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The Perils of Ramming Products Down IT's Throat
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Paul Venezia takes issue with the all-too-familiar practice of management dictating IT solutions to admins savvy enough to know the fiat revolves around far inferior products, in this case Nissan North America's embracing of Microsoft's Hyper-V. 'Very rarely do unilateral decisions by CIOs make for solid IT infrastructures, and they are generally at odds with what the admins on the ground are communicating,' Venezia writes, noting that upper managers who succumb to vendor tricks face a far worse fate than an infrastructure based on inferior technology — one devoid of the kind of expertise necessary to make the best of their flawed purchasing decisions. 'If continuously faced with the specter of having to implement and support clearly inferior products due to baffling, uneducated management decisions, top-flight admins will simply head elsewhere.'"
'If continuously faced with the specter of having to implement and support clearly inferior products due to baffling, uneducated management decisions, top-flight admins will simply head elsewhere.'
Yeah, because the job market is just that good right now.
If you had read the entire article, you would find that they are going to run vmware inside the hyper-v instances, so everything will work out in the end.
This sounds suspiciously like a whining threat, rather than a fact. How does the author know what fraction of admins leave in a situation like this?
Sure, many admins probably consider leaving when crap like this happens. Heck, I consider leaving my job whenever a purchase takes too long to go through.
But this summary sounds like a barely veiled threat to upper management: a claim that if you do this, your good admins will leave. I want evidence for such a claim before I believe it.
Just like every other industry that has to buy products, rarely do the experts have much say in which products would work the best.
How can you hold authority when you have to get the workers to make the decisions for you? Today it's which widget to buy, tomorrow it's how many hours they have to work, and next week, they'll be supervising themselves!
So here, employees, make the best of this Z-brand Widget that doesn't fit your needs at all. We bought 10,000 of them, and so help you if you don't use every single one of them.
Did I mention that Z-brand sent us managers to Vegas for a few days? Of course I didn't, because workers shouldn't know what goes on elsewhere in the company!
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
These links are all just speculation and fluff. There's no news in any of the articles. Don't waste your time RTFA.
FYI
It's like being a contractor, using a pneumatic hammer, and having the foreman come up to you and insist you use a carrot to perform your nailing. Then the boss expresses discontent at your declining performance, especially since he made an executive decision he thought would make things works better.
Yeah, it sounds like a dumb analogy, but human civilizations have been building structures much longer than your boss has had exposure to IT concepts. I'll be happy to stand by my carrot analogy and relate real-world examples.
So this is just some guy's opinion, right? Just like the hundreds of opinions that will undoubtedly fill up the page below this one of mine?
"Many places are Microsoft-centric, but exactly zero are 100 percent Microsoft." By which he means... "They may run Microsoft products on the servers and desktop, but there's absolutely no way that they are using solely Microsoft applications and products in every part of the infrastructure, from the switches to the firewalls."
Well bra-vo. Golf clap.
Admins are there for their expertise. If you show blatant contempt for that, don't be surprised if they flee. They will do so because of the expectation that they will be blamed when you ignore their advice and things go wrong.
Admins have to clean up after your poo.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
here at my work, management makes 'plug and play' purchasing decisions; they just want to but something and plug it in. It doesn't matter that their are open source alternatives that can save them thousands of dollars a year. It doesn't matter that these may be better or better tested. They feel like they will have to rely upon internal staff to support these tools and they would rather be able to contract out support.
They fail to understand how IT works and how the people who work for them work on a day to day basis. In their world's, everything would be perfect if everything ran under a GUI, was automated and supported outside the company. These are the things that define 98% of managers buying decisions.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
At my work the sysadmin refuses to upgrade from SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition (which had its support discontinued several years ago, though he still hasn't installed the latest service pack from 2004 or so), despite the fact that we have a budget (and need) for a high end clustered system with a nice pretty SAN. The execs are now pushing it because we're getting deadlocks constantly, but the admin insists that if everyone would stop using the database to do anything, we'd be fine, and refuses to upgrade.
Yeah its funny how hiring employers require tons of experience, yet ignore it once you get the job.
His whole rant is based on the "fact" (assumed) that Hyper-V doesn't meet Nissan's needs. He has no idea what Nissan needs. He has no idea if Hyper-V does or does not meet those needs.
VMWare is indeed very mature and full of features, some of which are missing from Hyper-V. Now let's pretend we aren't snide little commentators and dig in more. What does Hyper-V have that VMWare doesn't? Like... an affordable price? Like...being built into and integrated with Windows Server 2008 very well?
Worthless article picked for SlashDot solely because the author makes nonsensical rants against a Microsoft product.
A more insightful article might have been about IT and IT pundits sometimes like to pretend _they_ are the business. Your boss will set certain parameters for you to do your job. Now sometimes they may just seem TOTALLY CRAZY, I mean like "don't spend $50 million on a virtualization solution, instead spend $10 million on this other product we've got a deal for with Microsoft to get much more cheaply". Crazy to save money though, I know. It's all about the admins and their expertise, right
Pity the poor admins - having to actually [shudder] do what their boss wants rather than having the boss catering to their whims and biases.
