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Lack of Innovation in IT Holding Companies Back?
bednarz writes to mention that Google's Dave Girouard, manager of enterprise business, is blaming a "crisis" in IT and the "insane complexity" of technology, among other things, for the lack of innovation that could allow businesses to grow. "A lot of things that people think of as core IT functions need to disappear into the ether so that the IT organization can properly focus on the value-added [activities]," he said. "Information security, as critical as it is, needs to be taken care of by organizations who live and die by it, who invest the money, time, resources and staff. Why should every company in the world have to build up their own expertise and have to maintain servers and provide security?"
See any serious problems with this story? Sure! "Lack of content" springs to mind.
It's a simple task to make things complex, but a complex task to make things simple. - Meyer's Law
Google. What a mystique! They can 'innovate' new forms of -
2 .html
r essLan=1230&lan=3
e s/000663.htmlr es/google_email_troubles_continue.html
Cross-site scripting exploits:
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-01-01-n1
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=338
Exposure of personal and sensitive data:
http://www.finjan.com/Pressrelease.aspx?id=1261&P
Data loss:
http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu/MT/vanhouse/archiv
http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/google_featu
Site failure:
http://status.blogger.com/
Privacy violation:
http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html
http://www.google-watch.org/krane.html
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It's the end of the (IT) world as we know it - a riff on Carr's "IT Doesn't Matter" memo.
you had me at #!
I work for a medical device manufacturer that brings incredible levels of scrutany to its suppliers. The parts we receive from them must strictly meet requirements and are carefully qualified. So how is it the same company tolerates the dreck software that comes out of Redmond, pays millions annually for it, and must employ an army of techicians to keep it running? It is an astonishing imbalance.
an ill wind that blows no good
---"A lot of things that people think of as core IT functions need to disappear into the ether so that the IT organization can properly focus on the value-added [activities]," he said. "Information security, as critical as it is, needs to be taken care of by organizations who live and die by it, who invest the money, time, resources and staff. Why should every company in the world have to build up their own expertise and have to maintain servers and provide security?"
It comes down to ownership and renting..
Would you rather own your home, or rent it? Would you rather rent a car or own it?
Thats right, we can pay Google Apps to take care of our network architecture because we cant be bothered with it... Until they perceive a "non-payment".. What happens then when the lights go out? Do the DNS servers stop working, do the samba servers get rm'ed? Or does the master-password holders (READ google) just shut down every network appliance you all are using?
Not smart. Not smart at all...
A company buys enormous data centers, the kind one might use to farm out a business' IT infrastructure needs, and then that company promotes... farming out business' IT infrastructure needs! Whaaa?!
stuff |
The simple shocking ugly truth is that 90% of the problems in the IT industry are caused specifically because of proprietary crap being rammed down peoples throat. Get rid of copyrights and patents (which are a fradulent property right and incentive to begin with), and this problem would be solved in 5 seconds flat.
Just look at J2EE, EJB in particular. For many clients, it'd be cheaper to just write your own custom remote objects system using RMI. Cheaper and a lot easier too. "Enterprise" anything is typically very complicated and poorly documented. It's sad to see how bureaucratic it's become, but a lot of these things are, I think, complicated just to make work for people like consultants. I look at half the stuff that I have to work with, and it's far more complicated to get these huge, unwieldy apps to work together than to write most of the code.
Google illustrates the reason for out-sourcing film at 11.
Duh - Why do you think businesses outsource IT needs?? So they can focus on their core business, not grow an IT staff!
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
Try signing up for Google Checkout to sell things on Google Base... It's a disconnected nightmare process.
Google does search & email well. The rest... right up there with everyone else.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
IT organization can properly focus on the value-added [activities]
Yeah, I could see your point - if you define the function of IT that way. Most people out there though, don't. They see IT as the tech problem-solvers in the business. Fix that computer, hook me to such-and-such across VPN, get rid of my spyware.
If you want to have a group of guys doing value added activities, hire some engineers or more IT staff and define their job responsibilities that way. And once you do, don't bug them with other stuff. If they're supposed to be idea guys, let them do that and that only. Don't interrupt them with your secretary's spyware problem.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The Federal Government, which pays for most of the innovation in the US (directly through r&d contracts, or indirectly through grants) has cut back on its tech spending to free up money for the war.
Best Slashdot Co
More like 'lack of budget.'
How can we address 'lack of expanding?' Whenever someone trots out a Vista post we're reminded there's still businesses out there running on a Win 2000 network because 'it just works' and isn't getting replaced.
I'm sure the poor compitent sysadmin of that 2K network has plenty of ideas how to innovate their network, but they can't requisition the funds for it. Then there's training, dealing with the migration... Sure, it can happen, but no one outside IT sees the advantage in it.
Software is written badly. Seriously. Yes, it's complicated, but by now, home computing (and related devices) should be just that, devices.
I'm an admin.
The server room work-around: multiple servers, physical and virtual, for redundancy. More for software problems, than hardware. It's embarrassing.
