into play in order to assistin the #2 mentioned suggestion. On the flip side, how about training the IT folks in the business in what they support so that they can better understand what expectations are being made of them?
Secure passwords are those that are easy to remember (so they do not get written down) but also impervious to dictionary attacks. What works well in practice are long passwords, made up of elements that are easy to remember. A well known phrase or movie title of about 16 characters, with just one character changed, is a secure password (and only takes about three seconds to type once one is used to it). To be really secure, I use a longer password like "Columbus did not really discover America in 1492" (still easy to remember).
You just described an unusable system. If I had a system that required me to place a cursor over a field and hold the button down to see the data I could not do my job as it requires looking at a large amount of data and spotting trends, mistakes, things that look out of place, etc. The idea that the tech department should dictate to the user what needs to be done to "protect" data is the sort of arrogance for which IT departments are hated. The ultimate "secure data' is data that no employee can see or access - this will also cause the employee not to be able to do their job so everyone will be on the street. You need to get your head out of the sand (or somewhere else) and learn that the other employees in the organization are the reason that the IT department exists not the other way around. The IT deparment only exists because computers are faster than human beings at calculations most of the time. It is human beings that make companies work and the reason for their existence - both customers and employees. The first thing that I would require of my IT department is a commitment to serving the customers and other departments of the company - that is their sole reason for existence. The second is a THOROUGH understanding of how businesses in general make money and how their business in particular make money. I get a kick out of listening to 20 something know-it-all techies that think they know how to run a business when they couldn't even get out of bed in the morning without mommies help. The other things I would require of an IT deparment are:
1. Rock solid performance and up time - there are too many network management tools available today for networks to go down on a regular basis.
2. 100% reliable data and backup - preferably RAID and that this system be tested regularly. I have seen instance where a large amount of money was spent on a back-up system that was never tested - when push came to shove and a hard drive failed the back-up system didn't work - not a good way to find this out.
3. A customer service attitude - not just external customers - the one's that pay us money - but to internal departments too. As I said before the IT departments sole function is to service other departments in the company - and nothing else!
I could go on but I must get back to the job I am being paid to do.
Take a look at budget. Often the IT department is left with an inadequate budget and has to 'make do' the best they can ( until it blows up, then get blamed and a new budget to fix 'their' problem ).
When you do your job right in IT, you pretty much fade into the background, making it harder to ask for $ to keep up with demand. Its often hard to sell ' future plans' to CFO's these days.
One place I was at felt IT wasn't even a needed part of the business so i got almost no budget for several years, but managed to keep it together until the new CFO that came in, ' well, everything seems to just work, what do we need you for?'.. They had a total melt down soon afterwards and hired a contractor that screwed them hard. 6 months later they were bankrupt due to additional poor decisions.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think the first step should be to look at better IT organisation and management strategies. The way many IT departments are run is still rather primitive; extremely self-centered and often based on reactive maintenance. While a good organisation should be driven by the business or project goals it is supporting, and have the efficiency of its contribution to these as its target.
While concepts such as 6-sigma and TPM are not entirely applicable to IT organisations, there are important lessons to be learnt from them. Crucially, they help to define more clearly the goals for an organisation and offer more realistic metrics for a department to operate on than we closed so-and-so many trouble tickets last year.
I think it is also realistic to not expect too much from one organisation. There is a tendency to lump all that is IT together in one organisation, on the pretense that any work involving computers must be similar and have identical organisational needs. That makes little sense; the actual IT tasks can be very diverse and require different people, different attitudes, and different strategies. It makes considerably more sense to give an IT person a reporting line to the manager of the process that he or she is trying to support, than to some manager whose only connection with the activities of that person is that they both have "IT" printed on their business card. In my opinion, IT centralisation is a sin that one should not commit without a very good excuse.
I would ask the same thing that all of us non-IT have been asking for the past six years or so.... YOU do the IT work so that the departments don't have to do shadow IT work.
There has just been a major reorg at the hands of a new CEO, and the message has finally been heard.
With that, I anticipate that I will be joining the IT department within the year.
www.wavefront-av.com
- Air Travel should be banned until we win the War on Terror
- Hospitals should be closed until antibiotic-resistent diseases are cured
- Credit cards should be blocked until fraud is prevented
Insightful? Pah! (BOFH Archives)Reduce, reuse, cycle
Ask the question - is it a money thing, or technical?
Then ask - what percentage of IT is on Business as Usual Vs New projects. If resources are deficient, then something gotta give.
If storage is crimped, backups, that sounds like a money thing. If money, remind management that 'licence costs' is a legacy of their prior decisions.
Of course other factors may play, but incompetent is a foolish word to bandy about. Expectations and the POOR COMMUNICATION gap needs works. Badly managed change??
I'm in IT, so I clearly don't know, but I do know that you need to fire the person questioning us!
Technology for an enterprise is **very** different then that for a home pc network. Folks who've been successful at home - their DSL works - think that they are expert in configuring and managing any windows server or worse, any unix server for an enterprise. Managing 2 servers is 1 thing, but managing 10,000 is completely different. Heck, even managing IP addresses is completely different.
What happens when there is a fire in a corner of your data center? Where and how do you failover? No failover? How do you restore? No system inventory? How do you recover? Tapes where in that corner too? Not good. You are out of business. Sorry.
For $250/hr, I'll come help you and tell your executives what they need to hear. Clearly, you don't even realize the correct questions to ask and need a highly paid consultant to tell your officers. I offer my services.
The problem is, IT doesn't live in the world of business; the geeks live in a fantasy land. IT is responsible for ensuring that, for example, there is enough storage space on the fileserver. This is IT's responsibility. IT are the ones with visibility of the number and size of drives, the amount of free space, the partitioning, the number of free bays in the drive cage, etc.. Not the users. The users need the space, but IT are the ones who must provide it. If space is running low then it's up to IT to resolve this problem; they have the user requirement ("provide storage for our files") and they need to fulfil it.