Right now, I'm in the process of implementing several projects that came down via fiat. In the process I've discovered that the products we bought don't work together. They don't do everything we expected they would do. And they are implemented on platform choices that the CIO, who purchased all this, has specifically stated we would not implement in our environment. I will be expected to make it all work now and in the future.
This isn't about simple whim. This is about people doing their jobs. The high-up management deals with the big picture. The folks in the trenches deal with all the technical details that can make or break a project. And while everyone affects each other, we all have our little piece of the puzzle to hash out.
"You either trust your engineers, or you don't. It's as simple as that."
When it comes to IT, "Engineers" (forgive the quotes if you are actually an honest-to-goodness Engineer) sometimes CAN'T be completely trusted because they suffer from any of the following:
- AIHIAH syndrome - pronounced "eye-eye-ah" ("All I have is a hammer" - java/visual basic come to mind)
- "I've Seen The Light!" (religious worship of open source to the exclusion of everything else)
- "Sure I tried it, it don't work." Failure to actually test alternatives to his/her "preferred" solution.
So while you might be comfortable having somebody like this maintain the existing environment, they probably shouldn't be entrusted with decisions about the future.
Of course some IT folks are talented, open-minded, and diligent about testing alternatives. Treasure these. But don't automatically grant this kind of trust to every IT person.
Except that often the manager has no clue what he's talking about.
Bottom line is that managers know about the business side of things - how the numbers work (even that's deabatable, but I'll give them as a group the benefit of the doubt). However, IT's exepertise is in the technology side of things. When either starts trying to assert authority outside of their area you get crap results.
In general my approach is that I'll do anything they want if they push the issue (keeping full documentation of just WHO called what shots in those cases), but I'll flat out tell them as nicely as possible: "Look, you hired me based on my expertise. If you're trusting that decision, then you're also trusting that I wouldn't steer your wrong when it comes to something like this. Your idea will not work because ________.". If they still want to try a dumb thing then so be it, but I'll also remind them (nicely) when the SHTF that it was their decision.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
"Just put it on the cloud. I saw an IBM commercial last night that said this would solve all of our remote access problems."
It's fun to watch a coin land on its edge, and about as likely.
On my planet, it works more like this: the CIO and your manager were frat buddies (whether that's a coincidence is left as an exercise for the reader) and one day when they're playing golf the subject of you, and what a disobedient little asshat you are[1], comes up. Your job goes to India, and by Newton's laws you go out the door.
[1] HR would express it as having a weakness in interpersonal skills, an inabilty to see the big picture, and reluctance to be a team player. No matter, you're fired anyway.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The thing is, the contractors have already established what the best tools are to use. If a contractor changes their tools from eg. DeWalt to Ridgid (or whatever cheap/underpowered manufacturer you can find at Home Depot and Lowe's) because the salesman took them out to lunch and went golfing with them then the contracting business won't last very long since the thing will keep breaking every day/week or so. Eventually the people working will either walk out before the business is bankrupt or the boss will change back to the original brands.
The issue with IT is that nobody can really measure how well something new (or old) is doing. And thanks to Microsoft, people have gotten used to servers restarting and people being unable to work for computer-related issues for minutes or even hours. It also depends on your admins. A good admin will hardly have to restart a server while a rookie will always do it since that's for him the easiest way to restart a particular service. Also, a lot of products that are good are expensive and a lot of products that are bad can be kept together somewhat by a good admin. The boss-man doesn't really care whether the whole system is teetering on a small string, as long as it works somewhat they will be happy. Software usually works initially and under certain specifications it will always work but it will become unstable over time or under specific conditions and then the admin will get the blame. With the advances in remote capabilities and the ubiquity of the Internet it's like a contractor always having a technician available with all backup tools and spare parts available in less than 5 minutes. If that were the case, the contractor might not worry about having tools break in the middle of work, they just give it to the technician that will be able to fix it.
Off course the sh*t always hits the fan later on and it's usually when the decision makers have moved on or put themselves out of blame by a (or a series of) good quarterly report. Usually it's when the technician (to use the contractor example) is on vacation on a cruise for 2 weeks (that's a really great excuse/vacation if you're an always-on-call admin) or he has been hit by a bus.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
"... who cares?"
You can always be philosophical:
Hyper-V R2 is the Zune of virtualization. Someone needs to write articles about how it isn't so bad, really, like they do for the Zune MP3 player. Vista is the Zune of operating systems. Steve Ballmer, who has little technical knowledge, is the Zune of CEOs. It's a company-wide concept at Microsoft: You don't have to be good to make money, just tricky. That's my opinion, but I'm not the only one.
Pity the poor admins - having to actually [shudder] do what their boss wants rather than having the boss catering to their whims and biases.
Part of being the admin is having a more integral understanding of what your boss wants than she does.
If you ARE just doing exactly as the boss thinks she wants, then your job is likely either obsolete, or your are a reset-button-specialist, not an admin.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
You need to have that printed on a T-shirt!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
The Magician of the Ivory Tower brought his latest invention for the master programmer to examine. The magician wheeled a large black box into the master's office while the master waited in silence.
