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Why Businesses Move To the Cloud: They Hate IT
jfruhlinger writes "Cloud services can be unreliable and pricey, and they often duplicate capabilities larger companies already have in-house. So why do many managers within organizations use them? Partly because they don't want to deal with their own company's IT department. Getting a big project started is often such a politically fraught process that for many managers it's easier to simply write a check."
Guess what? No-one wants to deal with a department. They have business objectives they want to be able to achieve, and they want to pay for someone to deliver those as painlessly as possible, at the lowest cost possible. This is why they probably founded an IT Department. If that department is too slow or sluggish to deliver, they'll go elsewhere..."The Cloud" just offers them the chance to get what they want at a predictable, fixed cost...
Because their IT departments actually use the word "NO" when the managers want to do something stupid and retarded...
Companies don't like to eat their own dog food, no surprise there.
Lots of people complain about security and reliability in the cloud. Who do you trust more. A system designed by our underpaid overworked IT staff that got their degree from DeVry? You Consultants that charge $250/man/hour who will be gone when the thing shits the bed? Or Google?
This has been happening to us in the software world for some time. It's purely a cost thing (imo), which "dealing with IT" is a factor of, but in general I think it is a lot simpler.
Need some software. Your options be:
- Pay a team of developers to design, build, and maintain the software you use. Advantage is you get exactly (or well, in theory anyway) what you want. Disadvantage is it can take time to get the bugs sorted out
- Buy something off the shelf which is close enough. Advantage is you get it right away, it is generally mature out of the box, and you don’t need to keep a bunch of guys around to sort out bugs. Additionally because they sell this software to hundreds of users, they can throw way more development resources as it than you ever could (ye old horizontal market). Disadvantage is you don’t get exactly the features you want, but even that is changing as stuff becomes more extendable and more companies offer “customization”.
Option 2 starts looking very good, with option 1 becoming more reserved for “weird” or original software that no one else has written. A depressing trend.
I suspect as this same thing happens with infrastructure, you will find the same. Most businesses use some external provider, and the “real IT” jobs are mainly at places providing infrastructure to others, or handling really unusual cases.
Seriously, I would rather pull my own teeth than deal with my last company's IT people. Getting anything done through them was a nightmare. "Customer service" wasn't even a concept on their radar. "No" was the only word in their vocabulary. They had perfected a variation on "security through obscurity," which could best be characterized as "security through inaction." By not allowing anyone or anything on the system, they kept it secure. Here was a typical exchange:
Me: We've got a new program that's going to make the company a lot of money
Them: We can't do anything to help you. And if you try and go around us, we'll try to stop you.
Me: I just want to put up a simple html webpage with information on it.
Them: Can't do it. It's a security risk.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
They then have to deal with someone else's IT department.
A customer/provider relationship is very different than supervisor/employee our interdepartmental one. The provider can choose to stop taking the customer's money and tell him to go away. Sure the customer can sue but in the meantime, he's got NO SERVICE.
Newsflash. In-house IT departments can be unreliable and pricey too.
Different reasons for different sized businesses.
I moved my small corporation to "the cloud" because even though there have been outages (thoug not for us) in the cloud, it's still far more reliable than running a linux box in a neighborhood where PG&E apparently trips over their own power cords every month, and a UPS only buys the incompetents a short window to get it back up.
And it's cheaper and more reliable than colocing.
Has nothing to do with "hating IT" in our case. Hell, I am the IT guy in addition to all my other hats. Small businesses are like that.
Getting a big project started is often such a politically fraught process that for many managers it's easier to simply write a check.
There is no way the services provisioning and supply chain processes should allow line managers to sidestep corporate IT by merely writing a check. IT is failing in its critical mission to become the unavoidable middle man--the bill you have to pay--by not exercising its oversight over all purchasing decisions. It's the only way: every expenditure must have an IT sign-off to so that a grown-up can make sure IT isn't being left out, and attempting to acquire computing, storage, or communications facilities from anyone except IT must be an immediate termination offense.
Of course, IT must also make sure its firewalls and content protection systems keep the company's machines safely away from these rogue service providers unless the appropriate genuflections, prayers, and offerings are made to IT. An unsanctioned cloud provider contract is useless if the network won't let your systems connect to the service demarcation of the profider.
(Am I serious? Am I kidding? Am I both?)
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
This reads like an article from circa 1980, just replace "Cloud" with "Personal Computer".
People didn't want to wait for access to the mainframe, they went to Radio Shack and bought a TRS-80, or whatever local store you had and picked up an Apple, CBM, random CP/M machine, etc.
Then more PCs showed up, they needed to share data, IT installed a network ...
Isn't this where . . .
It got so bad in our office that our senior management paid money to build their own employee-managed network where management can set the IT policies. One of which is "developers and sys admins get admin rights on their own machines." The developers that I've seen who have to work on the corporate IT-managed network regularly curse whatever malevolent spirit controls our company at that level. We actually get work done.
you're just replacing one Dept. with another. I think it has to do more with cost. Cloud means the cheapest labor protected by the weakest laws. Plus Cloud means the blame can be placed outside the company.
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I work in the healthcare vertical. I've seen 2 major health systems attempt this form of outsourcing over the last few years. In both cases, the short-term cost savings were far outweighed over the long term by down times and a complete lack of true integration between the tech implementers and the business units (e.g. doctors and nurses).
This is the exact opposite of the experience detailed in TFA.
You think your IT is glacial? Try to get an IT org to move for you when they don't even work in the same company. Lawyers can sue to enforce the contract and all that, but by the time your case gets to court you've already lost your competitive advantage.
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
What you say here is a situation I am sure that exists, but there is another side, too.
There are also very smart IT personnel who care about who they are working for and present opinions and warnings and never get listened to. Then, when something goes wrong, panicked people expect them to fix the mess (usually on their own without a net). This is a tough place to be, and when you have no power and all the responsibility you tend to get a bit cynical. In a lot of organisations the idea is still too recent. People often hate IT because they also become the realist in the situation, and the person with the great idea hates being told that it makes no sense or is impractical... but at the same time they become the people who "know computers" and can fix every problem. It's a bad conundrum that happens in too many places.
