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Is Enterprise IT More Difficult To Manage Now Than Ever?
colinneagle writes: Who's old enough to remember when the best technology was found at work, while at home we got by with clunky home computers and pokey dial-up modems? Those days are gone, and they don't look like they're ever coming back.
Instead, today's IT department is scrambling to deliver technology offerings that won't get laughed at — or, just as bad, ignored — by a modern workforce raised on slick smartphones and consumer services powered by data centers far more powerful than the one their company uses. And those services work better and faster than the programs they offer, partly because consumers don't have to worry about all the constraints that IT does, from security and privacy to, you know, actually being profitable. Plus, while IT still has to maintain all the old desktop apps, it also needs to make sure mobile users can do whatever they need to from anywhere at any time.
And that's just the users. IT's issues with corporate peers and leaders may be even rockier. Between shadow IT and other Software-as-a-Service, estimates say that 1 in 5 technology operations dollars are now being spent outside the IT department, and many think that figure is actually much higher. New digital initiatives are increasingly being driven by marketing and other business functions, not by IT. Today's CMOs often outrank the CIO, whose role may be constrained to keeping the infrastructure running at the lowest possible cost instead of bringing strategic value to the organization. Hardly a recipe for success and influence.
Instead, today's IT department is scrambling to deliver technology offerings that won't get laughed at — or, just as bad, ignored — by a modern workforce raised on slick smartphones and consumer services powered by data centers far more powerful than the one their company uses. And those services work better and faster than the programs they offer, partly because consumers don't have to worry about all the constraints that IT does, from security and privacy to, you know, actually being profitable. Plus, while IT still has to maintain all the old desktop apps, it also needs to make sure mobile users can do whatever they need to from anywhere at any time.
And that's just the users. IT's issues with corporate peers and leaders may be even rockier. Between shadow IT and other Software-as-a-Service, estimates say that 1 in 5 technology operations dollars are now being spent outside the IT department, and many think that figure is actually much higher. New digital initiatives are increasingly being driven by marketing and other business functions, not by IT. Today's CMOs often outrank the CIO, whose role may be constrained to keeping the infrastructure running at the lowest possible cost instead of bringing strategic value to the organization. Hardly a recipe for success and influence.
Now it is, absolutely !!
The cost of the Cloud is cheap. And for IT, we just say "not as secure, but if you're okay with that, go ahead" and when the Cloud services fail, or get breached or whatever, the CIO can simply say "not my fault, that was your choice". The real cost is hidden.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
.. because nowadays NSA cares for all your backups ;)
force everyone to work on green phosphor , don't hire or pander to the kind of dumb-ass that needs clicky pointy and autocomplete and facebook/twitter/tumblr updates on the side. raise the bar. work will get done.
I can't answer if it's more difficult, or simply more challenging.
Increasingly, there seems to be more and more push for internal social media and the like.
There's clearly much more desire to see badges awarded for participating in discussions in Sharepoint than there is on having reliable servers.
So all the funding goes to the sexy mandates, with the apparent assumption that the stable boring stuff happens by magic and doesn't need funding.
Sometimes I find myself shaking my head, because when internally it becomes glitz over substance and functionality, the marketing idiots have screwed us all.
It is mind boggling to me that everyone seems to have gotten hoodwinked into thinking a "Like" button provides more benefit to the company than the things which keep corporate data intact.
It's like IT has become superficial and vacuous, and the decisions are being made by idiots who don't know which parts of technology add value to the business/support core business activities and are necessary.
I've seen "new collaboration tools" deployed in organizations that I immediately think "how the hell does this help me do my job, or improve anything in the company"? In some cases, I still don't have an answer.
But I've seen companies spend a lot of money on systems which add no real value, and which just siphon resources from things which do.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Difficult? Eh, only if you've been living under a rock; unable to learn, grow, and change with the times. IT is all about communications, documentation and change...when you stop changing, you stop being part of the solution.
>> Who's old enough to remember when the best technology was found at work, while at home we got by with clunky home computers and pokey dial-up modems?
