Slashdot Mirror
Barrier to Web 2.0 — IT Departments
jcatcw writes "Wikis, social networks, and other Web 2.0 technologies are finding resistance inside companies from the very people who should be rolling them out: the IT staff. The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in London had to bypass IT to get Web 2.0 technologies to end users. Both Morgan Stanley and Pfizer are rolling out Web 2.0 projects, but it took some grass roots organizing to get there."
Perhaps it's because IT departments actually know how complicated, messy, potentially insecure and how awful support of such "projects" are going to be. As a general rule of thumb, tech-types don't usually give into the hype about things like Web 2.0 that columnists, marketers and your usual assortment of weirdos do.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Am I the only one who read this as:
"IT departments are wisely refusing to spend uneeded man hours and money on technological buzzwords that will not help, and will likely hurt, the business. Management foolishly decided to override them instead of listening."
Maybe I'm just jaded.
How did the end-users get to bypass HIPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley, Regulation FD, and general GAAP auditing, management control, and business continuity requirements? If they could teach the "IT Departments" how to do that I am sure there would be great appreciation.
sPh
Let me get this straight. You want to make the IT department pick up the slack for all the half-assed projects that some newb MBA deploys because he's a big fan of Kevin Rose and thinks it's cool? And that's a problem? The "resistance" mentioned in the lead-in exists because responsible parties within the organization don't want to follow behind the puppy cleaning up the dog poop.
If the MBA doggies had to clean up their own poop, the IT staff would be all in favor of the new projects. It's easy to be cavalier when you aren't paying the bills with YOUR time and effort.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
The end user tends to want shit like Webshots or Bonzi Buddy too. Just because they clamor and whine for something that looks flashy and easy, doesn't mean that they should get it.
Not that many days ago it was an article about how our equivalent of the NSA had found sensitive information in plain sight on Facebook. The IT department don't want everyone and their mother blogging on the net because they'll also be the one getting the blame when shit hits the fan. And they'll also be the ones tasked with the impossible mission to create a magical filter that'll only let good things through and bad things not. Among several groups, the general opinion is that if they say nothing at all, they can't say anything wrong. It's not that terrible as it sounds, I'm not talking about whistleblowers here. I'm just talking about people that so desperately want to tell everyone else what they're doing. For the most part internal business is internal business and has no place in the public domain.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Certain things like wikis are really nice for development teams. The trick is using the technology for the correct problem.
I see two possible cases here:
1) The IT department is incompetent.
2) Some manager who wants to be able to write that he "synergized the business using new paradigms in a Web 2.0 world" in their resume.
I'm betting on the latter. But thats probably because I'm used to it.
Unfortunately, most companies see IT as a "cost" that should be minimized. Any extra expenditure for any extra features needs a champion, a proposal, a business case, documentation of ROI, prototypes, roll-out plans, risk reduction documents, etc. etc. IT departments live under this constant cost-avoidance mandate and become quite averse to anything that might create more work (= more costs) because they know they'll have jump through hoops to justify the extra cost.
If the IT department in your company is an obstacle for your job, realize that it's because the people that control the purse strings for IT (e.g., the CEO, COO, CFO, et al) don't understand that IT can provide a huge opportunity to boost productivity, revenues, and profits. But until someone goes to them with a solid business case and demonstrable ROI for whatever tech du jour, the C-level suits and the IT dept will stay in cost-avoidance (vs. opportunity-seeking) mode of management.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Web 2.0 is a slippery term. If by web 2.0 you mean user-generated content, then I have to disagree.
One example: wiki based support. I find that people are, for many reasons, willing to help others. Some may like showing how much they know. Some are altruistic. And so on. Now, let's say you have an application that gets used by 25000 people and a development team of 15 people. You probably don't have time to support the application to the extent it needs. Enter a wiki. If you have a wiki, that can at least minimize the questions / requests sent to your team, leaving you to focus on enhancements, future looking stuff, etc. Using a wiki, you can actually get your user base to at least partially support itself.
Sure, a social networking site *might* not be the right thing for you F500 company's intranet. But a wiki might be just what you need.
blah blah blah
Wow. I know this is Slashdot, but this is getting ridiculous. IT departments have one job and one job only:
Support the elements of the company that make money.