I was "all in" for a bit, was supporting the idea of moving an entire college's email system into one of these systems. We set up a pilot and due to a certain username transition going on with that company, it wiped out about 100 of our user's PERSONAL non-college data from the site because they had associated their college email address with the service in the past.
We begged and pleaded for help. They said they were looking into it. No updates. No promise to make it right. About 2-3 weeks after that, the user's data started to be restored. But I've never felt so helpless during that period. There was nothing I could do. It's a free service, so there wasn't much recourse either.
I have, or my staff have, in the past done some really stupid things that interrupted service or temporarily lost user data. But we were right on top of it, worked around the clock to fix it, and learned from the mistakes. It's a horrible feeling to lose a system but it's nothing compared to the hopeless feeling of losing user data in a system you have absolutely no control over.
Needless to say, the pilot opened our eyes.
> IT as an organization held the attitude that the company existed for their benefit
That's mostly a big company problem, I think. I've worked for some small shops, 20 to 100 employees. The problem isn't bad there. We had one idiot IT guy try to tell our developers that they couldn't have root access to the machines. Guess what, sherlock: we *write drivers*. We bloody well will have root access, thank you.
That IT guy is no longer working for us. We have a new guy, and he's great - understands exactly what to do, and the whole place hums along because of what he does. You just have to find the right people. There are good ones. They're out there.
Below, in process flow format for non IT people. Businesses are afraid of Technology.
Fear -> Anger -> Hate -> The Cloud
Getting a big project started is often such a politically fraught process that for many managers it's easier to simply write a check.
Yes, politics all too often come into play when trying to get a project off the ground and started, especially in IT. But it has more to do with the politicians and the manager than it does with the actual IT staff. And I am not sure how putting it in the cloud avoids the politics? Any project of significance has to be run up the flag pole in any IT situation.
I am a network engineer for a county government that has it's hooks into state and federal level networks. Our political party is currently republican. So needless to say they hate all democrats. Any democratic IT idea or project that is started is immediately met with HUGE levels of opposition, while any ideas from their side is met with opposition from the democrats. There are also many cases where one party will get elected to the actual city government, while the county officials are from another party, which makes working together sometimes impossible.
IT and networking department are usually the worker bees, taking orders from their manager and higher ups, who all report to politicians of some sort at some point in the creative process. Getting rid of IT departments isn't the answer. Get rid of the politicians!!! If we remove the politics from most things, they will run better and most likely take 1/2 the time, which will ultimately reduce the cost of projects in man hours alone.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
I guess you didn't work within the IT departments you're slating so thoroughly.
In no walk of life is the customer always right. The customer is a petulant 6 year old who needs to be told what can and can't be done, and needs to learn what reasonable expectations are. I'm all for providing 1st class service to someone who knows what they're doing, but far too often I'm presented with someone who's been shovelled into a position of power with no experience or knowledge, and who is totally impressionable by vendor buzzword-laden marketing drivel.
Case in point; We just got a wireless network upgrade. I was told about it the day it happened, despite being the senior IT technical person on site. The kit is nice, but totally over priced and over spec'd for what we need, it's not configured properly, and the cabling was shoddy. The whole project came over 40% more expensive than if I had sourced the kit myself, and would have cost parts only if I was only asked if I could do the work needed. But instead, my manager goes over my head to the Boss and gets this thing signed off, the upgrade is done, and I'm left picking up the pieces from the botched job as she signed off on completion after being shown some flashing lights in a cab.
TL;DR: I exist for the company's benefit, but they'd better do what the hell I said needs doing if they want stuff to work right.
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Let me see if I got this right: business managers are changing to Cloud SaaS infrastructures because their own IT departments don't give them new features fast enough?
So they expect a 3rd party supplier will be faster???
The word "Cloud" doesn't make it all magical, with faeries and pony's all over the place and quick response to changing requirements: if you start using software from a 3rd party supplier, Cloud or no Cloud, you better be a big enough customer that they're willing give you more than just the time of the day that your support contract entitles you to.
If you're going to the Cloud for the fast infrastructure rollout bit, software will still need to be developed by your IT department and oh, by the way, your infrastucture bills just went up 2-fold, 'cause the cloud provider needs their profit (and now that you've spent $$$ in making software for their cloud, they have you by the balls), your network infrastructure just couldn't cope with 5x increase in traffic and you had to go to a higher level contract with your ISP since you now need a connection with five-nines availability, 'cause if it falls down all your employees will be twidling their thumbs.
Have you tried turning off the Cloud, and turning it back on again?
I've worked at 3 different companies in my career, and at each of them, IT as an organization held the attitude that the company existed for their benefit, and not the other way around.
IT needs to understand that it is a service organization with the mission of satisfying its customer by providing top notch service and support, and asking "how high?"
I've heard this exact phrase many times over the years, particularly from big-company alumni. This attitude is exactly why companies fail. The only way to be successful is for all members of the team to work together to make the company successful. If your organization fails to foster true collaboration at all levels, your organization blows.
It is human nature that everybody wants to be in control. Sales managers want to have everyone cater to their whims, marketing wants their ideas followed without question, even the guys over in finance want to have their ideas implemented across the board without discussion. Well, following that paradigm will get you nothing but failure.
In a properly functioning company there should be no division between IT and the business unit (and accounting and legal and etc.). Any challenge being faced by the business should be addressed by all members of the organization. If the sales team is having trouble increasing business and feels that a new web application would help, a multidisciplinary team from all aspects of the business should brainstorm the problem and come up with the best solution possible for the company as a whole. There may be accounting reasons for using cloud services that are brought to the table by the Finance guys, and a better technical solution might come from the IT staff.
Your "service organizations ask 'How High?'" idea leads to misguided projects that don't address the underlying problem and fail to grow the business. Any manager worth their salary should know that they are not the expert in everything and welcome input from all quarters.
Of course, at the end of the day someone has to make a final call. But the 'service organization' meme is a stupid relic of the 90's outsourcing craze and has no business in modern corporate life.
FEAR!!
UNCERTAINITY!!