The solution here is not for someone in IT to mutter to someone higher up "oh, we need a few more hard disks". Nor is it for IT to just decide implement some absurd restriction such as quotas. It's for IT to create a costed request for a storage upgrade. Depending on what infrastructure exists, this may be small and simple (just stick a few more disks into the rack) or it may be big and complex (to satisfy future growth, availability, backup requirements we need to phase out "file servers" with their own local storage and invest in NAS or SAN-based storage), or it may be somewhere in between. Part of this request will of course include the rationale ("department X produce lots of data"), and will possibly need some detail to justify the decisions. These then need to be given to management.
In other words, a proper business case needs to be put together. Management may then say "the benefit doesn't justify the cost, what else can we do?". It's at this point that alternatives may need to be devised; maybe archive off older files to tape with an HSM system; maybe implement some quotas; maybe backup workstations to permit local storage. Because these alternatives result in an inability to fulfil the original demand, they need to be worked through with the department in question to evaluate their impact. Again, it needs to be costed and business-oriented. Vague demands for "more disks" and quota diktats are not acceptable.
But IT don't get this, because they're antisocial geeks who for some unfathomable reason believe that they know better than everyone else.
It doesn't matter how much or how little the non-IT people know. There are basic things that should just work. I should always be able to access my mail. Server software upgrades should not happen during office hours. Backups should work. You don't need technical expertise to be able to demand these things. They're the bare minimum expectation. I don't want to hear about how hard you think it is, because this stuff should just work. It's not rocket science. And fobbing people off with whining is not acceptable. Yet it's endemic to the IT world.
More often then not the issues you are discussing come as a direct result of management's decisions. If storage is maxed out, IT Departments cannot magically come up with more storage, unless someone writes the check to get new storage. Server downtimes, may be a result of servers that are maxed out above their resonable load, but without someone buying more servers the problem will continue. So if you have complaints about those things go to management and tell them to start writing checks to fix the problems.
The IT department of today is really not there to help service every request you have for help with your computer. This includes things such as "How do I get smiley faces in my MS Outlook Email?".....yes, I have been asked that question.
The IT department is also not there to train you on how to use Microsoft Office. "How do I...." is not something you should be asking your IT department. You got hired onto a job that asked if you knew how to use Office, if you do not, then that's your problem--not IT's.
So you view your IT department as lazy and incompetent? Because they sit there and goof around all day. But look at it from this perspective--knowledge pays. A good IT person will have that system running damn near flawlessly on what they have, have sound plans to get things back up quickly if things go down, keep up with all of the known issues with the technologies they're using, and monitor for new technologies that might be able to help out. Flat out, that's the IT guy's job. The kind of things that demand from IT are far more mentally involved than continuous work. It's not really a job where you're constantly inputting things into Office documents or interacting with customers. If you're jealous of the fact that the IT department works half as much as you do physically, spends less time in the office, and gets paid more--then you should not have made fun of the nerds in high school and college whom were "uncool".
With the above reasoning, running IT becomes a far more critical position than your particular run-of-the-mill office job. The computer already does most of your work for you. The computer runs your reports that you simply open into Excel and print out for the management. Your job is insignificant compared to that of the IT department who put that into place for you. If your computer goes down due to your error, then another could be had for you to start working again fairly quickly. If the systems that the IT department is responsible for go down, then the entire business is in lockdown mode until those systems come back up. As such, there really is continual pressure on the IT Department that you don't see because you're not a technical minded person (Nor do you have access to half of the information or systems they do).
Can you imagine i became an MCSE around win95 and had all MCSE title's since. It drives me mad that i'm in an environment that I could have designed deployed and managed. Still i have to be a member of their AD & network, my test labs run smoother then their network aaaaaaaarrrrgggghhhh. The stupidity of it all is killing me. Their network feels like a borg network. I don't want to join their collective look at me i'm full potentia; I want to bring down that hive queen, it's an internal borg war crisis i'm putting in procedures to improve but the collective doesn't hear a single voice, because it's used to this oh my....
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your problem comes from management. Either your head of IT is not senior enough to make a case for a proper budget, or if he has a decent budget, he is incompetent or can't manage, or both. Your company's senior mannagement needs to recognize this, but perhaps your senior management is also not senior enough and needs some outside help.
What is preventing the 500 techie IT dept from buying extra disk space?
What 12,500 employee company don't keep backups? But you just said `senior management' don't take notice. But you just said that the IT dept hadn't
Didn't anyone notice that it is nothing but a self contradictory TROLL.
Incidentally that 12 techie IT team did nothing but run round reinstalling
Windows profiles after senior management decided to 'upgrade`
from Novell to Windows because Winows had active directory(TM)
davecb5620@gmail.com
I work in a school district with over 1200 workstations (with about 200 being obsolete), and four full time people on the IT staff. One is a former librarian who is in charge of one specific program (which is down half the time), one is her secretary, the head honcho is a former english teacher who managed to network macs with apple talk 18 years ago (but hasn't upgraded her skills since), and her secretary. They occasionally hire consultants to fix broke stuff, or run more network cable, but they won't take advice to get rid of the 10-base hubs that are running our network (they had problems with a switche 10 years ago). I know there are knowledgeable and well functioning IT departments out there. I take their advice all the time on how to run the two small networks under my control. My solution has been to start an education campaign with the superintendant and school board members as I run into them, explaining how things are done in other distrcts, and what problems they don't have, and how the current IT department's excuses are not founded (without directly blaiming or attacking them).
If they don't have that, nothing else matters.
I reckon using his name in his email (raymond simms?) was probably a mistake. Do you think his IT guys have taken away his internet yet?
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
When IT does goes to pot, its usually a management /money problem. IT knows what to do to get the ship righted and the IT grunts are probably just as frustrated as the customers. Find out why IT is short staffed, with a dwindling budget. Instead of telling IT what they all ready know, bring IT into fold and they will tell you where the mis-management is. With out corporate backing, IT will disolve into choas until a disaster occurs that is more expensive to fix than all the nickel and dime cost cutting has saved. Until then dont alient the staff, most of them on are your side.
So, senior management doesn't see the value in IT investment, keeps pushing needed upgrades to the next budget cycle and that's IT's fault? WTF?