And I've programmed. For every decent programmer on a big project, there's 10 lazy ones. Not lazy as in not doing their job, lazy as in take a shortcut here, use an API call that you know leaks memory because it's one line versus twenty. Really just acting human on a boring job. Anything for speedy output and a quick finish - and management encourages this. Often even tells them to do it.
Small crap adds up quickly. API over API. I believe this is why the best projects have a small group of main workers. LLO - limitted lazy overhead. With a bigger group, there has to be an accountability (think buildings/structures/planes) that just isn't happening yet.
Longterm uptime: hardly ever the dev's problem. Testing is boring. New features (whether they're needed or not) are fun.
Everyone knows its a problem, and slowly, I hope it will (continue) to change.
Right now, there's a move to making servers smaller/clustered/redundant. This is good, but it's still avoiding the main issue.
Smart companies read this report and outsource customer data security infrastructure, which after all is just a cost center, but maintain the same old IT staff to protect their own earth shattering competitive corporate secrets.
A Google exec telling companies to outsource IT, is like a Microsoft exec telling companies to use Windows.
Given Google's recent missteps; In a few years, suggesting we outsource core IT functions to Google might be as laughable as suggesting we outsource core IT functions to Microsoft.
Lack of innovation doesn't seem to be holding Google back...
Why should every company in the world have to build up their own expertise and have to maintain servers and provide security? Why do it yourself when you could pay Microsoft to do it for you or outsource it to some other country? Uh, maybe because the data needs to be SECURE?!? Experience shows that outsourcing vital functions leads to those functions being passed down to the lowest-cost provider, with employees that have the least controls and the most incentive to, say, sell your data to the highest bidder. While I do think there is a big need for security consulting, ultimately the goals of keeping tight controls on something and hiring somebody else to do if for you are at cross purposes.
Well, let's follow this guy's logic.
Why should every company have an HR department? Why should every company have a payroll department? Why should every company have to maintain an accounting department? Why should every company have to maintain upper management? Why should every company need people to work in them, or janitorial staff, or mail rooms, or anything?
Let's just go with the NeoFascist extreme, where there is one company that does accounting, one company that does HR, one company does data processing, etc, and every "company" is just outsources each and every kind of work needed to be done to these companies... so executives no longer have to be tied to the office: they can just make three decisions per day, then head off to play golf.
Damn, it's hard werk being a Republican. Cut all taxes! Deficits don't matter!
That's old news Dave. Maybe you need to review some Software Engineering that clearly states most of your time will be spent maintaining a system regardless of what it is.
Like AJAX? Because there are only about 2 very complex programs out there that can run these things. In fact AJAX is a *result* specification derrived from the mozilla DOM/js implementation. So no other program can implement all this insane complexity correctly, unless it is a fork of mozilla or IE. And google does its best promoting those technologies.
Even the tags agree, just google it!
I work at a place where the sales, marketing, payroll, accounting, etc, organizations are for various reasons ("politics") incapable of agreeing on procedures and business rules on their own. When we got a new CEO, my IT manager, a seasoned, slightly Machiavellian good old boy, managed to get himself promoted to report directly to the CEO, and now he and the CEO pretty much run the company. The organizations get business processes embedded in the software IT cranks out, and if they don't like it, TS. Who says IT doesn't matter?
However, I doubt 99% of IT managers could pull this off.
Namaste
blaming a "crisis" in IT and the "insane complexity" of technology, among other things, for the lack of innovation that could allow businesses to grow.
Of course. The people at the top don't understand technology. The people at the bottom that do, don't sell it to the top. The people at the top don't ask for input from the lower ranks to guide change. So there will never be a coherent vision of technology. The largest companies (the non-tech ones) will always be 20 years behind on technology. The people at the top will stick with what was done before and works, even if there are better choices out there. Most big companies are very risk averse.
The whole thing makes sense. It isn't a problem. It is just how businesses work. The only problem is the people that know it could be done better that don't have the patience for a 20 year slow change.
Learn to love Alaska
This is flamebait but the sentiments are common enough to be worth responding to.
Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are not evil. Are they perfect? Of course not. They can be abused like any other rules. But without them you have a situation like that in China where IP is barely respected. Without IP laws it is virtually impossible to do anything innovative because there is little economic incentive to do anything novel. Create something profitable and you'll have thousands of knockoffs quickly follow. There is no value in being first.
Proprietary software isn't necessarily bad if someone is willing to pay for it. It should be a choice as much as possible but if someone is adding value with a proprietary solution (and not overcharging) that's not a bad thing. The problem comes when a proprietary solution controls basic infrastructure and utilities. (ala Windows) Then you have a serious problem that really can hamper innovation.
Are there problems with the current patent/copyright regime? Sure. They've been discussed here to death. Patent terms are FAR too long given the pace of the industry. Defensive patent portfolios are a serious issue. "Business process" patents are an abomination. Patents are granted on things like software where copyright is more appropriate. Copyright terms are ridiculously long and too supportive of corporate interests. Lots of problems. But they also create a lot of incentive for very productive and innovative work that would otherwise not exist.