DOUBT!!
I don't believe it.
Back in the late 90s, everyone was beefing up the server room with huge disk arrays, fat pipes, racks and cooling so all their remote locations could access "all the company's data" stored in one central location. It looked great on paper, but in practice, not so much. 8:15am every morning, the pipes would fil, Internet access was slow, VOIP got shitty, wifi would suck and remote offices would call the IT manager and report they could not access the file server.
This went on for a number of years until the industry did a flip-flop to local file services; NAS, RAID, WAAS whatever could speed up productivity remotely. Things improved, but then the company was flying techs all over the country to fix stupid windows problems, or be on the phone for hours walking a remote user through a server reboot.
Now, the industry is flip-flopping again. "Cloud" is just another word for centralized storage, except Amazon and Google are eating the IT departments lunch. Things will flip-flop again after a few outages cost a few companies some multi-million dollar contract. It would be nice if IT managers had the foresight to see this trend in the first place, but most of them don't.
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the 'cloud' belongs to another company, which is at the whim of its directors, and ultimately, shareholders.
who knows what they will decide in the next 5 years ? who says a company which is linked with a competitor of yours wont buy the company in 5 years ?
who says they wont just shut stuff on your face, like microsoft did to many, many partners and customers, in the next 5 years ?
noone says any of these. because, most of you have not thought of these.
its plain morondom. any manager that jeopardize the business by giving the lifeline of the company to an outside company, should be fired. then again that is a result which ends up coming into being because we have finance / managerial curriculum.
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That pretty much describes the recent and current trends in business. When was the last time you heard "20 year plan" let alone "10 year plan" or even "5 year plan"? I used to hear that all the time as businesses made their strategies and plans with longevity and long term goals in mind. These days, you hear planning by the year and the quarter. Long term projects are killed because they cost short-term money with no immediate returns. If there is anything that kills progress, it is this.
TL;DR? Business has gotten immature and impatient.
Thankfully the IT dept you mention had upper mgmt that had a clue. We inherited a legacy backup system that at best was 'shaky' and put in a request for a new backup infrastructure ($15K at the time). Denied. But researchers were generating MASSIVE amounts of data for our storage infrastructure. One day we experienced a triple disk failure (one disk failed, was replaced, and during the rebuild two more fell out of the array). This array was part of a multi-terabyte storage system. Go to the backups on the old legacy system and it cratered (testing was OK when we restored a files here and there to ensure it was working, but when we went for the full recovery, it blew sky high and revealed extensive catalog corruption) Cost us $25K to recover the data (OnTrack - amazing folks for data recovery). When the inevitable finger pointing kicked in, our dept was in the spotlight. When I showed everyone the budget request and subsequent rejection with notes highlighting our concerns with the existing system's reliability, guess whose job was eliminated within 4 months in a 'restructuring'? Wasn't the big boss who denied the capital request!
Correct. Truly great admins are literally worth their weight in gold.
with a cloud service the manager gets, at least in the best case: - An SLA ...
- feature or service is quickly in production
- cost can easily be lower than in house IT, at least for small companies
- no grumpy IT employee to deal with
- can redirect grumpy users to the cloud support center
- when the service fails, the manager can say "not my fault" and "I already called hotline in the cloud" - etc
I've got 100MB of email quota with my "IT managed" email. I really wish we would switch to the cloud and I can get a few gigabytes of email quota.
"OTOH, who usually cleans up any messes that happens with it? Who gets blamed if the cloud provider has an outage?"
Precisely the stuff of why more IT professionals are moving to cloud vendors: Most people want to be seen as valuable contributors to the success of something.
So... Win, win?
I work for a small company that provides specialized services to large corporations (saas). I cannot count how many times we have been close to closing a deal with new customer when at the last minute they have to "run it by IT". The typical response from IT is "...we can build that...". Which really means the dude who runs the IT views any external technology as some kind of threat to his empire. Occasionaly we come across an IT dept that will take the time to make a reasonable assessment followed by a security audit and when that happesn we usually get the deal. For us the ideal scenerio is avoiding IT altogether.
"It's fun to obey the machine" - Ralph Wiggum
All too often IT organizations spend all their effort telling the business managers what they cannot do rather than what they can - so getting a new project off the ground with in house resources becomes increasingly frustration. "We do not have enough resources to support that...", "Your project doesn't confirm to our standards...", "We'll 'agree' to support it as long as you make these changes...". Contrast this with a cloud provider that actually wants your business. True they may not be truthful about what they provide and you very well may be better off in house, but a new project in house can be very hard to start. IT managers who are flexible and 'influence' rather than 'dictate' are worth their weight...
We had one idiot IT guy try to tell our developers that they couldn't have root access to the machines. Guess what, sherlock: we *write drivers*. We bloody well will have root access, thank you.
That's where you set up a virtual environment for the driver writers. Root access, easily backed up/rolled back. They can root to their hearts content, and not screw up the wider network. Everyone is happy.
Maybe that concept was too hard for them and you.
Want better relationships with your IT department? Then stop treating them like the landscaping contractors you hire to mow your lawns. And stop using them as a dumping ground for the CEO's imbecile nephews who can't get jobs elsewhere.
The Cloud might work for you. But who in your (non IT) company is going to know how to negotiate a contract with cloud providers and hold them to those contract terms? To a greater or lesser extent, your company is going to have an IT department, even if its a 4 person shop and your CIO is the person who can best fix a PC.
If your company uses its IT to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace, then you are going to have to work closely with your IT people to ensure that those aspects of your systems that give you your advantage are kept separate from generic services. And you are going to have to stop shoving white papers, written by outside IT consultants pitching their products/services, down management's throats.
Have gnu, will travel.
In business school the biggest case of outsourcing (cloud included) is that they are not in the I.T. business. They are in the (insert banking, finance, construction, etc) business. Should a major bank with no knowledge of food preperation have it's own cafeteria or should they outsource to someone who does just that?
So why pay 3x for underpaid grunts who are not aliagned with values of the company, when you can go to salesforce.com or cloudx and have them take care of it for you for 1/3 the cost!!