I'm even older. I remember when the best technology was at home, on our personal computers. From there, PCs started invading the workplace...finally breaking up a lot of the control held by an iron-fisted, non-innovative, mainframe-based IT department.
It seems to me that the question asked in the headline doesn't quite match the summary:
"Is managing IT harder now than it used to be? I think it is, and I offer as my support that IT executives are not as influential as marketing executives!"
In a lot of ways, IT management is probably easier. The technology is better and more reliable. We have a new generation of cloud management and MDM for all kinds of things. Managing an IT department is hard, but it's always been hard.
But I think what you're really getting at is, businesses don't want to spend money in IT. The reality is, they never did. I've been working in IT for a couple decades now, and the whole time, there's always been budget issues where upper management is saying, "Do we really need to buy new workstations? Didn't we just buy new workstations 7 years ago?" Sure, a couple decades ago, they were saying, "Didn't we just install the terminals 7 years ago?" but the concept was the same. I doubt it was new then, either. Businesses don't like to spend money, and IT gets classified as a cost center.
Sure, "the cloud" makes it all a bit worse, since now clueless executives can say, "It's all this stuff supposed to be free now? I have a Dropbox account that I use for personal stuff, and it works great, and it's free. Can't we just put all of our servers in the Cloud like Dropbox is?" But is it new that marketing is driving business decisions more than the IT department is, or that clueless executives want to replace everything with whichever buzzword-heavy technology that they've recently heard about? Nope. That's pretty much the deal.
We're (IT and the company they work for, in general) not here to provide them with all the comforts of their home PC. I'm sorry, it's a job. Would I rather be working from my slick new laptop with the solid state drive and no security concerns? Sure, but that's not a reality on many different levels. On top of that I don't write the policy and I don't set the budget. Maybe they can land one of those "work from home for 2000 a week" jobs, Good luck.
You would have problems managing a distributed, literally mission-critical computing infrastructure too, if it was constantly getting hit by phaser, photon torpedo, and 'weapon of the week' fire, not to mention entities that don't respect fire/air/vacuum-walls. Seriously, do they even have an IT group?
After years of insisting that the rest of the organization exists to make the CIO's job easier, it's great to see the 'revolt of the masses' moving away from the one-size-fits-all/everything-Microsoft-regardless-of-the-security-cost solution to stuff that makes the individual more productive.
The complexity of everything makes the IT job harder, but "I can't be bothered to learn new things" response to the user demand for alternatives is ultimately self-defeating.
As a side observation over the last 35 years in the business, systems that support multiple platforms/clients/etc tend to be a lot more reliable than those that support a single configuration. The unwritten and often unknown assumptions about the execution environment (client or server, etc) are latent bugs even in a monoculture. (I'm certainly old enough to remember how much software broke in the move from 32 bit to 64 bit; anyone who coded as if integers and pointers are same size/interoperable got all the problems s/he deserved!)
I've had many (not too happy) confrontations with marketing lately, which I believe basically thinks our ~10-ppl company could do without any competence in IT.
It's funny because I've always thought of my job as being modern, cutting-edge, you know doing technology and all. Never before had I realized I was on the conservative side of things.
But it's true. Maybe it's changed or it has always been. While marketing will put forth a hundred short-lived ideas I do strive for stability, for things to be scalable and durable.
And maybe those marketing guys are right. They could kill IT in that 10-ppl company and might well get away with it. They probably would recreate an "online-app-maintenance" guy with much lesser influence and be done with internal IT with in-house developpers.
It's been 8 years since I started working. It's not quite like I've spent a whole 30+ year career in IT.
Perhaps requirements have increased. Your users in your enterprise might demand mobile support and whatnot, but at the same time, the tools are getting better and better.
For example: you need a server? well, it used to take months to get your server in the datacenter up and functional. Now, it is a matter of instantiating a new VM in your private cloud.