"But open source will fix this" goes the cry. No it won't. Open source doesn't do away with basic economic principles. All open source does is shift where is is possible to make a profit to arenas which (hopefully) are less damaging to society. It's a good thing but it not only doesn't eliminate the need for IP, open source (in the GPL definition at least) depends on copyright laws for its very existence.
I agree. Much of IT work (almost everything I see around me) is recreating, redoing, and reinventing things that already exist. Some of that duplication is useful (to avoid monocultures, for example), but how many web fora, AJAX frameworks, customer relationship management packages, accounting apps, programming languages, hardware drivers, etc. etc. do we really need?
If even 50% of the effort spent on duplicating old things was spent implementing new things, a lot of progress could be made. It's not really like there's a lack of good ideas to implement, either.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The way I see it is that you have trade offs. You can make things "simple" like Microsoft does by having software that makes assumptions about what you want to do. If you have minimal and non-specific needs, then you won't have much of an issue. You'll also be able to get away with less skilled workers to accomplish your basic goals. But if you want to do something very specialized and the assumptions don't support it, then that approach will get in your way. And your less skilled workers will become a detriment if you need to move to something a bit more complex.
On the other side of the coin you have other OSes (*nix OpenVMS and others) that have a good deal more flexibility in terms of allowing you to do virtually anything. But this will require more skill in your workforce and natually more complexity. There is not currently a way to have less complexity and a high degree of flexibility and power. There just isn't. Even Microsoft is learning that lesson as they add PowerShell (previously Monad) to Exchange 2007. They've finally seen the light that what you really want is a set of powerful and small tools that do one job well (the CLI) and then you layer your "ease of use" on top of that. So I expect that future MS products will probably earn the gripe of being "complicated" by less skilled people who entered the IT industry in the 90s as paper MCSEs.
There's no way around it. Computers ARE complex machines and they become even more complex when you want to do something really unique and innovative. This is why there is no equivalent of Exchange on the Mac OS Server platform. Zimbra is about the closest thing and it's not exactly friendly. But if you're a real IT guy, that's not a problem.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The Google Application Service... What do you reckon? $20 per month per seat? Something like that?
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Because companies have are afraid of risk. To use something that is new and untried, and thus could cause mission critical issues, ie. email failure, is to risky.
He's right about the problems.
It's not clear Google is the answer.
He doesn't explain how THEY deal with complexity except by throwing money and servers and data centers at it - which is pretty much how everyone else deals with it (and which is self-defeating eventually).
Self-defeating - almost a definition of the human condition.
Take IT in small business - or don't. Don't even get me started. I'm constantly getting clients who complain to me how long it takes for me to solve their problems. While I don't say it directly, the real issue is that EVERY small business using computers has done it wrong from day one. If they hadn't screwed up from the beginning, they wouldn't need to call me to straighten out their mess.
I doubt there is ONE small or medium business that hasn't screwed up. They bought the wrong machines, they bought the wrong OS, they bought the wrong application software, they bought the wrong networking hardware, they set up everything wrong, they didn't plan anything, they didn't ask anyone how to do it, they don't train, they don't back up, they don't maintain anything, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
Then they wonder why it takes a tech two days to do something as apparently simple as rebuild a PC.
It's because they are SO fucked up NOBODY could have done it faster.
NO human can take responsibility for their actions.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
- Servers, e-mail, security, and whatever else "Google Apps" offers now or in the forseeable future is a small portion of any company that has any kind of serious IT going on. Most companies have a lot of custom apps, or at least highly-customized "off-the-shelf" solutions. I don't see Google offering a solution to reduce costs in that area.
- Any cost savings from outsourcing will not translate into increased corporate R&D. The PHBs and bean-counters will just give themselves raises.
- The PHB raises are not just because of greed, but because "forward-looking" on today's Wall Street means the next quarter -- thus no R&D.
- The biggest barrier to innovation is corporate culture. The Google exec even touts that as a benefit within Google, but fails to mention it as a barrier in companies other than Google. I still remember the first time many years ago that I made what I thought was an innovative suggestion within a Fortune 500 company, and then hearing the response, "that's nice to have," and feeling flattered. Only a few minutes later I came to realize that in corporate-speak "nice to have" really means "not nice to have" because "nice to have" is meant to mean "it's nice to have but not needed to have, so we won't be doing that".
- Sarbanes Oxley. Nothing much else happens in the IT departments of publicly traded companies these days except for SOX compliance.
- Innovation is easier when everything's in house. Having servers, e-mail, security, etc. outsourced creates barriers to deep integration and high degrees of customization.
Despite the wrongness of the Google exec's assertion, it will be well received by PHBs because they'll get to cut costs while simultaneously pretending to be in favor of innovation.Anybody who's actually shelled out for real enterprise shiteware as opposed to something shrinkwrapped at Best Buy knows that renting and owning are essentially equivalent. We "bought" Remedy and Siebel, but still have to pay huge costs to maintain them, and in my judgment our software is LESS secure and available than if we were running all this crap as a service, because we are much less likely to keep everything patched and up to date. Mostly because IT doesn't like working every weekend from 1 AM to 8 AM Sunday mornings, and because most enterprise shiteware is so poorly documented and buggy that keeping it patched is a huge risk, almost as much as not patching it.