I explain it's like being a car mechanic. You can pay now for incremental improvements, or you can pay more later with a complete system upgrade. Then when their database server goes tits up because it's overloaded I can trot out the memo and ask if they remember having that conversation.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"Medical professionals *seem* to be a prime target for fleecing among computer folks "
No, doctors and lawyers are the worst with inflated expectations. Their throught process is such:
"I am highly skilled and competent and you are just a computer jock. I will pay you as I pay a plumber and then bitch and moan about how on my home computer I could do this in 10 minutes"
Then you get doctors trying to justify this stance as "Well, I'm responsible for human life, so you understand why I'm smart and better and why the hell should I pay you for stuff my kid does at home for free".
Don't even get me started on lawyers. They're like doctors but twice as bad. They don't even have the the "...these hands have been touched by god..." excuse to be an asshole like a doctor.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
No sig for now.
More decommissioned hardware available for personal use. ;)
Given that you've already identified several areas: Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems, you seem to be on the right track. You might ask the head of the IT to come to your office and set up a new system as 'Joe User'. You can ask the CEO to set up a small group of about 5 people to evaluate the IT department and report to the CEO in 3 weeks the areas for improvement and how to measure their effectiveness. CEOs are interested in their department effectiveness, particuarly if they are costing time and $$$ internally. Network File Storage: - Minimum 4gb storage per user, not including system backups - The mapped drive to the storage should be established as part of th login process, not an individuals machine Backup systems: - nightly backups of systems, something like Replicant or Connected DataProtector - system images for 'standard' machines - install packages for applications that can be pushed across the network to help restore machines that crash - a 3-year cycle to replace all desktop machines Security: - enforced policy of password changes every three months, with a 8-character minimum and 1-year history of old passwords Tech Support: - support that answers the @#$%^& phone during normal hours, and if they can't because of load, will call back within an hour. If this cant be done in-house, get outside support for non-critical things, like MS-Office 'how-to' help - Tech support that can reset passwords - remote access that requires an RSA key-fob (one of those number sequence generator things)
...I hate to say it, but if you "users" know what's good for a company. Why don't you axe the entire IT department and take the reigns yourselves? After all, you guys seem to think it can't be that hard and can't or don't want to understand that most IT departments are understaffed and saddled with crap software that YOU asked us to buy. While we're on the topic of crap software, lets point the finger where it really needs to be targetted: Management. They are the people who hamstring us by making clueless decisions that are totally the opposite of what we recommend.
;P
Trust me, IT folks try their hardest to keep these systems running, but if your company is like most, you don't have your own software development department. Instead, you have to buy software from some rinky-dink company that claims (to the management folks who make the bad decisions) that they are god's gift to your market segment. They also have their slickster sales guys shower YOU with the same claims and make sure you talk to only their happiest customers. But, when the program gets implemented onsite and it sucks ass it becomes OUR (I.T. that is) fault because everyone else who is using it has no problems. (Well... everyone that the sales folks directed you to even though we warned you after we tested the software and found it to be lacking.)
And then after we're into using the crap software for a year or two, you guys start talking about wanting to stage a revolt and go to the software from our current vendor's competitor because you hear all kinds of raves about that from users at other companies. After we've spent a lot of money just trying to support this bag of crap. Do you even have any idea how much strain YOU put on the IT department when you want to use software that is severly flawed simply because it's what other people in smaller environments (ie. lab situations or really small businesses) like? Do you realize that every time we have to fix some gigantic steaming pile of mess that the software created, we have less time to do some things that really matter to you guys? As soon as we ask for more staff to try and keep up with the steady flow of crap we're told we can't have them because we're running out of money. Well... until the next big piece of software comes along that management is dying for.
I'd say that before you stage a revolt, you might want to consider a more moderate approach and ask the IT staff what THEY need in order to improve the quality of their work. Don't be surprised if you hear: "more staff", "more hours", "more influence on software purchases" and "more testing that actually involves end users in real time with real data instead of these closed lab situations that never bring out problems that would occur in every day real life situations". Ideally, the best appraoch would be to try a temporary divorce. The IT staff get two weeks off from maintaining the looney bin and the most "technical" of the regular staff get to run IT for those two weeks. (No hiring of temps or consultants either. Since you guys want to run IT, this is your chance. Be honest about it.) Then we'll see who is incompetent. At worst, the arm chair techs will screw things up enough where we'd need to restore from tape on a few systems. At best, they'd screw things up that would only require a few reboots to fix (more likely although you'll all be screaming that the systems are totally dead). And (unlikely but possible) we might find a few new folks in house that could be added to IT to help increase our staff. So what do you say, you want to put your money where your mouth is?
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It sounds like your IT department has two major problems: they are underfunded and suffering from low worker moral. If your competent employees have not already fled the company, or never got employed due to low wages, improving the departments funding and employment levels could go a long way to improve the situation.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
It sounds like your company has serious management issues, which has already been mentioned several times in this thread.
Don't assume that IT is incompetent just because they won't bow to your every whim. Many times IT can't do what you want because of policy, or because doing so would be a "bad idea".
Unacceptable server down time - Uptime costs money. If you want 5 nines of reliability you'd better be prepared to budget Texa$$$ money for it.
Maxed network storage - SANs aren't cheap. You can get a couple hundred terabytes for 50k but implementing it and managing it will cost you even more. You'll save money in the long run but the upfront costs are high.
No backups systems - Your CIO should be fired. Backups should be top priority for any business, what are you going to do if your database server loses a disk and takes down the whole system with it?
Yes it's work, but it's out of the ordinary work.
IT != Data entry clerks. If you really want them to do that then pay the for it and bill the customer. That's the way it works.. customer wants something special they get a bill. Sales of course keep wanting to give stuff away for free (I've been in companies where sales would day *anything* to get the sale, whether it was physically possible or not - and they'd always charge to undercut the competitors even if we made a loss on the deal).
"The IT department at my company (approximately some 500 people) is showing signs of incompetence"
On one hand, don't forget that IT people aren't all geniuses. We don't know everything, and those of us who proclaim to really need an attitude adjustment. Systems fail, downtime occurs. Good IT departments manage things well and fix failures quickly.
On the other hand, if your IT department really is a bunch of boobs, then you have a right to complain. Just keep complaining until those on top listen. It might take a board member experiencing a whole day without their e-mail or computer because of a screw-up, but incompetence is almost always revealed.