I know it is something you all hate to read, but I speak the truth. Management never liked I.T. with the exception if you are an I.T. company. You cost money and produce no business value unlike the good old boys of management.
This means it is time for us to look for other careers path's if I sound too cynical. Our employers only concern is money and of a cloud can do it cheaper and they do not have to ever deal with you then it makes sense for them to fire you and replace you with a website. Nothing personal, it is just business and why should Joe's ceiling tiles inc have to worry about cost center computer guys? They do not make tiles or sell them?
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Every business - when it reaches a certain size - realizes that they need to have a fixed process for handling X, where X can be contract approval, printer supply purchase, production system access, hiring new employees and so on. They need it because it provides accountability, oversight, size estimation, consistency, and the higher you are in the org chart, the more important those attributes become versus one individual task's result. At some level, being able to say someone is 60% complete with 32 man hours remaining is more important than having someone who code ninjas a fix in a single night because it needs to be done. With accurate info, you can plan for resources and identify where there are problems and effect systemic change if necessary - you can't plan for "Bob did it last week without telling anyone and we didn't know he did it until today."
This is because the goal for the person (and their direct manager) is 'complete task', and 'process' can be perceived as an impediment that provides no immediate value. The more motivated that person is, the more likely they are to route around what they perceive as damage and circumvent the process in spirit, if not completely. Thus what may appear to be duplication of effort or reliance on external resources is really a myopic focus on short term goals.
In my experience, the good companies allow this, because they all realize that sometimes a time delay is unacceptable, even if it 'breaks process'. They'll say "It's better to ask forgiveness, than to ask permission." It is, of course, subjective when an employee should or should not exercise this quote.
This is just what it's like to work in a company. Nothing unusual.
The article was mostly sweeping generalization with few specifics to back up the argument. As CIO, I find that the problems regarding delivering relevant, efficient, meaningful automation solutions has much more to do with the business units' inability to articulate a problem statement and business case than with our ability to provide a technical solution. The paradigm is generally "give me one of these". The return question is always "What are you trying to solve?" We try to steer our users to third-party hosted solutions whenever there is one (or two or n) that will fit the problem.
I take it you've never worked in an organization that worked something like this:
Manager: "I need a perfect solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem - I just signed a 7-figure contract saying we'd provide that in 2 weeks."
IT: "There's no way to do this, we've got lots of papers and well-known theory that proves that this is a problem the best mathematical and scientific minds that have ever existed in the last 50 years aren't able to solve."
Manager: "Just get it done, ok? Look, there's a lot of money riding on this."
2 weeks later ...
...
Manager: "So where's that Traveling Salesman Problem solution I asked for?"
IT: "It's not ready yet. As I previously mentioned, it's a virtual impossibility."
Correction:
:-)
IT:"Here it is. Also given the number of locations to visit here are the expected times to provide an answer. We can improve these times to a small degree if you authorize additional hardware for the project, but there are diminishing returns.
We've also implemented an alternate solution for these situations with a large number of locations. The answers are pretty good but not perfect."
Yes a silly example but it was your analogy not mine.
That said, do you get the concept that others have mentioned? Rather than an IT organization that looks for technical reasons to say "no" you have an IT organization that starts with the business need and delivers a reasonable solution. Your taking the Pentagon subcontractor sort of approach: it doesn't matter if the plane flies all that matters is that the plane meets the Air Force specification. That is not how a good IT department operates.
That is great if you are writing virtual Vm drivers.
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The company where I currently work has gone to a cloud for one reason only. Upper management saw "Cloud" on blogs and magazine covers and said "A-ha, this Cloud sounds so much better than my previous buzz word". At that point they officially retired "Web 2.0" and moved in to the "Cloud" era.
Well, it all boils down to your employer's goals. If they make anything non I.T. related then yes it is how high. You are a waste of shareholder money and just there to be keep things from breaking. Not actually providing value at all to the company. You are a plumber and a technician and nothing more.
if you think you are better than get into sales or management as they are what is truly important. Or join an I.T. company where they actually make money from what you do.
The outsourcing crowd you talk about is just as active as ever and Clouds are the next progression. Now we can finally focus on our customers are let a website take care of our needs instead. These are answers you may not want to hear but it is the truth. It is insulting and I agree, but these other guys are correct. Technology is a commodity like electricity or plumbing. It is very important, but you never need to focus on it. Just pay by the month and do something else to increase sales. Each department has goals to help the company out and honest I see no value in I.T. other than repairing computers. 3rd party vendors and websites can help with certain customized needs you can't get with Office.
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Anyone who thinks using the cloud gets you away from using your own IT dept is smoking crack. Want to have single sign-on with your corporate active directory? You need IT. Want to integrate your Salesforce.com CRM instance with your in-house ERP system to get customers and orders? You need your IT dept. Want to use a cloud BI tool to make cool dashboards for your CEO? You need your IT dept to feed you data.
It's really simple - stop seeing your IT dept as a drive-thru fast food joint. Instead of coming to them with a half-baked solution that you need yesterday, try actually including them at the *beginning* of your thought process - and partner with them to meet corporate objectives. Stop thinking that *your* bonus objectives are the center of the universe - and start working together with the rest of the company's senior leadership to develop a prioritized portfolio of projects that your IT dept can help you execute. Take ownership of the business problem, the business process, the business data and the business value of the proposed solution - and let IT take ownership of the technical design, the system vendor management, the system implementation and the system maintenance.
The one part of the dot-com days that I really miss is that IT was actually considered a strategic partner & leader in the company. Now that the accountants and salesmen are back in-charge, it's 1985 all over again...