Another excellent example is email. For years management cried "waaah - we can't outsource email - information going outside the company, waaah!". Then they started getting 100 spams a day and spam-catching turned into a 2 FTE job in our 150-person company. Mail dies every week or two or under the load of comstant mailbombing, reconfiguration, and patching. Now management's opinion is slightly different, and they are turning an eye towrd outsourcing it to one of the many vendors that is nearly 100% effective at spam-blocking..
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I blame Software Patents.
IMO, SW patents are propably the only type of patent that has such a low value (as in $) that nobody would refer to it to improve or add value to an existing project, expired patent or not!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
This one is just a troll.
Self serving.
Is the reason I don't hear it often these days that it's just assumed?
Since bandwidth became so cheap. The same way road and rail made factories and supermarkets inevitable. Centralisation of services makes huge economic sense. Bye bye lots of developers and admins... We're seeing the end of the cottage industry. There are basically going to be four options for existing IT practitioners.
1: Get out there and compete with Google. Build your own data centres and application services.
2: Find a niche they aren't filling.
3: Build/write a Google killer.
4: Do something else entirely. Basket weaving or similar.
Yeah, won't happen, can't happen, people wan't personal service, don't trust data, blah blah blah... My counter argument? Walmart, Tesco etc. Bandwidth has made this inevitable.
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As someone who provides network security services for a very large university I would like to voice my opinion on this subject. When one company is allowed to become very experienced in a subject and provide that experience to a large audience the one thing that is often overlooked is the signifigance of a flaw in that service. Case in point, Cisco routers: Cisco routers move data around the internet, their penetration is everywhere, you can always find trained people to run your routers. That is all good. A vulnerability in Cisco IOS however leaves much of the net vulnerable...bad. So if 25 companies use the services of www.imasecuritypro.com (fake URL) and imasecuritypro hires someone who lacks competency or worse yet lacks scruples 25 companies are suddenly in peril.
How about one of the causes being me not wanted to get get my ass sued off by a patent squatter whenever I say %quot;Look what I just made".
Be gone from my sight or prepare to feel my flaming wraith!
I find it funny how the tags for this article are "Google" and "it" which spells out "Google it". Mod me informative, OT or funny you say? hard to choose? ;)
Not that it is entirely related, but did anybody else think of "The Net" when they read the summary?
The grandparent is not flaimbait. Patents and copyrights (by definition) force the market to center around the control value of innovation instead of the service value. Now all of a sudden people wonder why there are so many incoherent solutions, well WTF? The notion that invention and innovation would dry up without them is simply false and ignorant. Lawyers, buearucoracies, and governments are good at controling things, inventors are good at inventing things and providing solutions. Patents and copyrights do not help inventors. Maybe they help one or two every once in awhile, but other than that they are crap.
The other ponts are poor. Should we say that it is OK for a king to control peoples speech as long as he is reasonable about it? No, he has no right to that kind of control at all and any abuses are fair gaim to use as proof of that. Failing to associate the problems caused by copyright and patent to their nature is irrational. All those abuses you describe are simply copyright and patent being brought to their logical conclusion, it only takes a little common sense to see that. Copyrights and patents are not incentive, not property, but government imposed controls on invention and information that have no place in a free market or a free society.
Incentive, property, protection? What a crock!
Monopolies provide great efficiencies for society, once the technologies have been developed. But once market dominance is achieved, it isn't as cost effective to develop new technology as it is to hinder all competition. Thus, to make a longer story shorter, I'm pretty sure there should be a tax on initial sales of products containing any bit of proprietary information (unless it's government-classified technology). The tax should probably be ramped up to a level of around 30-40%, and the proceeds should be used to fund public domain research that is free to commercialize (not GPL-licensed) to compete with the proprietary product that was taxed. Things are upside-down, with most people employed to develop private rather than public technology. The monopolies can make due with even fewer private-technology researchers, because each one is a risk to proprietary information leakage, anyway. Publicly funded public domain research would greatly increase utilization of the workforce, and it would be great for healthcare research!
Because every company in the world is unique. This means no two companies are alike, even if they seemingly work in similar domains.
To achieve the ultimate efficiency, one has to customize, AND keep an in-house skilled IT department. Outsourcing to a one-size-fits-all joint just is not efficient, although it might be better in budgetary sense. But what is your core business - making budgets or making whatever your company exists for?
To outsource things just means you trade your own efficiency to those companies who by chance happen to fit the outsourced support's organization and methods of work. In other words, you potentially hurt yourself if you outsource, but your gain is very little even in the most positive situation.
Next question.
. . . just try having the U.S. Government as a customer.
Innovate? These people have only one thing on their minds: collecting their cushy civil service retirement checks.
I think it more of a lack of standardization that holds companies back. So many companies have to design this so that can integrate seamlessly with such and such. Where I work, we've got a few database systems. we have to use a complex activeX control thru windows IE to access these databases (running on linux) just to do our job, when it'd have been far easier to just have all the machines running linux, so you wouldn't need all the extra mess in the way.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Robin:Holy crap batman, we hired incompetent staff members, better outsource!