The impact is even more dramatic for small companies. Want to make a web application? create an account in azure or amazon or any other cloud provider, and just deploy your app in a few minutes. Email, storage, databases, backups, version control systems, project planning tools, ecommerce sites, you can set any of that stuff up in a few minutes with a few clicks, often for free.
If anything IT, particularly for small businesses, has been simplified to where it is a cheap commodity and just a few clicks away.
And as such is a juicy target for all the hucksters. Home users can switch if they get pissed off at one brand. And nobody really needs Facebook anyway. But sitting at your desk at work, you will use what they tell you to. And when the people selling crap to corporate IT discovered this, it was game on for thousands of dollars per seat for licenses. And then there was the blow-back. Many BODs looked at the IT spending and realized that they were getting screwed by travelling salesmen. And they tightened the purse strings.
I worked in and around a few IT projects at Boeing back in the 1990s. Back when "The Web" was becoming viable for enterprise applications. But before vendors caught on that their precious "green screen" mainframe apps could be replaced for pennies on the dollar by a couple of smart people. But once they caught on, they convinced the (newly created position of) CIO that the only way to maintain corporate credibility was to be juggling a bunch of billion dollar development and procurement projects. You are measured by the budget that you consume. Finally, when the non IT management types started seeing the TV ads with the empty data centers, except for that one tiny rack in the corner that replaced it all, they cut off the blank checks, cocaine and hookers.
Have gnu, will travel.
I have found the Cloud to be a magical place. Come, come and join me in... "the Cloud."
Back in the days of dial up modems, green screen terminals and WordPerfect, there were not as many questions and difficulties because there were just so few valid answers. As technology grew to answer those questions, of course it became more difficult to manage simply because things got better. I recall connecting to some places at 300 baud -- when you can watch text download in real-time, of course you want a faster connection. With green screens and non WYSIWIG computing, you wondered why it was such a pain in the ass to get a document to look right and why the computer couldn't just show you what it would look like so you could not have to waste reams of paper.
Nowadays, when you can get a decently fast Internet connection that delivers realtime HD video for less than a hundred bucks a month, is it so weird to ask why bandwidth is limited at work? When many providers will give you gigabytes (or unlimited -- services like CrashPlan) storage space for free for something around $10/month, is it odd to ask why there is a storage quota measured in megabytes? When you see commercial websites that regularly update their UI, why is it so weird that people want to know why no effort is being expended to update some godawful internal tool that hasn't been touched in more than a decade?
Of course, there can be valid answers to the above -- your industry may have reporting requirements, retention requirements, backup requirements, regulatory requirements and/or a grab bag of other things (reliability, testing, etc) that make your costs for providing services very high, and the change process rather onerous. But it doesn't make the questions wrong, you just can't say "we are IT and we control" any more -- you likely need to be more well versed in your industry, or be able to communicate clearly why you still have legacy systems or how much an upgrade would cost, or how much a decent storage array and backup system costs to run.
A lot of these changes also show that IT is fairly well integrated into our daily lives, and it's no longer a "mystery" to a lot of people -- which is good because it opens the opportunity for better partnerships with company departments to do cool stuff. Rather than sit around waiting for someone to suggest a project, why not get out there and ask the departments in your organization what you can do to help them be better? Projects that are co-sponsored by departments that make the money or make the product you sell are much more likely to get funded, and far more likely to be recognized as "strategic" and "revenue positive".
The main problem is that most of the people making "IT decisions" do not understand the full impact of those decisions (or believe that they will not be held responsible).
Moving anything "to the cloud" simply means moving it "to someone else's computer". How do you judge their security?
What happens when one of their other clients is arrested for something illegal and the "cloud" computers get confiscated?
Anyway, from TFA:
Which will NEVER work. Spend some time reading up on the latest cracks that leaked credit card info. If you have to rely on "influence" you should look for another job. There will always be someone with more "influence" than you.
No. Sony knows it is.
