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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.'"
Loaded cost for an employee is typically 18% of salary + $320/month for real estate overhead. So a $90 K employee ends up costing about $120,000 with benefits.
-- $G
On the other hand, there is certainly plenty of crap that they pay Oracle and Microsoft $$$ to run that doesn't serve anyone's needs very well, or integrate with anything else.
Like Sharepoint? It baffles me as to why anybody would buy that monstrosity... it doesn't do anything!
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
There are IT gurus out there with free time. Some of them are working in environments that have completely outsourced to vendors, and the gurus end up educating the vendor's minions, sometimes on the most basic operations. Personally I find it easier when I open a ticket with the vendor to copy/paste the exact commands for them to run on servers on which I no longer have root. It saves time.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It depends on if you mean a vendor's 3rd party product versus outsourced programming.
If you hired an outside consultant and paid them by the hour to produce a custom piece of software, then I'd default to having the contract written up to include the source code as a deliverable. You might encounter resistance if its a big firm and they have reusable libraries they've created and don't want to share them. In this case the compromise might be to provide the compiled DLL's for these, but you are back at square one where you depend upon them to fix issues in those DLLs, but at least this way it reduces the dependencies.
When I think "Vendor" I think of someone who has some premade product, which seems to be what the article is refering to. I.e. its like going to a vending machine and saying I want the "Blah Blah Account Management Software". These products are usually sold to many different customers and thus have had a stream of revenue over a long period of time or for a large team to enhance the software over time. Thus they are somewhat large and even if there was a source code license option available from the vendor(although there usually isn't), the code base would probably be large and probably somewhat difficult to customize by internal staff.
Also, the cost to develop these vendor products is spread across many customers, but as the article author points out, you can pay dearly in the areas of integration and customization. You may find corner cases or new requirements down the line that the software simply cannot handle, and in my experience(having continuously been in one scenario or another dealing with a vendor for the last 5+ years) there are a lot of barriers to cross in getting the customization or fixes done.
If people are upset about the inability to customize the vendor product, then you need to go back to the stakeholders and say hey, "In light of new requirements, we clearly need a solution that 1) has some features that support these customization scenarios, OR 2) has a source code license and developers who have the skills and time to deal with implementing those customization(it's hard to know what you are getting yourself into until you actually see the source code), OR 3) roll our own solution." #3 can be a good option if you are only using a small subset of the vendor's product's features, which I've found to often be the case(since usually over time it has been enhanced to meet many customer's needs, but any single customer will only need a subset of these). Thus to roll your own solution isn't going to be nearly as complex, and may be a breath of fresh air for your users who can be overwhelmed by extra unneeded features/complexities.
I've also found that vendors put a premium on integration features. The more features they provide for integration, the more their fear that you or another vendor's product will stand in place of one of their extra "modules" that they wanted you to buy from them.
The company I work for has the best of both worlds. They go out and buy a $500,000 piece of Enterprise Software*, forgo the expensive contractors and dump the setup and configuration on 2 or 3 in-house developers, a project manager (who is usually an outside contractor who happens to be friends with an executive -- a budget locust, if you will) and an IT manager. After about a year the esteemed project manager moves on to the next project, the manager in charge gets promoted, the software is blamed for the lack of results and a new $500,000 purchase is made.
*For those that haven't used the stuff, Enterprise Software doesn't actually work out of the box. It's much like a do-it-yourself plane kit with lots of manuals on FAA regulations, a glossy guide full of pictures of planes "other customers" have built and a box full of parts (with a few random parts missing) but no actual assembly instructions.
I'm not sure what Sharepoint's forte is. It's a file server with a web interface more or less with some MS-Office integration features. Some try to use it as a intranet WCM system, which it does poorly and requires lots of tweaking to work right. I don't get "it".
Table-ized A.I.
The article was about contracting versus in house gurus, and every month it seems there is always an article about the lack of gurus, hence the comment.
I suspect the problem is corporate executives who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. There is a simple way to increase the supply of something: Pay more. If companies would pay competent IT people more money, then more people who would otherwise go on to be tax lawyers or securities traders will go into IT instead.
By contrast, what you hear in the media is the executives thinking with their MBA brains: If you want to increase supply, you can pay more... or you can go to the government and create artificial incentives to increase supply. More H1B visas. Government education subsidies for tech majors, to divert labor supply from occupations that pay the same or less than IT into IT. More supply at the same price.
The problem is that the latter doesn't create "gurus" -- it creates paper MCSEs. It makes the problem companies have in hiring competent staff that much harder, because you create a population of applicants who have degrees and certifications and even experience, yet have no earthly idea what they're doing. It attracts exactly those people who are too stupid to understand that a $1000 scholarship is a completely asinine way to make a career choice, instead of those who are smart enough to do just about anything and who make decisions based on forward thinking criteria like which career will allow them to afford a house in a neighborhood with better schools and a comfortable retirement.
It's the same disease that allows them to make the IT department a cost center: They count all of the salaries and equipment and ignore the productivity improvements that accrue to other departments as a result of their existence. Which makes it look like cutting staff or replacing them with less qualified but lower paid employees will save them money: The cost savings goes straight onto the spreadsheet, without accounting for the lost profits that will occur when a major system falls over and there is no longer anyone competent working there who can get it running before you lose a big client.
And what does CS have to do with IT?
Exactly. This. This is part of the problem.
There's a disjunct between how academia sees Computer Science as nothing to do with IT and how business sees a CS degree as the basic starting point for a career in IT.
Can we please either have a Computers in Business degree that teaches useful skills, or a business culture that doesn't expect academic degrees to be vocational qualifications? I don't mind which, either is good.
Also, the reason your company doesn't have any gurus is that no-one is prepared to spend any time or money training their staff, or even giving them self-development time to train themselves. Companies that do decent training have gurus. It's pretty simple.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Although a union to say "You don't have to be forced to give up having a life, just so someone can get their spreadsheets at all times of day" would be nice.
Everyone wants a 24x7 IT system. There's a way to do that; lots of money on the hardware, and three complete teams of core staff who work shifts (with the commensurate shift salary augmentation).
But no, what business wants is a group of IT staff who work the same hours as everyone else, for the same kind of salary as the average pen pusher, who will then, at no notice, respond to a phone call at any time of day or night and get to site (or at least connect up remotely) and spend hours diagnosing network/server/PC/application problems (possibly calling up other IT staff), and then being in for work the next day as if nothing happened.