Batman: But if we outsource all the geeks will know where the Batcave is and they will steal our technology!
Robin: Your ideas suck Batman.
Batman: You are an incompetent fool with no foresight.
Robin runs off crying, having lost all remaining respect of his mentor
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
This is actually a crisis of money to back good ideas. A great VC guy would set up a system where engineers and techies could send in the ideas and then have the VC try to back it with good business ppl. As it is now, an engineer has to have the idea, develop it, and still line up their own business guy who will probably take 80% of the company for themselves.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
5. Go back to school, get PhD in anything, apply for job at Google as a janitor, and Profit!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I work in the opposite environment where no one who is salaried by the Parent Company is permitted to do anything other than manage vendors who manage our business. Ironically we are a company dependent upon software performance.
We don't actually know what our servers are doing for us. Everything has to be funnelled through the contractors as a price. If they left, we wouldn't have anything to call a business.
Perhaps some aspects can be turned over to companies that specialize in something. But there's a dark side to this too.
This is similar to saying I can't live alone. Well yes you can live alone, the caveman were able to do so can you. Sure now we have these new fangled devices like cell phones, e-mail, and motion pictures on the puter, what ever that is but is it really IT's fault you can't understand them?
The simple fact is IT is normally seen as one thing "technical support" and technical support usually means "my program is not working". I was hired into a couple IT departments, one at a finance company and one at Harvard business school. Harvard business school only wanted 1 thing, for me to do Technical support and I was happy. There was an entire web interface group and a program group and so on. That's fine.
On the other hand the finance job expected me to be a DBA, a software engineer and tech support for 24 thousand dollars a year. The fact is those jobs are NOT easy for one person to do, and then to expect all three of the IT staff to do all three jobs (they expected 3 software engineers to be working at times) you just run into problems. For some reason during the four monthes I worked there our projects were late. And this doesn't even get into the fact that the original program we were replacing took "12 guys in india 6 monthes to do" and they had 3 guys here who only got 3 monthes to replace it from scratch. It doesn't take in the fact that in that room there was a total of 4 years total experience, and that there was no real oversight because the person in charge of us really didn't know anything about IT, luckily she wasn't pushing us hard. Of course the VP was always pissed at us, which really helped us feel good about our job.
The big picture though is there isn't a lack of innovation, there's a lack of possibility or drive to innovate. If you're spending your whole day working on Windows bugs and virii how are you going to program or look at new technology? Google likely saw a problem similar to this and started there 10 percent time. That 10 percent wasn't just for new innovations but stuff the people wanted to work on, so now you don't have to do bug fixing or crap like that, instead you can take 10 percent of your time and work on innovations, and you'll want to do it because you choose the area.
The point is simply this. If you completely structure your IT department to the point where they don't have time to innovate I can guarentee they won't innovate at least not for you. Scheduling them for an 8 hours day with 8 hours of work, meetings and interuptions means their day is shot, not that they'll work 12 hours.
Of course that's abhorant to some managers that IT won't kill themselves for your company but the simple fact is after 8 hours of crap it's really hard to innovate something new even if it's needed.
Lack of Innovation in IT Holding Companies Back?
I see... IT holding companies are becoming less innovative. Again.
IT is a cost of doing business, just like sales and marketing, why the suits want to farm out everything they do not understand themselves is never understood by those that actually do the work.
It's because the "suits" mostly come from a background of S&M (sales & marketing) and have a deep-seated resentment being at the mercy of in-house IT from days of their pasts. As they worked their way up thru the corporate ladders and finally made the big time after almost all of them having "payed their dues" coming up from entry level sales positions in their career beginnings, most of them have sworn personal oaths to never ever allow the geeks to have an upper hand over them again. They carry this psychology into the senior positions when they finally become VPs, CEO's etc., and outsourcing of IT is one of their revenge mechanisms. They genuinely gloat with sick pleasure inside when they watch the dismantling of their formerly internal IT operations.
At least this is what I've seen 5 times over in the almost 20 years and 5 corporations I've worked at during my career in IT.
Ahem: Privacy.
The problem with using Google tools is that the data that goes into them is no longer "yours" in that it resides soley on your servers, your systems, etc. Google may claim to use this only for special needs, etc but the bottom line is that businesses live and die by their internal info and a combination of good sense and securities laws forces most of them to keep internal documents internally. As such using external storage of docs or google storage is limited by the extent to which they can trade that data away without losing their jobs.
Try telling your boss in a publicly traded (or worse yet private) company that what you should do is put your corporate secrets into someone else's hands, and that someone else specializes in mining and sharing information.
"Information security, as critical as it is, needs to be taken care of by organizations who live and die by it, who invest the money, time, resources and staff."
Security guru Bruce Schneier thinks the same way - which is why he founded a company to do exactly that.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
How is a company supposed to innovate if they outsource their staff? Solutions that are honed to very specific company needs can only realistically be achieved by staff that is there who has the business's interest in mind. Outsourcing is a step backward for innovation, not a step forward. Taking security as an example, since it's in the headline of the article....my team has saved the company quite a bit of money, time, and effort ... and is able to put management tasks down to less-skilled operations staff rather than have us involved by coming up with a custom firewall/vpn solution built around iptables and openswan. It works flawlessly at numerous branch office sites, and we even use it internally to segregate networks. Any outsourcer would not only provide less effective service in general, but would have used expensive to license and support hardware and software that likely is a real pain to manage.