As a company grows, bad hiring is more probable. Bad hiring is made worse by the need to hastily replace IT people. Since most IT people still hop jobs with incredible frequency (2 years is the average, I think), they often leave their former employers with an immediate need, and few qualified people to fill the job for the salary they're asking. Also, the transient nature of IT workers means they don't necessaruily understand the way your business uses the commodity technology skills they have.
I firmly believe that the only US IT people who will have jobs in the future are those who can be responsive. It's definitely time to for us let go of some of the iron-fist, "we are God, you are stupid users" mentality. Those who do, and can play nice with the business side, will be rewarded with regular salary increases and stable employment. It's going to become even more important to retain IT talent in the "proprietary" sections of your business when you farm out all the commodity stuff (backups, server admin, etc.)
PHB: You must learn that change is good. Any questions?
Dilbert: Question: Why don't you triple our pay? That would be a change.
PHB: That would not be in the best interest of the shareholders.
Dilbert: Okay, why don't you work for free? That's a change that's good for shareholders...or would it be better to admit that change can be very bad?
Wally: My favorite part was when he yelled, "Stop ruining my slogans with your logic!"
Content Management System: A pretentious way of saying "text editor."
As a member of IT departments in the past and a current (6 year) consultant, I say leave us the fuck alone. It's not up to you, as the user, to maverick it and plant your measly pathetic flag in whatever ground you think is right and then try to change the IT department to your stupid assumptions as to what you think it should be.
Your company has 500+ IT people right? Somewhere in there I assume there's a few managers. Be a proper worker and follow the fucking CHAIN OF COMMAND. If you want something different, notify your manager, who will notify their manager, who will notify the CIO.
"As a knowledgable user"... in who's opinion? You think you know enough about IT? Then, why aren't you in the IT department putting your money where your mouth is? Any monkey can tell if a server is out of space or isn't being backed up. That doesn't make you knowledgable.
Seriously, IT people have degrees, certifications and a lot of work to do. We couldn't care less what some wanna-be motherfucking loser like you wants different. If we hear it from our (good) management team, we'll change.
Follow the chain of command.
You give 'em hell!! Speaking as a user, I can say that I could put together an entire server room in a week using off the shelf parts from CompUSA and Best Buy. And it wouldn't cost the millions that most IT departments spend on those elitist devices like SCSI drives, ECC RAM, DLT tapes, Cisco Managed Switches and SANs. The first thing I'd do is build a big system based on the latest gaming system specs (since gamers push the technology envelope) and cram it with ten 300 gig SATA drives. That's 3 terabytes of storage (more than those piddly SANs!) and at a fraction of the cost. Then I'd make sure had a dual layer DVD burner in it for backups. That way WE could have full backups on really inexpensive mediums. When I saw the price of a DLT II tape on an IT invoice, I nearly flipped. They're TOO expensive!!!!1111!!! Then I'd throw Windows 2003 Server on the box to manage all this stuff in one place. A few Linksys or Netgear switches can start connecting the resst of the networks together and they'd be WAYYY cheaper than the highway robbery that Cisco foists on us through our IT elitists.
The workstations would be even easier. I'd buy everyone the $300 AMD specials with Windows XP Home. That way they'd be more familiar with the OS since they probably have XP Home at home too. Just plug them into the network and away they go. They can all get their IP address from the Linksys router like I do at home and then they're online easy as pie. Don't need to get out any stupid manuals to manage Cisco switches or anything like that. All the gobbledygook is just for elitist snobs. For restoring a PC if it gets hosed, I'd just use a copy of Ghost. Sometimes you can even get Ghost for free if you buy the right hard drive. Just hook up a laptop with Ghost to a PC using a USB cable and make an image to burn onto a DVD. The next time the PC needs to be revived, just grab the DVD from the pouch on the side of that box, pop it in the laptop and Ghost the other way around! Easy as pie and FAST too!!
In this day and age, what company with a competent IT staff does it's own e-mail? I've been trying to tell the folks in my IT department to ditch our mail server (some antiquated Unix based thing that nobody really likes) and just let everyone get Hotmail accounts. Now that GMail is around, that's an option too since they give you a pretty comfortably sized mail box as opposed to the meager offerings of the clueless IT staff. E-mail should be able to hold whatever I put into it no matter how much or how big. Period.
The voice over IP thing is easy too. Just buy a VOIP box from Linksys and get a Vonage account for every group of ten users you've got. You'll need multiple DSL lines to do it, but that would still be far cheaper than having one of those snobby PRI or T1 lines to carry your voice traffic. Speaking of which... why on earth is anyone using T1s and T3s these days? They're so costly and they don't perform anywhere near what I get on my cable modem at home. Just get cable modem and be done with it. Your users will thank you forever.
Barron, I'm glad you gave me a chance to get that out there. The users need to know the truth.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Amazing. An obvious troll makes the front page.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Fine, we'll give you all of the precious SLA agreements you want. In return however, you have to abide by the strict SLA that we, the IT department, are forced to implement so that we can ensure compliance with your SLA. Trust me, you won't like what we have to write to protect us from the likes of you.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
Institute a fake company-wide budget so each department can pay each other department for the services they provide. Set the prices for services equal to what it would cost to outsource. Tie each department's "profit" to a yearly bonus for that department separate from each other department. Then you can only demand what you're willing to pay for. You'll be surprised how service will improve when you can offer a tip.
But they won't listen.
If you change jobs, please wear a green tie and blue shirt on your first day. When I'm called to install a PC and I see the green tie, I'll know that the time has come to move on.
you remind me of the jerk that works for one of my clients. He's not allowed to call tech support any more.
Wow guys, it seems that there's a lot of hostility going on here...
I understand the frustration we all feel when we work for companies that undervalue and overwork their IT department. I, however, work at a place that underworks and overvalues us techies so I'm coming at this from a slightly different perspective. I think when these standards are developed it is imperative that management meet with the IT people to get their input as well as to open up a discussion on what is reasonable and what is not reasonable. It is management's job to tell IT what must be available all the time and it is IT's job to tell them what it's going to take for that to happen.
The bottom line is that you can't just develop an arbitrary list of what to expect from your IT department; it depends on the specific details of your network. You also can't be afraid to talk to the techs; they're usually very nice people!
