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?

Comments

from personal anecdotal experience

[yagu]

Your company may have IT problems if any of the following has happened recently:

• your company has right-sized the work force (could cause loss of corporate memory since right-sizing is usually code for age discrimination
• decided to become a [insert technology here] shop by executive fiat with no input from IT staff (could de-moralize IT staff, they're not going to care much if their input isn't being counted)
• changed the review process (more de-moralization -- they're (reviews) usually not changed in a positive way)
• eliminated bonuses
• implemented mandatory overtime (I've experienced this many times -- it's the best way to instill attitude in an IT organization)
• gotten a new CEO soon to loot your company and run (I experienced this... once I experienced a half million loss in options and 401K it was hard to like what my company had become when the CEO walked away with $500M)
• frozen pension benefits (ditto)
• cut back on medical coverages (ditto)
• implemented a required "certification" process for IT staff (gag)

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...)

Have you thought about...

[tekiegreg]

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.

Re:ITIL

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to post this one as AC, sorry.

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.

The company I work for decided to "implement" ITIL about five years ago. It has improved nothing, and has essentially just served as a different set of buzzwords for managers to use.

What it reminds me of is an article I read about the US military and its "transformational" thing a few years ago. Everyone and their mother was scrambling to claim that their pet project was a great example of a "transformational" weapon, even though they changed nothing about it.

Knowledgeable user input? Yeah Right...

[DnemoniX]

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.

Re:From the non-tech perspective

[sphealey]

=== 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. ===

Only the fire department and the Marine Corps keep enough people on standby to handle any problem presented to them immediately (and even the Marines are a bit tied up at the moment). Every other entity queues, prioritizes, and triages. Your IT department *could* maintain enough knowledgable experts to answer your difficult questions in depth whenever you picked up the phone - I once worked with one that did. That department lasted a little less than 2 years; once senior management figured out how much it was costing they terminated it and replaced it with an outsourcer at 1/3 the cost. 1/5 the level of service, but that was not senior management's concern (and perhaps rightly so).

sPh

Re:What would you demand from your IT users?

[shokk]

Dear ZombieLine,
Maybe your company, like most others, is drastically underfunding the IT department, expecting superhuman performance on less than shoe-string budgets, while every day demanding all new buzzword compliant services and ignoring IT requests for additional warm bodies. Not to mention the fact that you are using high maintenance Microsoft Outlook type services while surfing for pr0N and jam packing your mail server full of the latest Happy Fun Tentacle Rape Party videos that everyone is mailing around.

Unacceptable server downtime? Are you clustering critical services?

Bad backups? Chances are your company is very content with single tape drives that the sysadmins can swap tapes from rather than having a good tape library with enough licenses to cover all servers with a decent retention time.

Maxed network storage? Are you paying for more RAID disk shelves? Or are you still feeling brilliant telling your IT staff all about how "you can get an IDE 200GB drive for $50 at Staples, so why can't that be plugged into the EMC or NetApp fileserver?"

My recommendation: stop demanding Five 9's of service and stop expecting services to never reboot or need maintenance if you aren't going to fund it. Stop dicking around at being a business and spend money to make money. Otherwise, save everyone time and bend over to your competition now. You can recommend all the fantastic new upgrades and services, but if your company doesn't recognize the value of improved infrastructure services, and an educated staff, you don't deserve to stay in business and sooner or later Darwin will rear his ugly head.

Get your little posse of idiots together an ask senior management why they are refusing to fund the needed changes. You might be pleasantly surprised to find out that they have no friggin clue about how to manage IT. Or maybe you haven't been paying enough attention to quarterly financial reports to realize that your company is experiencing a classic symptom of the death spiral.

Oh, BTW, you're an asshole. You and your 2Live Crew can go fuck off.
Love,
Shokk

I Love Stupid Users

[inKubus]

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.

Re:From the non-tech perspective

[TheRaven64]

I recall another organisation that had a similar policy. Their policy was that you were not allowed to have the a wheel in their cryptographic system in the same place on two consecutive days, and you were not allowed to have the all same wheels in the machine two days in a row (i.e. you had to replace at least one wheel and re-order the others). Something else that could have been described as policy, but was really an part of the machine's original design, was that no letter could map to itself in any configuration. The cryptographic engine was called Enigma, and the organisation that came up with this policy was the Third Reich. Now, I'm skirting dangerously close to Godwin's Law here, but I will continue.

At the same time, a bright young English mathematician named Alan Turing came into possession of this knowledge. He realised that these rules dramatically reduced the number of possible cyphertexts for any given plaintext (and vice versa), making the search space much smaller than it would otherwise have been. As a result of this, he and his colleagues were able to crack the encryption with the primitive computers available at the time.

Arbitrary restrictions on passwords are not sensible. Do not allow dictionary words and trivial permutations of them, since they can be cracked by a simple method, but any further restrictions only serve to narrow the search space for an attacker. The scheme listed means that most passwords will have two upper case letters, two lower case, two symbols and two numbers. This is an almost trivial subset of the number of possible eight character combinations of letters, numbers and symbols.

In summary, whoever came up this this policy is an idiot both for social and mathematical reasons. They should, therefor, not be allowed to interact with either humans or computers.