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are destined to eat them. IT, Legal, QA, Documentation, Insurance... All of these items are (among other things) risk management and prevention. The *best* outcome from all of them is... nothing happens. A result of nothing isn't showy. It's harder to demonstrate quantitatively. It doesn't appeal to a risk-taking managerial personality. It's easy for a newly minted MBA who's only out for himself to convince others that IT, Legal, QA, Docs, insurance, et. al. is just an unnecessary expense that can be cut. After all, nothing happened before... :)
Coincidentally, the newly minted MBA may get bonused on the cost savings... and be GONE, GONE, GONE next year before the network has 30% downtime, the company is being sued and has no protection in its contracts, the product isn't selling because there was no QA department to find the problems, product documentation is out of date, and there's no insurance to cover damage from the crane that fell on top of the neighboring building.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
This is an interesting article, a bit inflammatory and quite lacking in valid details, seems more of a rant than not. While this seems to be just someone complaining it also illuminates a serious issue. IT is always treated as outside the business process and business is seen more of as an adversary to IT than a companion. Try busting these notions and you will have a healthy situation where your business personnel desire to work with it and IT desire to work with business. It can be done.
A: IT Personnel need to realize that no matter how bad things get, it is a customer service situation. You want people to understand your IT hurdles but at the same time tend to miss the details that it took years for us to get to understand those details ourselves. Your business sales people are good at what they do, your good at what you do, care for them. It does work I have done/seen/developed this.
B: Business personel, Remember when you get mad, that your IT personnel will respond when you yell with yelling. It is human nature to go bull and in any business relationship you should never accept a meek persons response or the yes mans IT values. They will yield few to no results in your goals. Bring your IT into the fold, include them in your business meetings so they can be aware of your needs. Most often, IT personnel can find solutions you might miss.
C: IT, you are all NERD!! or should be, a solution is always available. It might take a long time it might take a zeeeeeelion dollars but they do exist. Look at your options before declaring a project dead. Actually never declare an idea dead, Build the case for your yes or no and let the business people put their stamp on it. After all it is more work and that can be a good thing.
I am Nerd, Life is Nerd...
I've worked in a range of environments, from tiny to huge. Some companies do really well with an internal IT department, and others are awful. Some IT departments put up huge walls and make it impossible to do anything, and at the other extreme, they do whatever crazy stuff the business tells them to and waste more time and money. I can definitely see why some decision makers might jump at the opportunity to "kick the nerds out of the basement," but they may not realize how much institutional knowledge walks out with them.
In my experience, any time you involve a third party to do IT, friction ensues because now there's a wall between you and another company looking to make money, not just your internal IT department. Some businesses out there do well with this model because IT isn't used for much beyond file, print and office applications. Businesses looking to go outside the standards, develop their own business logic or applications, etc. will find issues with the cloud model. No matter how big of a check you write, or how many onsite people the service provider gives you (or zero in the cloud case,) the model will always be "That's not in the contract, submit a change request, and we will get back to you with a scope estimate and price."
Eventually, businesses are going to come to grips with the cloud model, figure out what can and cannot be safely hosted or run outside their organizations, and make intelligent decisions. However, we're in the "marketing hype" phase now, and it's just starting to slow down. For example, in a nod to the idea that "cloud == VM hypervisor + virtual network fabric + SAN + servers", infrastructure providers are tailoring their pitches to involve the "private cloud" which basically means dedicated hosting plus flexibility...and that's a good model in my mind.
Clouds are great for dev work and testing -- I've been able to build and rip down entire labs full of equipment to test new Windows domain designs, etc. without buying tons of extra hardware. I still think the security model needs to be looked at, because your average managed service provider will dump the cheapest, greenest sysadmins into their cloud computing environment to save money. Test in the cloud, then buy enough in-house or dedicated capacity to run production within your control.
If you truly believe that "most of the day-to-day work of an IT department unnecessary", I have a bridge for sale at a good price. A couple of PCs and a wireless router do not an IT professional make. In fact, folk who believe that are the ones that cause the most damages to corporate resources.
Further, you might want to think that it's not always the best idea to outsource strategic infrastructure to the lowest bidder - and the lowest bidder is going to win any competition. And if you buy the salesman's spiel that 'their goals are your goals', maybe you'd like to consider an extended warranty or a lease on that bridge.
It's TSO all over again. TSO and mainframes failed not because they were slow - they weren't. It's not because they didn't work, they did. It was because the apps the middle manager wanted to run (lotus 1-2-3) weren't there. So we got PCs and HUUUUUUGE complexity from departments buying software and installing it in the face of IT reqs, then demanding integration with core systems. And if you think you are going to get one company's 'cloud app' to integrate to another company's 'cloud app' and provide data in the cloud to you custom app that provides you with business advantage (because homogenous environments provide no advantage over others with the same environment) quicker/better/cheaper than a project run by local IT, well I gotta tell you we have bridges in designer colors now.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
Well, one of the problems I see with the "if you don't like our proposal, we'll take our ball and play with an outside vendor" attitude is:
What happens when a department contracts with an outside entity and comes up with a scheme like we saw yesterday in the story about Citibank with the account number == URL fragment? (Just surmising, but the fact is vanilla cloud server employees have root access to all your data.)
So, I think it's not just a matter of "big, bad IT" spoiling the day again.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
"Today, our businesses move too fast for the traditional IT model; instead, business technology (BT) leaders must partner with their business colleagues to create business and technology strategy simultaneously."
I thought that's how it was always done, identify a market for a particular technology. I hadn't realized the `traditional IT model' was a hindrance to doing business. Doing large scale IT projects is a bit like building bridges, each one is unique and you never want to be involved in one again. Given the anount of buzz words in that article I figure its aimed at the clueless PHB who don't know or don't want to know about real world IT processes.
Key words: building bridges, business architecture strategies, business change, business objectives., business partners, business strategy, business technology, co-created innovation, co-creating business, collective action, consultation, continual refinement, Counter-intuitively, customer-driven, empowered BT organization, empowered employees, flexibility, flexible processes , foundation, fresh technology implementations, interrelated disciplines:, IT capabilities , key potential driver, legacy burdens, new-generation technology visioning, operationalizing innovation, process flexibility, provision their own technology, push innovation, ruthless standardization of technology, scaling innovative solutions, service delivery infrastructure, smart business process management, technology alignment, technology strategy, the enterprise, tools, traditional IT , Unleash technology-based innovation, waterfall process ...
IT people are a complete pain in the ass with terrible attitudes and unrealistic expectations.
Unless you've been on both sides of the fence, and then suddenly IT makes sense.