I work in a large organization with the sort of separation of duties described by the parent poster. It works very well.
Even normal business users need to remember two or three passwords, and programmers might need to remember several dozen, often on systems with completely imcompatible password requirements.
That makes it harder to use a single mnemonic device to remember complex passwords.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
At a previous job, they used IBM's OfficeVision (formerly known as PROFS), which did a fairly nice job of handling calendars, and before that (when I worked at Unisys) we used a mainframe application called OfisLink.
There are lots of mail systems which handle shared calendars, scheduling, etc., but most folks simply aren't aware of the alternatives because "everyone uses Outlook/Exchange"...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Where can I get some of that Microsoft Sales Kool-Aid you've been drinking?
I'm not saying your conclusion is wrong. It may not be worth the short term pain of switching. But there are always alternatives.
The customers didn't want to deal with our pointy-haired-bosses any more than we did, so they began managing from below (sounds like your group) -- setting requirements, deadlines and assigning tasks capriciously. Naturally, our overworked staff was frequently unable to meet these demands even though many of us were working 70-hour weeks in frantic desperation. When customers complained to management about our "poor" performance, management broke out the whips and chains.
At this point point, a few key people (including myself) sought jobs elsewhere, taking with them the knowledge of how all these critical systems were interwoven, and how a bunch of old hardware had been coaxed into performing far beyond it's intended lifespan and capacity. Now, as we look back at our old company there's a pall of smoke rising from the server room, and the pointy-haired bosses have fled the wreckage with their golden parachute payments, and are looking for fresh companies to destroy. Maybe they've arrived at your firm?
So, be careful, and ask yourself why the IT department is failing to perform. I find it less likely that they're all lazy and incompetent than mismanaged and overworked. If so, having another group of self-appointed pony-floggers show up to "motivate" them may not have the effect you intend. By setting yourselves up as technical wizards, you and your associates are likely to be called upon to step up to the plate and run the IT department when your current nerds decide to abandon ship. Have fun!
It's funny because it's true. --Homer Simpson
I work for a major telecommunications company and SLAs seem to work OK for us. In practice, the IT department has a few "canned" SLAs that clients can choose from, and their performance rating and bonuses are tied to how well they meet the provisions of the SLAs.
If you can drop the "us versus them" mentality in a corporate environment and realize that you're actually on the same team, it becomes much easier to draft things like SLAs and both sides are usually willing to cooperate when things don't work out.
(Of course, that doesn't always happen, but the client organization is at fault just as often as the IT organization in these cases.)
i was faced with a similar situation at my previous employer. they had a huge budget that noone took advantage of, a nice stable network running high end network equipment and nothing but the best servers and services when the GM decided he needed to make a budget cut. This budget cut drastically hindered our ability to maintain the system. When a RAID drive went down it took days to get a replacement, a powersupply, weeks! It was down to myself purchasing the hardware personally and getting reimbursed at the end of the month. my obligation to the company was to keep the network and computer systems running in a timely, flawless matter. then, when we were at an alltime low budget that was allready impossible just to get our maintenance through (replacing old tapes, drives, etc.) another budget cut! we couldnt do anything! so of course as described in this article, server downtimes were extensive and unacceptable at best. storage quickly ran out, and things that should have been monitored regularily no longer were because of the admins having to fix other more crutial problems, and it spirals downwards from there. next thing you know, were down to 1 sysadmin (layoffs) no, the company wasnt going under, in fact, sales were at an all time high! I was the last employee to be laid off. and the 1 remaining sysadmin, who was only there because of seniority, and seniority he had at 60 years old, couldnt put up with the workload, his hours were cut, and the server is running very minimally. the users have such crazy space quotas that can barely allow them to store the documents they need for work to counter the space problem, and an employee has been instructed on how to clear out temporaray files and such when there is a space problem. the one thing companys need not to do is cut IT budget. IT is expensive, it runs your business FFS. If your company is in the automotive business for example, would you cut the salaries of your salesmen? no. the salesmen are what bring in the profit, and believe it or not you'd find way less productivity and sales without a computer system.
Recently, some IT folks moved in over the cubicle wall from me. And let me tell you, it's been interesting. For one, they don't like different service calls. They like easy fixes and keep their fingers crossed when they receive a call. For another, they seem to have an us versus them mentality. Their first goal is to cover their own butts. Only after that, will they consider the end user. In fact, I overheard one of them say more or less, "I don't care about my end user. I only care about my job." This makes sense when you think about it. Basically, we need more accountability. If they bring a server down at high noon and halt the productivity of a software team, there should be accountability. If they make a change, requiring a standard S3 password for every account, and it interferes with ClearCase administration, there should be accountability. At present, they ask themselves, "Is my job safe? Will this next action help me or hurt me?" But they don't necessarily ask themselves, "What about the end user?"
>knowledgeable user input :-)
Dude, you had me until that line.
Hysterical!!!!
Do you work at my old job? 'cause that sounds awefully familiar.
I have no tag line
My number one IT complaint is that they make rules like:
... but they will not. It isn't really enough anyway.
no unsupported access/mysql/etc databases, but provide no alternative.
As a manufacturing engineer, I must collect megabytes of data on each unit built to do my job.
I can't realistically have technicians manually enter data in some slow Oracle forms java interface without doubling the cost of my parts, thereby guaranteeing that all of our jobs will go to China.
Some things I could do with a scanner and Oracle's mobile applications... if they would enable that
I really need to use Oracle's Open Interfaces. I understand them. I read the manual. I just need access.
But the answer is no. They don't want the headache, and think that forms is good enough for all users.
So what can I do? My leaders are too clueless to understand the problem. They just demand that I collect all the data so they can later magically get 'six-sigma' data from me.
So I enrage IT by creating whatever databases I need to get the job done. Some of them have gotten nervy enough to delete these production databases, knowing full well they are critical, just to prove their point. I back eveything up to multiple network locations hourly, so I only lost a few minutes of production, but that only makes them madder, as data backup is their job, and I'm using up an obscene amount of disc space.
Too damn bad. I know that my customers are 1. Manufacturing Floor 2. Management that needs good data to make decisions 3. Design engineers, who need feedback on their designs to create next generation products. 4. Customers. IT is not in that list. I am their customer, and a damn demanding one, and rightfully so.