Oh goodie. Google wants to enter the business EDS, IBM and hundreds if not thousands of others have beaten to a bloody wasteland: outsourced commodity data centers. But Google's entering it without the deep government and business contacts that really make these things into profit centers. We've seen this pitch for forty years; there's really nothing innovative about it now.
See: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/24/151823 1 "Why Don't More CIOs Become CEO?"
Having worked in several IT shops it's very clear that, for many businesses, the day-to-day maintenance is dragging down the ability to innovate.
;)
The answer is not outsourcing, it's differentiation and adoption of IT functions in other business areas. Delegate account administration to HR, since they're in charge of adds/moves/changes for staff anyway. Complex security? Script it or document it, and have your sysadmin deal with the exceptions only. HR begins to discover the employees who can't ever remember their passwords, and somehow those people disappear.
PC Issues? Blue Cross had a great solution to cover the 80% of the non-power-users: Re-image your PCs during an acknowledged downtime at least once a month. (I think BCBS was doing it every Sunday night) Push back down all the apps (based on their group membership) that they use to do their jobs, along with the profile/settings transfer wizards if you want to be nice. Keep their files and settings in their home directory, where they need to be for backups anyway. Most Windows stability/speed issues disappear.
User training issues? One person per department or team group is designated as the app admin for that group's apps, and is paid extra for that function. Got an Excel/Access/great plains question, go see the guru in Finance. Got a PowerPoint question, see the Sales guru. Or make a training department who's goal is too serve as power users for each app that's under the corporate umbrella, and attach that department to HR or an Administrative function.
This kind of day to day stuff shouldn't be a protected IT function. More often than not, if you farm it out, the business will get the answers to questions that are holding them back, and IT can focus on the good stuff.
jb
I'd be an enthusiastic supporter of outsourcing enterprise services, such as moving corporate email to Google mail. That is if Google would hire someone for enterprise sales and they'd return their fricken phone calls.
That might be a good start.
Google goes to the trouble of running the mail servers, providing security and spam filtering. It be easier to leave the mail services to them and dump that bloatware security horror freak show Exchange/Outlook.
Girouard promoted the software-as-a-service model, saying companies should join this growing trend of outsourcing IT tasks, even if it means trusting third parties with sensitive information.
Half the corporate users I know are forwarding all their email to Gmail anyway to get around the Exchange space limitations now. It's just insane to running parallel systems.
Maybe the first step in that innovative process should be returning your damn phone calls, Dave!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Many companies farm out sales. I can think of a couple easy examples.
First is manufacturers. Many use indepenent sales reps (manufacturer's reps) rather than an in house sales staff. They also use distributors who handle product sales to retailers.
Next is travel related businesses. They use all sorts of commission based plans to farm out their sales.
There are generic sales firms that will sell *anything* for a commission. You give them the leads and they will hit the streets. I've dealt with those guys. They are mercenary.
Funny, IT was scrounging and asking users to deinstall Visio so they wouldn't have to pay through the ass for a license upgrade. Microsoft's sleezy business is based on artificial software scarcity. $70/desktop. What a crock. Thanks fanboy.
an ill wind that blows no good
My question to you would be, what do these outsourcing firms typically charge a company, vs. hiring a person (or multiple people) to do those roles themselves?
... like phone support, or even your receptionists.) People employed directly by you have much more motivation to put forward a positive image of your business to your clients or customers. If they're outsourced, you're at least 1 level removed from them. (If your firm fires the outsourcing company, those employees may well go on to work for another customer of that outsourcing firm, vs. definitely being out of a job.)
As a general rule, with every extra layer "in the middle", you add cost. (EG. A given firm performing H.R. duties will still have to pay market-rate salaries to their employees performing those duties. That means, to turn a profit, they have to charge YOU over and above that salary they're paying out.)
I can see the advantages of scale, in that one firm providing outsourced H.R. for many smaller businesses can get insurance and other benefits usually only attainable by a large company. But if the the yearly expenses a small firm puts out for this are too high, it doesn't add enough value to justify outsourcing them.
Things like janitorial work are usually outsourced because it's unskilled/low skilled labor, which comes relatively cheap - and it's a job that only takes someone maybe 45 minutes to 2 hours a night to do for you. (It's not often cost-effective to ask a much higher-paid person to do these tasks at their pay-rate, vs. bringing in janitors to do them -- and it makes no sense to hire a full-time or even part-time, 4 hour per day, employee for 45 mins. of actual work.)
But as your tasks get more critical to the operation of your business, outsourcing them makes less sense. (IMHO, this is even true for some relatively low-paying positions, if such positions involve direct contact with your customers
Why should every company in the world have to build up their own expertise and have to maintain servers and provide security?