That's it. That's our job. If the elements of whatever company we're working for wants a "Web 2.0" app, instead of immediately jumping on our pedestals and saying, "Whoa there, mister! That's insecure and NEW! Put that thing away," we should instead be asking ourselves, "Hey, what problem are they trying to solve with this, and can we find a better solution?" When the employees are using Gmail or Facebook for inter-office communication, it means we're not doing our jobs, not because we're not locking down outside communication paths but because the communication paths we're providing are inadequate. When our customers start firing up MSN Messenger without our permission, we should be asking ourselves what we can use that's better, more secure, and easier to manage in an enterprise. When our customers come up to us and say, "We're tired of chasing Word docs everywhere - we're getting a wiki to manage our information", we should be looking at their problems and figuring out if a wiki is the best solution, or if they really just need a document management system.
Get it? WE are at the disposal and discretion of our coworkers, NOT the other way around.
The article almost seems to suggest that IT personnel are lazy.
Perish the thought.
He added that he began his Web 2.0 quest by working closely with the company's 10,000-member IT department. "Nothing gets done without the IT department," he noted.
Wow! 10,000 member IT department!! That's a bloody legion of IT workers!
No wonder they had resistance to change, their bureaucracy is simply huge. Are the 10,000 geeks serving 10 million workers? A huge company that must be!
--
P.S. It looks like this web page changed its text when I loaded it a 2nd time. What's up with that? It think someone edited it.
Yes, and when that wiki breaks or is incompatable with something, guess who's going to be at fault? People are going to blame I.T., not the guy that created it. And I imagine it's probably based on MySQL in an IT dept used to MS SQL Server, so they've no idea how to make a back-up of it (even if it's possible.)
(Of course, you're going to blame IT when they try to do proactive mantainence, expecting them to work in the weekend when you wouldn't consider it yourself. But then you'll blame IT when something breaks too.)
The mentality you have is that of a 'client' with IT being the 'vendor' -- the catch is that a real vendor will *charge you* for the services; you ask something tricky and they keep ratcheting up the price. Internal IT depts don't have that option; and you simply won't believe the hidden costs behind implementing a new piece of technology.
The correct attitude to have is everyone on the same team. You work *with* IT, you don't treat them as a mere vendor.
Keeping things working is nowhwere near as easy as you think on things as complex as computers. You do your best, but some user will bitch and moan because the updates you've pushed out to every machine three
Why do people always assume that IT-savvy and "in IT" are synonyms?
Because that IS the way it SHOULD be. Anything else is a mistake.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
What, the same people who put Windoze on desktops and increasingly into the server room don't like Wikis and other very cool free programs? Shocker. There are plenty of exceptions, like the CIA, but Windows inertia is a good part of this problem and established IT departments are something that have to be circumvented to get things done. The solution is radical removal of the problem. Doing that removes all sorts of networking problems and frees up staff for productive use. It's sad that users have to push this kind of change onto the IT departments instead of the other way around.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
When Adam Carson, an associate at Morgan Stanley, first began pushing the use of Web 2.0 tools, he faced a major obstacle in the New York-based investment bank's 10,000-member IT department. "Most of our IT department didn't get it," he said. "This was all new to them. They had just been stuck in the world of enterprise IT."
... people liked using them."
So, the IT department would have prefered to do their job (enterprise IT) instead of building something just to use the tools.
However, he said he worked closely with IT team members to convince them of the merits of Web 2.0, which led them to implement Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) technologies, a key requirement for building and supporting Web 2.0 tools
He didn't stop nagging until they told an intern to cobble something together and paint the relevant acronyms in two feet letters on it.
Once IT was convinced of the value of Web 2.0, he said, the organization was "really good at making sure that [systems] worked really well and didn't break, but they weren't really good at making sure
So, people don't use the new-fangled stuff. Obviously this is the fault of IT, and not because they don't see the need.
Carson noted that the company now has about 80 Web 2.0 projects under way, including an effort to create social networks for its clients.