Yes, I'm one of those people who uses 80% of their time. I manage hundreds of production PCs running various pieces of test software written in dead languages with obsolete and esoteric hardware and they need to last long enough for me to replace them with something modern. You can't just walk by and take something with a Metrobyte ISA IO card in it and stick a new box with XP there instead, no matter what your upgrade policy is.
I'm the system administrator for two really different organizations. During the usual work week, I'm managing systems at a small fastener distributorship. During the weekend I manage systems at my Naval Reserve unit (NMCI be damned). There are some similarities between the two that really bear saying. 1) Dedicate yourself to communicating with everybody. You are after all, working in a communications capacity. Your job is to keep all these machines communicating. So keep your department communicating with the users, management, and the guy passing by on the street. Let them know when you will be performing maintenance, let them know when a new machine arrives, let them know when you will be out for lunch, let them know when your taking a vacation. Let them know everything. Everybody gets the impression your doing something, and when you say you need something, people are more likley to connect the problem you've been having with a problem THEY have been having. 2) Make friends with the senior managment. This is perhaps the hardest thing I do. It takes alot of effort, and patience, but by keeping from alienating the decision maker(s), and putting for the effort to keep them close to the vest, makes each day easier. It doesn't guarantee a yes, but it makes the 'no' a lot easier to deal with when it's followed by details like "taxes are due, mabye next quarter." or "I'm thinking of going in another direction, have you ever heard of Linux?". 3) Work ethic, work ethic, work ethic. Show up for work ready to work, and ready to work with people. Cloistering yourself in the office only makes your situation worse (although I understand that the server room is not in the lobby). And getting surly with users (no matter how inane their questions) can only serve to make you look like the loser here. I have reported users for "abuse of company resources" when they called multiple times in a day for the same trouble. But that was an absolute last resort. And only after openly hostile behavior from them. Basically, I use trouble tickets with users as an opportunity to get to know them, and cement bonds with the different departments. 4) After all that, I'm basically left with.... a)Do your level best to keep the uptime counter looking big. b)Own up to mistakes, and fix them. That's all my bosses really want from their IT departments.
Ok I'll bite onto this Troll bait.
I want the Internet to never be down.
I want computers to do what I want them to.
I want 99.9999999999999999998% uptime not 99.9999998%.
I want acces to all printer that I see.
I want Administrator acces so I can do anything I want.
I want my mouse to carry out the execution of my thoughts.
I want to type commands that I makeup and have them work the way I think they should.
I want all blame to be on the IT department.
I want SUID root on remote shares for all my scripts.
I want IT to redo my source when I can't compile.
I want IT to remove security - It gets in my way.
I want, I want, I want----- etc....
This is not the entire list but this is a start.
Maybe my IT department will get off thier butt.
My IT department sits around and does nothing but stare at monitors all day and types in meaningless garbage.
And always speak gobly gop to try to confuse you. Like IPtables, TCPslashIP, Flamewalls and IDS - blah,blah blah.
An IT department of 500 people is astounding. Where I work there were similar issues. A certain department got fed up and formed their own IT group which I am a part of. This got the blessing senior mangement. So far the main IT group is still doing a crappy job but the group I belong to seems to have a good handle on things. people seem to be happy with the service we rarely get the upset user. We even have users whom we arent supposed to support occassionaly try to get support from us because of what they heard.
Bottom line is clamor for the change. It may be A: Mangement issues in the IT group or B: the workers or C: Both and lots of changes need to be made. Be aware that it will take time but make sure the changes are followed thru. It also depends on the influence and ability to change that you have in the company.
and "...Medical professionals *seem* to be a prime target for fleecing".
Phffft, from a medical professional, no less.
I would ask them to vertically organise domain expert groups in their department, with users (domain experts), analysts and IT project leaders at level one, technical analists at level two and programmers at level three. The groups form a single unit of competence. And I always talk about roles, not persons, to be clear.
Then I would horizontally organize formal and informal communication channels at each level, where each level is in touch with its counterpart in other domain units. At each level there is a support team to provide the means to standardize and keep an eye on productivity and focus.
Your IT department organisation can be graphically represented as a field of stacks of three checker discs, with a large sheet of paper thru the stacks at each level starting at the bottom, representing the support and communication channels.
The most important thing is that users are full time member of the groups, are directly involved an take their part of responsability in the IT processes.
There should be no us and them. No choosing sides.
And if ever you need a consultant, treat him as one of yours.
--------
* Sigh *
The IT department at my company
The problem is the director of IT. If he isn't, he should be a VP (to have the power to sit on an equal level with the other departments) and he needs to be effective. That is, he has to be able to sell, not the front-level staff. The users should be encouraging IT to do their job, not hating them when they do it. The manager/VP has 100% control over everything you describe. And, if he can't do it, he should be replaced with someone effective.
Learn to love Alaska
MS-based services consume staff time like it's going out of style. And not just IT-staff, those stuck with such an infrastructure or desktop services lose a lot of productivity due to extremely poor levels of service and frequent outages, even re-starts. Sure the re-boot after a crash is automatic on XP, but you still have lost your train of thought and will have to re-expend a lot of effort just to pick up where you left off. By that point, other time constraints kick in. e.g. a meeting, another project, lunch, quitting time, etc.
MS Exchange may be ok as a calendar system on a quarantined intranet, but once you connect it to the Internet that beast turns into an electronic chernobyl of viruses, worms, warez, porn and videos. Not to mention that it loses a heck of a lot of mail. Even your die-hard MS apologists have to admit that 10%-15% error rate is not acceptable.
There are an increasing number of "Exchange Alternatives" out there for those that bother to look. Yes, MS Exchange is about Calendaring and there are also many separate calendaring tools out there as well. Having separate calendar and mail clients allow your site to choose the best of both.
The basic description is that the IT department is over-taxed, but adding more staff won't help any if the underlying cause is the technology. The MS-Outlook / MS-Exchange is probably the most burdensome and should go first. File storage should move next. Then ease people off of MS Office. At that point, much of the maintenance difficulties will be gone, though you can go that little bit extra and eventually ditch MS Windows. They're there to work, not play games. Evaluating technology based on technical merits rather than how it fits in with admiration of Bill will go a long way in reducing overhead.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I'm sorry, but what you have said is a total stereotype. Look at police and fire departments.
