Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
Well, it is sort of a "duh" story the way it is written, but OTOH the subject is not without merit.
I have been involved with infrastructure assessment of companies prior to acquisition and some stuff is just shocking. Publicly owned companies are driven by return to the shareholders; one way to keep the dividends flowing when the economy is in a downturn or when the business plan isn't working is to reduce operational expense.
Releasing employees is very effective to reduce the spend side but usually that means there is less available effort to work on maintenance. It looks good to have all employee time capitalized on projects but who is keeping stuff working? Also, each person out the door takes expertise with them that is lost to the company. After a while, the company may not even have enough knowledge internally to understand that their boat has holes in it and that patching isn't happening.
This isn't smoke; I've seen it. Data centers with overheating problems and with inadequate standby generators. Power is distributed unwittingly to cause a cascading failure if one breaker trips. Leaking roofs over financial servers (plastic tarp and bucket gave that away). Licensing that has not been kept up to date because no one has a good inventory and no one wants to look-see. So... Oracle enterprise instances running in non-secure network zones and without proper licensing ( potentially million$ in back costs). A database server being used as a network monitoring node and firewall because funds were not available to separate the functions.
Deferred infrastructure investment and maintenance investment happens and it is a ghastly mess to clean up. I am not surprised that more of this is happening.