Now we have 80 unused projects. Even our customers refuse to use theirs so far.
During the education process, Carson said he also had to find a manager that would require the use of a Web 2.0 tool for a specific project.
He had an hammer and was looking for a nail. A screw would probably work as well.
That would help spur employees to use the new tools, he noted. The effort also faced cultural resistance from some users clinging to the use of e-mail and other traditional tools rather than switch to new Web 2.0 collaboration tools, he added.
So, with hard work he managed to have something implemented that nobody else thought necessary. Now he is looking for a way to make the users use it.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Technology is chasing itself in cruel circles at everyones expense.
People are building abstraction layers on top of technologies that are best off standing alone only to reintroduce the same set of problems solved by the very things they were abstracting.
Web 2.0 is to me is a rediculous and sorry joke. Hello WTF do you think the Internet is for if not to communicate ideas with each other? Information was a hell of a lot easier to find and process when everyone used *usenet* for chatting with each other. Now with all the phpbb's data that can be used and archived gets lost when some mod gets a wild hair or a disk drive crashes. How is wading through commercial upon commercial just to find what your looking for or using a cheap textbox vs a real editor online any sort of an improvement??
Collaboration tools are used to colloborate and share ideas they are not new and have been around since people first started linking computer systems togeather even before the Internet ever existed.
Marketeers and those who follow them are just not confusing people but unwittingly doing real harm to the network and innovation in the process.
The article isn't really about web 2.0 it's more just along the lines of any web based technologies for communication and interaction.
As an IT guy I am rolling out web based stuff. I have found:
- A lot of canned stuff (even some OSS apps) just aren't a fit for what we do (most businesses aren't a one size fits all business).
- Many of the hottest things to do are not all that flexible when it comes to integrating with other apps or data conversion, web 2.0 integration is cool as long as you keep with one co.'s products (assuming you can find one that can offer it all).
- I'm very leery of the SAAS companies - if the service company takes a dive all my work and data goes with it and then I'm really screwed (so most stuff will be hosted in-house).
- Those I can't I am reworking what we do (part from modified code other parts from scratch). A lot of this is truly very flexible and powerful, but compared to what tools I used before it is surely more complex (in a good sense) and takes time to get it right.
- Nothing is stopping you from rolling out a web app tomorrow but until you have your business (more importantly your data) on it it just will be a struggle in the transition. I find it takes a lot of work (or just time) to get to the tipping point where it becomes commonplace. When it does, it's great - but it surely doesn't happen overnight (unless that's the same time you start your business).
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Haha, that's so true.
What happens is these people think that there's some new miracle computer technology that magically solves their problems. When they find out that behind the shiny new Flash/JavaScript/ActiveX user interface they've really just got yet another information storage and retrieval system like their old one and making it useful requires real work by real people, they stop being interested because, heck, they could have done real work with the LAST system.
Where it gets really fun is when just enough work goes into the new thingy that the low-level office droids end up using it regularly and can't live without it BUT upgrading and maintaining it to sane levels doesn't get funded because the shiny exciting part that appeals to management is long gone.
It's *all* just another symptom of management's love of short-term/free-ride thinking. I'm surprised we don't hear more about these same people losing money to perpetual motion machines.
Web 2.0? Social networking??? Right, just as soon as we roll out the ping pong tables and arcade cabinets.
Listen, this isn't 1996 anymore, thank God. Unless you can make the case that we will recoup the implementation, training, and operating costs in productivity gains, it isn't going to happen. This is what is known as a BUSINESS CASE. Businesses exist to make money, not to coddle and pamper you. Did you mistake your cube farm for the Hilton?
You should be thankful you have Web 1.0. Because if it weren't for the fact that Java is most cost effective to maintain and operate, you would still be doing data entry and form processing on COBOL terminal screens.
And talk about insane, if you have so much free time at work that you think we should deploy a social networking system for you, you have got another thing coming. Which would you prefer? We can either cut you down to 20 hours and drop your benefits, or we can just reassign your job to an existing employee who is interested in working in exchange for monetary compensation?
NO WONDER the economy is in a slump. Do you think your counterparts over in India have the time to whine about lack of social networking software on the job? No, that's why they're taking your jobs.