This analogy is invalid unless your fire departments carry their own individual water supplies or the police precincts are responsible for maintaining the roads they use. I'm sure there are other problems with it, but those are the most obvious.
I am a competent and experienced BoFH, available for work. I generally work for small companies and startups, as they haven't any policies or procedures in-place yet. That makes things easier for everyone. I can travel anywhere on this or any other planets (will consider lowering my rate if you provide interstellar travel). I also have over 10 years of experience as a UNIX sysadmin. I come complete with my own laptop, Subaru, and data-grade hatchet. Please contact me at the address attached to this account.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Really, work in a company like that. Luckilly, it's only 5 people, so the 24-port Linksys actually works out okay. This won't be the case for long -- of course...
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
They're very difficult to fix. I work in an IT department for a company with our business people saying much the same thing. We in the IT organization get to feeling very beat up over it. The sad truth is that we have several problems. 1) We are not an IT business, so the IT department is seen by upper management as a cost center and a drain on net revenue, not an asset to be nurtured. 2) Given that upper management doesn't understand IT, they expect to be able to run a 24/7/365 shop on a shoe string budget. 3)The business team and management don't understand that detailed analysis and requirements gathering are essential to project success. They honestly think they can ask IT to give them something "kind of like this" and we'll be able to deliver. All this has resulted in low, low morale and a very high turn-over rate.
My company has made several attempts to get things right, but time after time, upper management has stopped the momentum by getting aggravated at escalating costs and lengthening time lines. They fire the guys making the headway and charge the remaining IT staff to "get to work" with reduced discovery and reduced budget, thus resulting in bad results.
All that said, here is what I'd tell you. 1)Be sure your company (at all levels) understands that good IT is an investiment in time and money. 2) Be sure that upper management and the business team understand that they are IT owners too. The success of a project is dependent upon the non-IT sponsors just as much as it is on IT. 3) Always do good up front requirement and/or service level agreement definition. 4) Always have an open dialog between IT and the business. Get the folks communicating and feeling like one big team, rather than "Us Guys" and "Those Guys". After all, you all work for the same company, and therefore the same goal.
Swisssushi - When the going gets tough, get some tenderizer
If you lock yourself and all IT staff in there when there are serious IT problems people will just assume you have gone home for the day and have left them with a burning ship - so you get frantic and abusive mobile calls instead. If nobody is in the room you lock it - so people will assume nobody is in there if you lock the door (and even if they bother to knock it would be hard to hear in a lot of server rooms).
American Fidelity Assurance Company 1 IT for every 11 employees.
Minnesota Life Insurance Company, 1 IT for every 6 employees.
USAA, 1 IT person for every 10 employees.
Assurant Solutions, 1 IT person for every 9 employees.
Aflac Inc., 1 IT person for every 9 employees.
Vision Service Plan, 1 IT person for every 8 employees.
Ohio Savings Bank, 1 IT person for every 9 employees.
LexusNexus Group, 1 IT person for every 9 employees.
Pennsylvania National Mutual Casualty Insurance Co., 1 IT employee for every 8 employees.
Northern Trust Corp., 1 IT person for every 9 employees.
CNA Financial Corp., 1 IT person for every 6 employees.
Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc., 1 IT person for every 2 employees.
You don't actually mention which company you're talking about. So just in case, here are my recommendations.
1 - Cut them some slack.
2 - Give them all pay rises.
3 - They are obviously under too much stress, reduce their working hours. Send them on a paid vacation to recharge.
I think thats a pretty good start.
Signed,
Paul from IT.
I'm sorry, but I think your statement is ... well, rude. Identity theft is a criminal offense, most IT people won't stoop to that simply to play a prank on someone who treated them poorly.
There are MUCH better pranks you can play on people - like the guy who bought tons of lotto balls on eBay and then rigged up a chute to randomly drop them on his coworker.
I agree that quality *anything* is more expensive than cheap. Sometimes cheap is the best thing, even if it's not the *Right Thing TM*
In terms of quality, so you dropped $1500 on a 300GB drive? OK with me. That's $5/Gb. Pretty cheap. If I want to keep 5 GB of mail, (or anything else) that's only $25 bucks. If you say it needs to be RAID 5 - that's $125 per user for storage. Still pretty cheap. Hardware support/maintenance at 25% is $375/year, and I figure that you can keep almost 50 users on that RAID set (assuming 80% capacity, each user a disk hog like me.)
My point is this. It would be a whole lot more expensive to pay me my rate of pay to delete the messages (multiplied by the total number of users) than it would be to upgrade the storage subsystem.
The problem is that the actual cost of me "cleaning up" my mail and shared disk is not measurable, and there's this nice, clean bill that you get for hardware capex and maintenance which *is* measurable, and someone will complain because *their* budget gets hit with that charge.
Disk costs a lot? So what?
(I'm not trolling - I'm expressing genuine feelings on this issue, but *dons flameproof suit* anyway)
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
There are an increasing number of "Exchange Alternatives" out there for those that bother to look. Yes, MS Exchange is about Calendaring and there are also many separate calendaring tools out there as well. Having separate calendar and mail clients allow your site to choose the best of both.
Out of interest, could you suggest some Exchange server calendaring alternatives. Preferably that allow Outlook calendar sharing. They don't have to do mail. I have to set this up for a small company (c. 8 people) and am a bit scared about Exchange. They would have to run on a Windows server tho, don't have a Linux box in this place.
In terms of quality, so you dropped $1500 on a 300GB drive? OK with me. That's $5/Gb. Pretty cheap. If I want to keep 5 GB of mail, (or anything else) that's only $25 bucks. If you say it needs to be RAID 5 - that's $125 per user for storage. Still pretty cheap. Hardware support/maintenance at 25% is $375/year, and I figure that you can keep almost 50 users on that RAID set (assuming 80% capacity, each user a disk hog like me.)
That's true, but your calculation is missing a few things.
1) If you have 50 users and are already at 80% you didn't plan this upgrade properly, and should be buying a lot more for just the short term.