Because security is largely a people issue, not a technical one. Only a company can know who is friend or foe, not computer chips. It is similar to the front door guard. He/she knows your face. Even if you forge a badge, the door guard may still be suspicious. Spam and hackers are like badge forgers. Similarly, who is given access to what is a business decision, not really a technical one.
Table-ized A.I.
unless it is coming out of a big software house and is associated with a big media and marketing event.
Don't you know there exist many smaller groups that are building out new ideas?
Here are two examples of largly unrecognized and unknown software innovation:
1) the Ofbiz web applications framework and
2) the SmartVariables network-shared-memory framework
Both of these outfits are too small for any big media blitz campaign, yet they still have released outstanding, innovative open-source software. I see all too often execs claiming that there is nothing new. But these folks are not looking in the right places..
1) We'll spare no expense! (to outsource to non employees)
2) We'll spare no expense! (yup, we havn't upgraded our test software or environments for over three years now)
3) staffing cut so low that now projects regularly cancelled, pushed back be cause a key technical person doesn't exist any more or there is ONE where there used to be three. So if the guy is sick, on vacation, in training, gets moved to a higher priority project-- reschedule the project.
4) Load testing before production? Bwahhaha. "Just make it work!" "oh, why is it working differently now that 3k users are hitting it? Well fix it right away!"
Spare no expense... too complicated....
BAH!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So IT directors are just taking their cues from the CEOs (because many of them want desperately to become CEO)...
Just have a look at the Slashdot news article immediately below this one on the front page today. The discussions and responses to it cover in great depth why IT directors never get to be CEOs.
Let's just get rid of IT, Legal, Accounting, Purchasing & HR. Get all the losers who work for us out on their fat lazy asses and get some REAL EXPERTS. Let's have a company with similar ethics to Walmart come in and take over each department. Think this is a joke? Hang around in a public company for the next 5 years or so.
I've been looking for work for a couple of weeks now.
When prompted for questions toward the end of the interview the only thing I can ever think to ask is how receptive management is to input from below*. For all intents and purposes I've been laughed at every time, without exception. You'd be surprised at some of the reputedly innovative and creative companies that have responded this way.
I'm not sure any company really wants to hire thinking people. There's too much risk in it, they might not be as malleable as the run-of-the-mill sheep.
*: e.g., ideas for products, features, marketing strategies, etc.
As a general rule, with every extra layer "in the middle", you add cost. (EG. A given firm performing H.R. duties will still have to pay market-rate salaries to their employees performing those duties. That means, to turn a profit, they have to charge YOU over and above that salary they're paying out.)
However, a paycheck firm can ammortize the tax law changes over far more people and keep costs down that way - volume can drive down unit costs. This means that you could end up paying less.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
As a general rule, with every extra layer "in the middle", you add cost. (EG. A given firm performing H.R. duties will still have to pay market-rate salaries to their employees performing those duties. That means, to turn a profit, they have to charge YOU over and above that salary they're paying out.)
I can see the advantages of scale, in that one firm providing outsourced H.R. for many smaller businesses can get insurance and other benefits usually only attainable by a large company. But if the the yearly expenses a small firm puts out for this are too high, it doesn't add enough value to justify outsourcing them.
I don't think Alcott took any jobs away from my old company. Being our HR director also did purchasing, it quite possible delayed the hiring of our current purchasing staff. I think they are quite competative.
Yes, it comes down to money, but there is efficiency in specializing. I worked for a company that specialized in IT outsourcing. We could do things more efficiently because all we did was it. Also, its easier to "ramp up" for large projects. If you needed to deploy a hundred workstations, 5 of us would show up at your office. Being the 5 of us would be 3 guys from the help desk, an exchange admin and a unix admin looking to get out of the office, all of which have dealt with either your employees calling with questions or fixing your servers, we were all "up to speed".
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
"Control, is why most mid->large companies have a sizable in-house IT infrastructure. Farming out IT to companies like Google, may save money, but it reduces flexibility. It also creates a situation where you completely dependent on a another party. Whats your exit strategy?"
Become a hermit.
It does make sense if you do not need the person for full time. i.e. do you really need inhouse IT if you have only three computers? do you really need inhouse accounting if you get two checks a month? Also outsourcing save on benefits, taxes and bookeeping expenses.
But as your tasks get more critical to the operation of your business, outsourcing them makes less sense.
What is more critical to your business beyond making sure your employees get paid on time? That's outsourced to ADP.
What's more critical to your business than making sure your goods are delivered on time? That's outsourced to UPS.
What's more critical than making sure your computrrs are up 24x7? That thinking was outsourced to Sun or Dell.
What's more critical than having a roof over your head in the office? That was outsourced to whomever owns the building (I've almost always worked at places that rent their office space).
What's more critical than making sure your website's up 24x7? That's outsourced to your colo facility.
I'm sure people think there's a difference between "outsourcing" and "buying a product" but really there's not. I've outsourced the writing of a word processor to Apple (Mac Pages). I've also outsourced the need to grow my own food to Safeway. Likewise I would like to outsource my need for an email admin to google.
some diversification is good from the accidental whoopsies that befall you in reality. I think it is better to have a decent enough healthy mix. Not an insane amount, just "some".
