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Deferred IT Maintenance Is a Ticking Time Bomb
snydeq writes "The underfunding of routine hardware replacement purchases and the degradation of aging enterprise apps pose systemic risk for many IT organizations, thanks to a ballooning 'deferred IT maintenance debt' in the decade since Y2K fears pushed enterprises to invest heavily in essential system upgrades, InfoWorld's Bill Snyder reports. And with sysadmins 'scrambling to keep systems up and running with budgets that barely cover the basics,' this 'IT debt' promises only to increase in the coming years, especially as IT continues to defer routine maintenance in favor of new 'cost-saving' initiatives, particularly around the cloud."
Deferring any maintenance can have calamitous effects.
I fail to see why this is newsworthy? Is it just because IT people whine louder?
If you are in the US---just look around. Infrastructure systems are crumbling away because of "deferred maintenance". It's not just IT. It's roads, bridges, state governments, municipalities, houses, businesses---it'severything!
CIOs and organizations blissfully march towards disaster while quietly chanting to themselves, "The Cloud will save us all".
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Too many CIOs of too many western corporations report to the CFO, not the CEO. There are WAY too many CIOs who come into organizations with an eye, or a reputation, for cost cutting instead of tech innovation. Pick up any copy of CIO magazine and look at the toadies who make the top CIOs in the nation, and ask yourself - what innovation did they bring to make that list? What business process did they improve with tech? Only a handful make the cut. Most are there because they are good at pinching out costs, kicking out the older IT workers and either outsourcing or bringing in college grads.
I routinely see job ads for experienced Java developers, people with hard core experience in integration, esp. with telephony or security technologies, need 5-10 good years, offering $70k tops. Good luck with that, but again it is the CIOs who get the jobs telling people they can staff cheaper, run leaner, cut the corners - that get the job because it is the CFO who is doing the hiring and the performance reviews.
The big corporation IT C-level execs are a fear driven lot, there are no Gates or Zuckerburgs in their midsts. The action is being with the cloud providers, or the web service providers themselves. Enterprise IT is really a shit place to be outside China. It's a world full of EDS consultants and chickenshit CIOs who won't think how a business could use IT to expand. And the social media space is going to tear a bunch of them new assholes, because none of them know how to leverage it. The startups do.
Depends on the level of "bespoke" in your house.
Scavenging for desktop parts is the "little devil". Scavenging for people who know how the bloody things work more than 3 years after for IT systems is the real nightmare.
If a system has been in the field for 3+ year nobody knows what are its real dependencies and what does it really take to augment, add capacity or do any changes. The people who knew have left, gone to pastures new or have forgotten what the problems used to be and no documentation can help you here (even if there is any suriviving docs on the design of the system in question). This is valid for almost all classes of IT and telecoms systems and is the real cost factor in IT "maintenance debt". If we use a real-life analogy IT maintenance debt is like a discounted mortgage. You pay virtually nothing for 2-3 years and after that the lender skins your hide.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Cost savings is the biggest expense to any large organization that does it.
Oh Please! That is SUCH an easy one to fix! You either run XP Mode in Pro or just load up XP VMs. No you want to talk about "IT debt" try some of the places I walk into, where there is ALWAYS a "mission critical app" that is this horribly mangled piece of badly coded VB+Access mess of no comments anywhere junk, and then they expect YOU to deal with it! Hell one place I walked into in mid 09 had a NT 4 box running a VB3 "app" because each guy they brought in took one look at that beast and said "fuck that!".
Man I can hear the real programmers right now screaming out in pain just at the thought! You want to watch a "real" programmer wet his pants in fear you hand him a huge 14 page VB mess written by a half a dozen guys over the years, NONE of whom ever heard of a comment, with shit all over the place and nothing indented or even calling in a logical order, unless "insane band aid" is considered logic.
You want to know why there is an ever increasing IT debt I'd say that is a BIG part of it. All across the country you have this huge mess of apps written by some Joe Schmo that was bought ages ago and nobody knows how to live without and it DON'T run on anything but what it was written for and even then it is fussy as hell. And that of course don't even take into account the lovely crap like that ISA C&C controller written for DOS 3 that runs a $75,000 piece of machinery made by a company that has been DOA for a decade plus! I have stared into the abyss pal, and not only did it stare back it gave me the finger to boot!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Ohhhh...sounds like the abyss has given you the finger as well. And to be fair we are talking about 14 pages of badly written VB4 with about half of the pages nothing but fricking GOTOs bouncing all over the place.Now I'll admit when I've had to do something quick and dirty I've thrown in the occasional GOTO but the GOTOs all went to the same place whereas this massive pile of shite had more twists and turns than a bad detective novel!
But since you have seen the "true horror" of IT I'm sure you can see why I sometimes want to bash my head on the desk when dealing with FOSSies. They always seem to think "All you have to do is replace Windows and Office, and all will be hearts and flowers!" when it is NEVER Windows and Office that is the problem. Hell most companies can't even upgrade to the latest windows version for fear of that giant reeking mess of garbage code they've come to depend on will come falling down like a house of cards in a hurricane.
And while I agree 110% that the goal should ALWAYS be KISS, the problem is the PHBs at these places will never ever in a million years shell out what it costs to actually get all the data out and build a REAL solution, not until they have the crap they are depending on fall apart like some giant train wreck from hell. Like that VB4 app I mentioned early on, I ended up just jamming the thing in a Win2K VM and letting it rot for the next guy. Not because that is what I wanted to do, but because you couldn't pay a college kid what they wanted to pay to have it rewritten, much less get a REAL programmer of any skill.
And that to me is the problem in a nutshell and why the shit isn't gonna get any better for the foreseeable future. It is because businesses in the USA can't pull their heads out of the stock page to realize that working long term solutions cost money no different that decent roads or schools, and look how well THOSE are faring here in the US. IT has it even worse because as long as the thing works that day they don't care if it is a single power surge away from taking down the whole company. To them ANY expense related to IT is just a "waste" unless it is something like an iShiny for themselves or the CEO. That is why I ended up getting out of dealing with corporate, because I frankly got tired of people with impossible problems that wanted to pay pennies to fix years worth of neglect. I mean with the corporate attitude in the USA, is it any wonder nobody young is going into IT anymore? You'd have to be nuts!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.