"Waaaah! I *need* a bigger monitor to be more effective, and you have to open a hole in the firewall for my Dropbox account! Oh, and since you wouldn't give me a copy of Matlab to play with, I grabbed one from a file sharing site and installed it. But now my computer is all slow and acting weird ... fix it!!!!"
I was once told by a CFO that IT is merely a cost without a return. At first I was astonished to hear that's how we were thought of but once I understood that viewpoint all the other ill-informed decisions made sense. Just like outsourcing customer service to India; they'll eventually see they've shot themselves in the foot.
I remember the days when buying desktop computers was a way to get your work done without waiting for the "data processing" department to get around to thinking about whatever applications you'd asked for.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That's the point: We don't NEED an "IT professional" when we have a couple of PCs and a wireless router, if we avail ourselves of outsourced cloud services for the stuff we formerly might have needed an IT professional for.
No disrespect is meant to IT professionals here: they are a vital and intrinsic resource -- within the cloud services with whom we will be contracting for service. They're just not needed on the payroll of every company with more than a dozen employees, as they were perceived as being needed back in the Corporate IT Hay Day a few years back.
I attended a great Azure / Sofware-as-a-Service conference a few weeks ago that hit on this exact point. The "traditional" role of IT (specify, procure, deploy, train, maintain) is diminishing.
A company like Salesforce doesn't need to try get their foot in the door with a potential customer's CIO and try arrange a multimillion dollar deal. They can sell directly to the sales group. Or even a small division or team. "A few bucks per user per month" is within any manager's purchasing authority, and requires zero infrastructure.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Where I currently work, if a department comes with a complete detailled project plan we can approve it in less than a week or even the same day if we don't need to go back and forth clarifying important points. The problem is that once we approved the project plan, it must spend about 90 days in the "purchasing" labyrinth. Then the purchase order has to cross the "call for tender" quicksand area (throw in a couple of weeks at least) to finish in the "supplier administration" swamp. We can't purchase anything without an approved detailled project plan, which initially requires a "steering committee" and loads of meetings on the client department side. What happens most of the time is that the client comes to us with a few notes on a napkin, lacking most useful information and with a target date a few weeks in the past. Of course, they then blame us for failing to deliver on time just after leaving said napkin at our door.
And here we see the difference between the academical and the real worlds. People solve the traveling salesman problem all the time at the real word. And yes, with exact solution. Of course, for that they need exponential time. If exponential time isn't available, they are ok with an approximation.
And that also exemplifies the "can't get it done" behaviour the article is complaining about. It is quite a fair request at this level of detail, it may become a bad request with more details, and it is the job of IT to gather those extra details, judge if it is viable and, if it isn't viable, to understand the actual problem and propose a viable way to solve it. Ok, maybe there isn't, sometimes the client is saking for strong AI or something alike, then it is the job of IT to specify what parts of the problem could be solved.
Rethinking email
You'll plug the device they are writting the drivers for at that virtual computer?
Rethinking email
ROFLMAO! Yeah if all you use is word and excel. Oh and maybe Access. Cloud makes sense if you work out of your basement. You don't want an advantage over your competitors? Custom software? Business models that don't come out of a textbook? THAT'S how you think competition works?
Heheh. Think like that and you will have LOTS of time to submit posts to /.. Until you run out of money for your cable modem and phone, that is.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
IT people don't known how to deal with departments, every talk that I need to have with my client IT department is a pain. They always have an excuse to not deliver the project, always have problems and don't wan't to work very closely to get a solution. I see it every day and every time, the Marketing department get some amount of their budget and buying IT services that were exclusive with the IT department. Thank you
http://www.michel.eti.br
This is just the standard PHB attitude. Any employee that isn't directly in the revenue stream is a waste of resources, unless that employee is in management, or directly serves the PHB's needs. That gives the PHB three options. Fire the "unnecessary" employees and 1) move their duties to lower paid, unqualified workers 2) Add their tasks to the duties of salaried workers who don't get paid for overtime or 3) Outsource. Lather, rinse, repeat. In the end you get $250k/yr aerospace engineers spending most of their day typing and maintaining software systems, while the PHB moves up the career ladder for "increasing productivity."
Support SETI@home
When I worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, I was hired to write a server, essentially, that would provide a web interface to some of the big iron projects in biology.
Was a two year project. I got it finished over a summer, as it turned out to be easier than I thought to do the coding that piped information to and from the biology modeling programs to a web browser.
The only roadblock was the SDSC IT and web services guys that said they wouldn't allow... well, everything. So, long story short, we just had to bypass them entirely, host it on our own machines, and just use the SDSC site as a redirect. The moral of the story was that IT policy trumps million dollar research projects.
All of your points are equally valid in an organization that outsources most of the routine IT infrastructure to cloud-based service providers.
IT still has a role, but it's a much smaller role once you've gotten rid of a large chunk of it.
That's where you set up a virtual environment for the driver writers. Root access, easily backed up/rolled back. They can root to their hearts content, and not screw up the wider network. Everyone is happy.
Maybe that concept was too hard for them and you.
Obviously you never worked in such environment.
No.
Any organization of any size needs to use technology to maintain any sort of competitive advantage. You can't win the game with filing cabinets and hand-written memos anymore. Given that, you need somebody from your technical department high enough up to collaborate as a peer with other people making organization level decisions, or else you end up with what every other IT employee on this page is complaining about: people making decisions about their IT infrastructure that have absolutely no understanding of the viability or cost of any of the decisions they are making. You are exactly the PHB that drives us up the walls. You get mad because we tell you no or don't do what you want and you think it is because we want to run our own little feifdom in our department. We get mad because you think that your MBA gives you the background necessary to decide what is good for the technical side of your company even though you don't know your ass from an RJ45 jack.
If your IT department is a bunch of yes men that always ask "How high?", you are probably burning through an insane amount of capital having them waste time on projects with rewards minimal compared to time/money investment, and you are also not getting any benefit from your IT pro-actively suggesting projects that would have a wonderful ROI.
If you are running your IT workers like plumbers, it would most likely be in your company's best interest to let you go.