Say you had an all homogenous desktop situtation,hardware side, then wham, hit with all the mobos on the recall list from bad caps or they were all configged with deathstars. Now you didn't know it up front, but now you are looking at emergency replacement of all your hardware in that segment of your shop. Another example, say you are all running the exact same OS or application, one day, the super worm dujour hits across the internets and it turns out you are vulnerable. Again, you didn't know in advance, but that isn't helping right now. Same deal as with the hardware, all your desktops are now vulnerable, perhaps half or something are infected.
Quite frankly nobody can be surprised at this.
The US I.T. skill set basically is composed of a bunch of people that buy "certificate training" on the weekend, and then push OK or CANCEL during the weekday.
Is it any wonder? How can you gain any introspective into systems that are as rigid and brittle as those of a closed source OS like Cisco's IOS or Windows, and really expect your I.T. department to do anything innovative?
American I.T. does exactly what the closed source products tell them to do, and you can't do more than that without the source.
If you want to consider possibilities, that are completely impossible in a closed source infrastructure, take a can opener to your brain and start using and building systems that come with source code and get crackin.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I've worked in a few different capacities in IT, from a system admin at a small start up and now a developer role. It seems consistent to me that IT is always made out to be a villain by upper executives whilst their own misguided decisions can be entirely ignored. I had a friend tell me some of the nightmares in Australia's flight company (the one which sounds like Quantums) before they decided to outsource to Indian companies. The consistent theme was an embarrasing mix of stuff ups between middle managers and upper executives which are never analysed. The summary was that due to a failed outsourced IT project (called e-ticket or something like that) it left them with a shortfall of something like $20m AUD. Solution - outsource your remaining IT to make up for it. From the sounds of it, the higher level IT project manager of the failed project then went on to work for the company that they'd outsourced to - and was given a nice hand shake payout as well. It seems that there are decent IT workers and managers out there, but yeah, there's a lot of dummies who don't seek to automate their work. However, as bad as they are, having non-technical upper executives making whimsical decisions seems to be the biggest cost to companies. Every year, IT is getting easier to do more with less, and should reduce the cost - but to want to entirely outsource? Meh, some people never learn. Why can't people (well executives) take a step back, and realise that we're doing a pretty complicated job - but that it's a necessary job, just like their own one. It's funny, but in Australia they've so completely buggered the IT workforce by pushing down salaries, they've now found a skill shortage - and consequently pay very well for good help. Well boo hoo to employers - they pushed many smart people into different professions, and now they try and whinge about skill shortages. Until people start realising that fostering a good skill base is a good long term strategy on a micro and macro level, this cycle is just going to keep repeating...
We already do that, it's called a board of directors.
You're saying:
and
So, we don't need innovative business processes then?
If you buy into the patent lobby's arguments about "providing incentive for innovation" why not for business processes? Are they perfect already? Or are there other economic incentives for developing new business processes? If so, what are these incentives?
Innovation contests, like this one, are certainly a better alternative to patents:
Ignore this sig
It's not just their hardware side. My most recent business involved making web apps for small businesses. They seem incapable of knowing what they want and lack the ability to communicate these things clearly.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Innovation doesn't drive the economy, sadly. Innovation is EXPENSIVE, and oh so difficult. IT Companies aren't in it to change the world, cure disease and abolish hunger, they're in it to make money. You make money by offering a product or service to a large audience, not by spending a ton of resources on innovation that will only cater to a tiny niche. Besides, have IT companies ever been innovative at all ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I see what you're saying, but I don't think it really negates my original point. The examples you cite are mostly ones where the particular service in question has been "outsourced" as a matter of course for ALL business "players". (You could say "What's more important to your company's operations than having electricity? Yet you rely on your local power company to provide it, instead of building your own power plant!") But as with your UPS shipping example, or the example of letting someone else rent you the office building you operate from, these are considered "standards" of operation. The cost justifications have already been done, and practically everyone accepts as fact that these are cases where it makes more sense to let someone else do those things for you.
However, "outsourcing" jobs is different. You're talking about the value of hiring an employee, vs. letting someone else handle the work you would otherwise ask the new employee to do for you. When I need electricity, it's not as easy as hiring an "electricity guy" who can stand around and give off kilowatts. When I need UPS shipping, I can't just hire a guy to fly all over the world on overnight flights to get my packages delivered.
In the end, "outsourcing" only makes sense when the firm you outsource to provides a service (or product) that requires a LARGE investment in BOTH manpower and physical resources.
So sure, you and I would be best served by "outsourcing" our grocery needs to the local grocery chains, BUT large enough complexes can see advantages by operating their own greenhouses and/or gardens and being more self-sufficient.
Since you are obviously an expert in psychology, you would also have read the studies that show that happily married couples are far more sexually fulfilled than singles on average.
and second Once I have kids (as Darwin demands) I can guarantee you are going to be one of the guys who's world is going to be put in perspective if you are ever blessed with kids :) trust me on this one. If not find me again in 10 years after you have a wife and kids and tell me I am wrong.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?