2) You didn't factor in the cost of adding more servers, a ton of users accessing gigs of data will take forever without more servers unless you are using the maildir format
3) You didn't factor in the cost of purchasing CAL's and licensing server software, as most organizations use Lotus or Exchange.
4) You didn't factor in the cost of increased labor to IT. This stuff doesn't manage itself.
5) The cost of backup (software, tape robots or disks, and backup servers)
6) Extra cost of off-site storage for more tapes or disks
My point is this. It would be a whole lot more expensive to pay me my rate of pay to delete the messages (multiplied by the total number of users) than it would be to upgrade the storage subsystem.
Not necessarily. Read above. There's more to a mail system than just a box with disks.
Disk costs a lot? So what?
This proves that you don't understand IT. As stated multiple above, there is more to a mail system than just the disks. Many companies pay for the mail servers from their overhead budget. And this sinks into the companies profits, guess what? Companies want their profits more than they want you to have e-mail that you will never read from 1992. If you work for a company that can burn crazy cash so that each employee can have a few gigs of mail space, then your IT people are very lucky. In my experience working for 2 different fortune 100's, that's not the case.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
I've been working for Fortune ranked companies for more than a dozen years. I've been in the IT business FAR longer than that. I do understand IT. Most IT people don't get it.
Of course there are more expenses than the actual disks. There's power, SAN hardware, SAN management software, server licenses, server hardware, server virtualization software, server virtualization management tools, network tuning tools to get to my data LAN gear, including routers, server licenses, CALs, and LOTS of people to manage all of that stuff.
Of course the numbers are far higher than the numbers I listed. You have to factor in the growth of email storage, which increases annually, etc. Let's say that my numbers are CRAZY wrong - that they are off by a factor of 10. That's $1250/user/year for storage. Pretty cheap. If the average employee is making $50K/yr, that's $25/hr (not including benefits, but let's make this easy) The labor equivalence is 50 hours. In other words if that $50K/yr person spends 50 hours organizing, filing, archiving, printing, and deleting those "unnecessary" emails, that has burned the $1250 that I estimated for storage.
Let's assume that I'm off by a factor of 30, and the actual cost of storage is $3750, meaning 150 hours for that $50K person for break-even.
You might argue that 150 hours is excessive. I can say that spending time waiting for archiving to complete, or searching archives takes a LOOONG time. wouldn't you rather have me doing productive work than waiting for a process to finish, or wasting my time looking for something that your arbitrary policy forced me to delete?
I submit to you that aggressive deletion means that some work will be redone. Some work will be lost forever, and some opportunities to make the company more revenue will be lost forever, too. Some time is spent looking for that lost data, and that is lost time, too. 150 hours go by pretty quickly.
By the way, even if you limit users to 50MB or 200MB or some other number, you still have the CALs, the LAN gear, the servers, and all the rest. You merely have less DISK, and potentially less servers, but the costs don't completely disappear. All I'm saying is that the marginal cost of data is not significant enough to justify forcing ME to adapt to an IT system. That's ridiculous. Build the blasted thing to adapt to me. IT people don't get it.
Finally, the problem (as I see it) is that there's a BIG bottom-line number associated with the SAN gear and maintenance that hits a single person's budget. That person is measured in terms of how well they manage or cut that budget. If they force costs to other departments, they look good and are rewarded. They frankly don't care whether this is harmful to other departments or the organization as a whole. This is how IT (and every other) business works. Make a problem "somebody else's problem" and you will be rewarded. I don't know of any organization that looks at costs across the whole organization, predominantly because this is extremely hard to measure.
Still so sure that I don't understand IT, or that my opinion is that far off base?
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
>> I submit to you that aggressive deletion means that some work will be redone. Some work will be lost forever, and some opportunities to make the company more revenue will be lost forever, too.
Bingo!.
My company (fortune 500) automatically sends out notices to users with "excessive" shared disk usage. Read "normal" for excessive - We're talking a few hundred meg to get a notice, and users often legitimately have large files in their private folder. Mailboxes default to 20 meg, so don't try to store anything there or you'll get a different 'excessive use notice'
People routinely delete things they really need because IT hassles them and it's easier to just blow it away then beg for more quota.
Some users try to back up their stuff before deletion, but that's usually just by moving it onto another shared drive (d'oh - Those are full too) or pulling it to a local drive. Bad move, there's no backup and a corporate policy of nuking your local drive at the first sign of system instability. You place a call to helpdesk for something and they often smoke the whole drive image overnight, rather than try to fix it. (cost effective, no?)
We (IT) know you can't just buy a consumer grade drive and plug it into the SAN. It costs real money to expand storage, but the costs of *not* expanding your storage as your business grows are pretty much open-ended.
http://request-header.info
Note: these things aren't cheap. Unless one level is proven, don't move on to the next.
For an IT dept., specifically, in order of importance...
-phone service
-a stable, available network
-anti-virus/patching policies
-backup/recovery systems (offsite, and local)
-desktop refresh programs (so you don't have to use the same computer for 10 years)
-email with adequate space
-If you have applications that are internally maintained... plan on replacing them every 5-7 years.
-If you have internal development and projects going on... read the following.
The biggest issue I've found was that management had been 'promoted to their level of incompetence.' Our middle management sucked, and I'm not sure, but it was likely because upper management sucked. (cliche: weak people surround themselves with weak people. Strong people surround themselves with strong people.)
There were enough bright people to do the work. However, the job was never defined and the project was never properly managed. I finally got a good project manager after 3 years (hired from outside). It was amazing what a difference it made. He quit shortly after 1 year (he recognized the futility of it all). I quit shortly after that...
My advice: put in a process (performance reviews (360 reviews, etc), interviewing practices, etc.) for hiring/promoting only EXCEPTIONAL people. Train your managers (there are certifications for them, too). MAKE SURE they have (current) technical skills, too. DO NOT demand constant 'face time' (meetings) with the techies. DO make them understand (perhaps put them through training for) the jobs of the people that they support.
My other pet peave is that companies believe that they can hire a consultant to do new development 'better' than internal people. In my experience 80% of the info necessary to build an application is business knowledge. The other 20% is technical knowledge. Subcontractors have the wrong skill set for new development, IMHO.