Go outside of IT to buy a "cheap" laptop, cheaper than the standard model we provide. But without the warranty($), and you bought a cheap consumer model, not a business class model($), and it won't run the software your dept. relies on, and when it blows up because you let your nephew install "better" antivirus software to fix the crapware you loaded, IT has to rebuild it. But we don't have an image for it, so it takes a day or 2, instead of an hour or 2.
Go outside of IT to the cloud for backup, go right ahead and trust business or client data to that web startup. Sure, it's a lot easier than using the corporate VPN, until the data is exposed. Or until you forget your password, and IT can't help you, no matter how much you jump up & down, because you used an outside service.
It's not okay for IT staff to be surly or give bad advice or not listen. But you may want to consider that some of us have a clue, and a better understanding of our company's IT environment than your brother-in-law, and we do care about what you need, and will do our best to help you.
A long time ago, all the computing power was in the "dinosaur pens", and with advances in technology some companies started making what they called "minicomputers" (scaled-down big computers that only cost ten or fifty thousand dollars or so), and many enterprising managers tried taking control of data processing from the DP department.
The cost comparisons typically proved that the minis were the way to go, and they typically involved purchase cost of the mini against what the DP department was charging for mainframe processing, which included paying for the dinosaurs, housing them, feeding them with clean power, backing up data, providing operators, all of that. I watched one acquisition take place where the programming budget was for one person, one-fourth time, and that was soon four people, full-time. The department had to find a place to put the minicomputer and the developers, have somebody watch over it, and all that sort of thing that wasn't budgeted for. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as the mini did do some things the mainframe didn't then, but it sure wasn't worth it to save money.
We saw it again with personal computers, and we're seeing it again with the cloud. It's cheaper to go with the distributed solution, as long as you don't worry about security, possible regulatory issues, getting software that works, having reliable service, or other considerations. Both minis and personal computers frequently gave some additional flexibility, which was good, but that's not typically why they were adopted.
This has been going on for a long, long time.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
i've worked in companies where the cloud would've been a far better solution than the in-house one. the problem in those companies were the politics and lack of competence by that department. the fact that cloud providers have managed to solve some common problems for a scalable price makes it far more attractive than dealing with difficult and unpredictable personalities (let's be honest; sysadmins are sysadmins because of a certain personality trait). it's just one less variable to deal with in the end. this is not to say that the cloud is for everyone. i think the cloud doesn't work where you have a specific problem that cannot be scaled to the cloud's needs. or if you have a great IT department that you can trust.
For most business users, poor service is better than no service. I have seen hundreds of projects and millions of dollars wasted across multiple companies because IT simply cannot deliver. The "cloud", in comparison, may suck or be unreliable but if it provides the basic functionality that a business needs then it wins over local IT. Simple.
Nope, physically isolated development network. We dealt with this at Cisco where obviously they were developing stuff that could affect other networking equipment, the only way to assure the production network was stable was to have an isolated lab network. They even had its own internet feed so that if they hosed the uplink router they only lost web access from the lab.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
If they have an unrealistic expectation tell them that, but also tell them what their alternatives are: spend more money now, use "cloud" (aka rented) resources a[n]d pay later.
Just the same reason as normal outsourcing: Fast fix for something that would take forever to do it internally. Sometimes the fast fix is a fix, sometimes it comes back later to bite you. - Hopefully, after the earnings statement, the promotion, or transfer...
I've worked at 3 different companies in my career, and at each of them, IT as an organization held the attitude that the company existed for their benefit, and not the other way around.
IT needs to understand that it is a service organization with the mission of satisfying its customer by providing top notch service and support, and asking "how high?"
Actually in most large organisations IT exists for and has the same mission as every other part of the organisation: Maximise shareholder value. ITILv3 done properly is all about IT being a real part of the business from the top to the bottom, working with our colleagues in other areas to make things better.
An awful lot of business managers approach IT in the wrong way, they tend to say "I want this" when in most cases a more productive approach is to say "This is my problem, how can IT help me make it go away?"
If you employ a bunch of experts with years of experience in their field why in Cthulhu's name would you, as a business manager, not want them to use their experience to design you a solution? Appropriate delegation is a key part of effective management, set your goals and the parameters that need to be worked within (cost, FSA regulations, whatever), and let the people you employed to do this stuff do it.
I've seen IT done well and I've seen it done badly, but I ran a service desk that was adored by all our users from the lowest to the highest and I can tell you now that a business working in partnership with IT gets so much our of the relationship you wouldn't believe it.
I have a bridge for sale at a good price.
Is it a 3Com or Cisco at least? I haven't seen a good bridge in a while.
All joking aside, it's interesting to see how these different transition periods (mainframe->PC, local->cloud) overlap in terms of integration and increasing complexity.
Why trust any one with your proprietary information? Sounds like an easy target for the chicom's to hack into, hey they can did to the government.
When you don't include IT early enough, their input is disruptive to the plan, even if it's valid input. So they are the bearers of bad news.
Some say the solution is to include IT earler in a project by asking for their input and assistance with the design phase. Bad idea. Nobody should have to go beg another department for help, and what you get by asking is always less than you need.
Q: So how do you solve this problem?
A: By including IT in your team organizationally. Some companies do this by making the product team (developers, etc) responsible for most IT functions on their product (e.g. Amazon.com). Some companies integrate IT team members into the virtual product team, sitting next to the developers as they work (e.g. aQuantive, before the MS acquisition).
Either way, you need to make IT literally *BE* part of the team, so there is no "us vs. them" mentality. Now that cloud services can be bought off the shelf, IT needs to be very responsive to remain compatitive. The only way to be responsive enough to an modern agile team is to be integrated into their fast-paced process at an intimate level. Any IT department that tries to stay independent and powerful will fall to the competition, and deserves to IMO.
--Jaborandy
The best company that I ever did work for used the ISP model for services. It had three IT departments. The Main IT department provided a solid connection to the Internet and a solid email service. The other two also offered a menu of services that each department could use or not use at their pleasure. This included bulk software licensing, computer purchasing, and best of all repair and technical support. But these services came with a price. If an employee bought their own crap computer and the IT people had to fight with it daily then the department would be billed a pile and probably do something about it. But unless the computer posed a clear threat then they had to support it. This way any department that felt that macs were better than pcs could try it out and find out if this were true.