"This is an integrated, distributed, general-purpose workstation," began the magician, "ergonomically designed with a proprietary operating system, sixth generation languages, and multiple state of the art user interfaces. It took my assistants several hundred man years to construct. Is it not amazing?"
The master raised his eyebrows slightly. "It is indeed amazing," he said.
"Corporate Headquarters has commanded," continued the magician, "that everyone use this workstation as a platform for new programs. Do you agree to this?"
"Certainly," replied the master, "I will have it transported to the data center immediately!" And the magician returned to his tower, well pleased.
Several days later, a novice wandered into the office of the master programmer and said, ``I cannot find the listing for my new program. Do you know where it might be?''
"Yes," replied the master, "the listings are stacked on the platform in the data center."
-- The Tao of Programming
until you read the referenced Nissan article, and realise that maybe the "good relationship with Microsoft that we leverage and utilize" was worth more to them than filling the feature gaps in Hyper-V vs. VMWare/XenServer. It's even possible that the MS "good relationship" discounts they're most likely enjoying are what allowed them to move forward with the project in the first place. If either of those are the case, then how can you fault the CIO on this decision?
body massage!
"The issue with IT is that nobody can really measure... thanks to Microsoft..."
Preaching to the choir my man. Someone else once said "Failure is not an option! It comes standard with every Microsoft product."
Now fully functional junk can be shoved down their throats.
Once when I was leaving a job (because my family was moving) I had plenty of lead time to give notice, and, among other things, I was asked to draft the job description for my replacement. One of the things that I put in that was, "never leave the boss alone with a salesman." My boss chuckled at this, but somehow that bit did get cut from the final version.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
As someone who currently uses VMWare products along side Hyper-V, if you are willing to walk out of your job because of this, you either are in an extremely specific situation that is so tailored to VMWare that it should take you all of 30 seconds to prove why only VMWare is an option ... or ... you're just a whiney little bitch.
VMware and Hyper-V while certainly different, they aren't so much so that there is any reason to walk out other than throwing a temper tantrum cause you didn't get your way. They both work, they both do the job they are supposed to do. They both have stengths and weaknesses, but neither of them has any strength that can't be accomplished indirectly with the other, and no weakness that can't be overcome indirectly.
If you're willing to walk out because of this choice, you probably don't have the skills to just walk into another job right now. Neither of them have a feature you can't do with a (sometimes hefty) script on the other.
So go ahead, walk out, they probably won't be that upset. Perhaps you should just accept that you don't always get your way, and its called 'work' for a reason.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"The thing is, the contractors have already established what the best tools are to use."
Actually, at least in the house building market in NZ, there's been a rash of really poor new buildings built in the last 20 years, by developers making a quick buck. Houses that leak, that rot, that are just poorly designed and shoddily built in every way. Whereas the houses built 50 years ago from older tools and materials are still going strong.
And this is by registered builders who really ought to know better.
Moral: It's not just IT that sacrifices quality for speed or cost and gets away with it - because the market doesn't always react in time, and the penalties for poor performance don't always catch up with the people who make the bad decisions.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
the [London Stock] Exchange will replace its .NET trading platform with the acquisition of MilleniumIT, a company based on Sri Lanka with strong backgrounds on Solaris
London Stock Exchange to dump Microsoft-based trad...
what should be a metric at least as good as LOC is for programmers,
You do know that LOC is a truly lousy metric for programmers, I hope?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
While this article correctly points out the problems with implementing an IT solution without significant and valued IT input; the same is true for IT driving a solution without significant user input hat is actually understood and included in the decision making process.
Too often, IT comes up with a solution that the think is cool, meets their needs, and is an abomination in the eyes of the end users. Yes, it has a cool underlying infrastructure, is easy to maintain, and has plenty of bells and whistles but unless it solves a problem, who (beyond IT) cares?
All too often, end users find ways around it and you wind up with a mess of one off apps taht IT is expected to support; leading to much whining about end users and the stupid things they are doing.
Unfortunately for IT, it usually comes down to "How much revenue did you generate?" and "Oh, you're a cost center. Let's see if out sourcing is cheaper." As one boss of mine put it, once our IT department brings in 30 mill a year in revenue they can have a say in how we conduct business. Unfortunately, the real problem - lack of communication and coordination - is never solved.
I have worked in places where IT and end users actually talked - usually smaller shops - and surprise surprise - it wasn't an adversarial relationship. They wouldn't always do what I asked, or would set something up with the understanding I was basically on my own from there out, or suggest a different supported solution - resulting in an environment where we simply got stuff done.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
WRONG. Virtualized guests are treated exactly the same no matter the virtualization platform, and you can use the datacenter licensing route for VMWare, in fact MS specifically calls it out when they compare the cost of running vmware to hyper-v (ignoring the fact that many shops virtualize Linux workloads thus not needing any MS licensing).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Microsoft fixed the licening issue on Oct 1, 2006.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/news/bulletins/datacenterhighavail.mspx
They specifically mention VMware ESX in the Microsoft article.