You (PP&GP) are both right, because the IT department people are just that people. Some are morons some not.
Where I worked before we had a UNIX network (most servers running Solaris) but my department had a Windows subnetwork for several reasons. And that was the pain in the ass for the IT people (mostly security related problems). And I could fully understand them.
But now I'm working in a pure Microsoft faculty, I mean everything is Microsoft - really everything. And don't get me started on all the problems here, disk space, email, network, name it we had it in the last 14 months. But the point is, this is the will of the IT department. All problems are of course the fault of the user (which is really bullshit, believe me). And they block every change - even the most reasonable. I mean a lot of users are programming in Prolog, are using Emacs, write their papers in LaTeX, use Perl, and... and... and... - why Windows?
I know users can be annoying but not every PEBKAC is really a PEBKAC. In the first job users where the problem - in the second job I assure you it's the IT department and they are shooting the messenger.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
It's really not that difficult a concept. Has anyone tried saying "please" and "thank you" to any of these folks? Or tried to find out what they do with their time? I'd bet you a paycheck that they're so busy putting out fires that idiot users or executives (but I repeat myself) are setting that they don't have TIME to do anything else. If you treat IT half as badly as it sounds, I think you're lucky they haven't dragged you from your car yet.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The "cool digital media lady" went down the IT section and asked:
- Hey, could you install some MediaWikis with capacity to five thousands access per minute by friday? I read it's super simple and light, just as Web 2.0 is supposed to be, so it should be very easy to do!
And the "boring IT guys" replied:
- You know we can't, we need to deal with all other emergency priorities you set last week about mail and the new Vista boxes. Besides, it's simple to install in one single machine for amateur use, it's complicated to prepare it for the security and load we'll need.
- You IT guys can't deal with changes. You complicate everything. I'll have a smart consultant friend to come over, install it for a few thousand bucks and hand the maintenance over to you.
- Gahhh...
Weeks later, she gave an interview boasting her boldness in "bypassing IT to get Web 2.0 technologies to the group's end users":
- IT started to realize it was happening without them anyway. They weren't interested until they started to get multiple requests from around the business. Eventually, they came on board.
The "boring IT guys" couldn't be interviewed. They were overwhelmed by client's support requests of system configurations, security alarms, the same old email problems and configuring tens of new servers with load balancing.
Next on "The Daily Buzzword Bugle", the folksonomy is being slowed down by the users.
^[:wq!
I think both sides are right to some extent in this case..
I can see users wanting to use wikis and social networking, and if the users want it, IT should do it. I suppose in some companies the corporate structure makes it impossible or unwieldy, but IT is a support structure -- they can formally note that some request is useless, but if it has much demand should do it anyway.
On the other hand, there's absolutely NO business for people to tell IT "do this with Ajax". NO! IT should be treated as a utility -- people can request they want an app that DOES something, but should have no business specifying how it's done. They simply should have no say if the app uses AJAX, Perl or C CGI, Ruby on Rails, PHP+MySQL, or even some unholy mash of Visual Basic, ASP, and Cobol. I don't tell my (cable company) ISP "Hey, you should get an all-IP backbone. Oh, and I don't know what brand of routers you have, but dump them and get Ciscos instead. KByethx." I don't tell Verizon Wireless that they should ditch the (I think) Motorola, Lucent, and Nortel phone switches, and buy all Nokia switches. IT should essentially be a utility, providing the computing needs the customers (rest of the company) need. But they shouldn't be told how to do it.
Found the book to be an interesting take, especially when he talks about an experience at an O'Reiley event with folks talking about "Web 2.0" and how it was going to change everything.
At any rate, I hear a lot about "We want a web 2.0 website" without people having a clue what that means. Some get damned irate when I say, "That's just a buzz word, what do you want it to do?" Most of the time their idea of web 2.0 is going from an HTML static site to one based around Joomla or some other CMS or they need some type of support ticket solution installed.
I don't tend to get into buzz words, my question is always straight forward: "What the hell are you trying to accomplish?" Then, "Okay. Here is Option A, B, C. My recommendation is A because:..."
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.