Slashdot Mirror
In Favor of Homegrown IT Solutions
snydeq writes "Today's IT organizations turn too readily to vendors, eschewing homegrown solutions to their detriment, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'Back when IT was "simple," several good programmers and support staff could run the whole show. Nowadays, [companies] buy hefty support contracts and shift the burden of maintaining and troubleshooting large parts of their IT infrastructure on to the vendors who may know their own product well, but have a hard time dealing with issues that may crop up during integration with other vendors' gear. ... Relying solely on support contracts and generic solutions is a good way to self-limit the agility and performance of any business. In short, more gurus equals less hand-wringing and stress all around.'"
Unfortunately, this is all too true. Just recently, I had to contact support for one of the largest IT companies in the world. They will remain nameless, but the company has a 4 letter name and they were at one time the largest PC manufacturer. I asked to speak to someone in the support dept for the product I was using, and the people on the other end of the phone had no idea that product even existed.