The only check the IT people had to do was a software license check and an important data backup plan check.
Where this got interesting was that with two separate support groups you could call one and if they wouldn't come or pissed on your selection of computers then you could call the other. The result was that the grumpy IT department would bill less and have its budget cut.
The main IT people could also bill any department that caused a disaster. So if you had a bunch of infected PCs show up and they had to cut you off then they would send you a whopper of a bill. Thus the individual departments were motivated to not make stupid decisions.
I never saw a company outsource less. Also before I was leaving they were about to do the same thing with software development except they were talking about setting up three competing sections.
Also this company had the most interesting selection of systems working I have ever seen. In the security room they had (not kidding) a VIC-20 which overlaid some text (really BIG text) onto the video feed. This had been set up when the VIC-20 was new. The video system had been upgraded but since the VIC was a working solution no IT person could ever kill it on a whim.
The printing department had a crap Sun Sparc setup years past its best by date because that was what they wanted. The IT people wanted it long gone but the only thing they could do was support it and then bill appropriately.
Another department (the one I dealt with) was serving data up from MongoDB. Things like MongoDB are hard to get past a stodgy old IT department.
IT is one of the most thankless tasks in existence. If everything is running well, people forget they exist. If something breaks or has to be taken offline for maintenance, someone is inevitably screaming bloody hell.
You think that is unique? Think anyone ever calls a policeman, a firefighter, or a paramedic because things are going well? How about a sports referee? If they do their job right no one notices them at all. If they screw up, EVERYONE notices them and not in a good way. Ever think about accounting? I promise you the only time you pay them a moment's attention is if your paycheck isn't correct. Bet you don't pay much attention to the bridges you drive over every day - unless of course one collapses underneath you. Then you want the head of the engineer who designed it wrong. You spend much time thinking about the fisherman who risks his life to put that salmon on your dinner plate? And if you want really, truly thankless jobs, consider being a soldier. Not only do most people not think about you, but it's part of the job description that others might try to kill you. Worse, many of the people you protect will call you a murderer for protecting them. I'll take some sniveling VP throwing an unreasoning hissy fit over being shot any day.
I can continue pretty much forever. Virtually every job is like this. People do not notice things running smoothly. IT is nothing special in this regard.
I wish the CEO of my employer would fire my CIO. That childish douchebag has completely trashed the IT department and is hemorrhaging his whole budget on a 3rd party company to add features to a barely useable webapp. He could care less about improving it so it functions better and the employees can do their job. Instead, the interface is a PITA, DBs aren't indexed, stored procedures are rare and written poorly if they exist, DB queries read like "select * from all" and then parsed from there, and I can't even get an approval to replace a seven year old laptop that doesn't work so an employee can do their job.
I've been tempted to communicate with the CEO, verbally or writing a letter, explaining how the Chief Idiot Officer he has working for him is going to bring the company to its knees, again. Sadly I doubt he would listen to someone not in an executive position, like myself.
That is what I use to do for my development machines, stand alone virtual machines no network access so I could do what I need.
Then the IT office above us made a rule that standalone machines had to follow the same rules as those on the domain.
I'm not against cloud services, but I've seen users do this sort of thing with 3rd party suppliers or with packages.It all sounds great. Some company supplies something and you don't have pesky IT getting in the way.
But then the business wants to change its process in some way. Does the 3rd party company's software allow that change? No. OK, either you now have to work out some Rube Goldberg process, where your users have to put something into 2 systems, or pay through the nose for that 3rd party company to make a change. And you'll have to wait behind all the priorities to other customers. What I've seen in a few places is that after a few years, they realise they're getting shafted by the 3rd party company, and the reason is that users completely underestimated how many changes they'd need to do.
People running companies need to quit thinking about IT as something that they can just drop in. It's more like the arteries of the business. That doesn't mean you can't use packages or clouds, but it does mean that those things better be easy to integrate, or be flexible in a way that you can change them without being forced to go to a 3rd party supplier. That either means having a web service, or the source code. I've worked on systems where we couldn't get our own data out without paying the company a 5 figure sum for the a CSV dump.
At last! an interesting comment. It assumes there will be a transition to the cloud though. I'm not so sure. I have a feeling the cloud is already here, and remote access to data and applications is all that will happen. Cloud not dominated by big players replacing IT, but rather cloud services provided _by_ IT.
We'll see though!
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
What, exactly, have you eliminated when you outsource to the cloud? Some of the folks that build servers, a few (but not all) your application development staff and perhaps a few DBAs. You will still need your network engineers, your client support helpdesk (unless you have already outsourced that), your business analysts, your application admins and a good part of your development staff. If you think you can really outsource "a large chunk" of your IT staff, then I suspect you've never seen a company try to do it. The companies that do it will slash their staff, bring in the outsource firms, and think they cut a fat hog. Then the outsource fees will start to rise as the company figures out that the folks they had on the IT staff really were doing a lot more than the management thought - and now they actually have to pay to get people to work weekends and nights. The company will also find out that asking for something that is out of scope of the SLA or project requirements isn't just a matter of telling everyone to work harder - they will actually have to pay money when that happens. Of course, the outsource firm will also be trying to load the support roster with every fresh-off-the-plane, junior tech they can - and eventually the company will figure out that they are paying the same or more for far inferior service.
The cloud has many advantages - but none of them involve dramatically lowering the size of the IT staff or reducing IT's role as a strategic partner to the company.
We don't NEED an "IT professional" when ALL we have is a couple of PCs and a wireless router
FTFY. If you're an actual business, you'll need an IT professional to advise you on what you really need (and to make IT policies, etc). If you're operating out of your basement, an IT pro can come in handy, but you might just accidentally use your computer securely without it being enforced.
You can get rid of the dinners, and they will sweeten the deal some other way - sales is an art, and it works. Everyone should try to learn a little about how to make themselves a salesman, even if they aren't naturally good at it.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
So you've got a st00pid boss? Find a new one.