Who's old enough to remember when the best technology was found at work
For as long as I've used a personal computer (as opposed to dialing in to the school/work mainframe), I've had a better computer at home than at work. I had a color monitor at home while still using monochrome at work, I've had fast graphics cards (sometimes dual) at home while my work computer was using a cheap integrated card, I had an SSD in my home computer long before I got one in my work computer. There was a brief time when work had a better internet connection than my 56kbs modem, but ever since I got DSL and then a faster cable connection, I've had a better connection at home than at work. Instead of a fractional T1 shared among the office, I had 768 or 1.5mbit DSL... instead of a 10mbit dedicated internet connection at the office, I had a 25mbit cable modem connection.
It's only quite recently that work has surpassed what I'm willing to pay for at home -- now my office has a gigabit pipe to the internet and on my desk I have a 27" iMac (maxed out on CPU and RAM with a 1TB SSD) and two 27" monitors (in addition to the iMac display). My home environment is not even close to my work environment.
1) No computer ever be 100% secure. If it is, it's a brick with a power cord and a monitor.
2) One size NEVER fits all. A secretary, a programmer, a salesperson, a testing lab and a configuration management department all need wildly different configurations for security, login, admin privileges, et. al. As a CIO, your job, frankly, is to suck it up and give it to them. If you can't, you fail.
3) If you let the bean counters run the IT department, it's an automatic fail. This fail can be hidden for some years by the bean counters and they engage in the standard self-congratulatory circle jerks and self-defined measures of "productivity," but the lack of reality orientation *will* kill your organization eventually.
4) Never trust a newly minted MBA or anything they say, think or do. Ever. It's like putting a philosophy major in charge of line production on a factory floor. It's a *lot* like that. Good luck with getting anything done on budget and on schedule.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The More Things Change, the More They Stay The Same.
It's my general impression that the cost of any given IT resource has gone down at roughly the same rate the consumption of said resource has risen. This means that IT capabilities rise at the same rate as advances in storage/programming/processing power/etc., but the total complexity (and amount of IT resource to manage that complexity) has stayed roughly level.
I remember fifteen years ago, the "rule of thumb" for managing Enterprise Storage was approx. two administrators per Terabyte. (This was when a terabyte storage array was about the size of a pair of commercial refrigerators and took 4 3-phase power feeds.) Nowadays, the company still has two administrators, but they now have a Petabyte to manage, and their company makes productive use of every last scrap of that Petabyte.
Companies need to take advantage of the same externally available technology that consumers do... it's not rocket science. The idea that a company MUST provide it's own infrastructure the same way it did 20 years ago is stupid. My company just last week turned off access to all dropbox type providers, and there's practically a line out their door of people asking for exceptions. To excel in business, you have to adopt good ideas, regardless of where they come from.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
All of this is missing a major point about the posted article:
- Is this news or a posted question to the readers?
Everyone knows that IT has become a huge house of cards and it isn't possible to give a real solid level of protection while using modern features and technology. The comments echo this fact.
So where is the news and/or where is the useful question?
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SlashDot should be so much better then this.
I have been in IT for about 10 years, so I am not sure I am completely qualified to say since forever, but I would say that the issue is we are now competing with cloud providers as to the expectation of our customers. For example, Gmail offers you 15 GBs for free and IT customers wonder why they only have 2GBs at work. Most cloud services have pretty amazing up times, and people wonder why your IT dept. can't do the same thing (no matter how well staffed it is). People are seeing the consuming of resources as free and then trying to IT accordingly.
If IT were easy and things never changed then anybody could do it. If you expect long term stability then you are in the wrong field.
File and printer sharing is easy. How much more complicated than that is up to you.
My management started saying, "THE CLOUD," over and over again, like consumers were saying, "iPad!."
I made damn sure that my objections were documented via email at every step as I cheerfully participated in assisted suicide.
Sure enough, about 8 months later (after management got a hands-on physics lesson about propagation delay), the cloud wasn't there. People were on my ass big time.
I called the cloud center and told them to, "Do that fail-over thing to the backup site in Oklahoma and stuff," and they said that the switch-over was included in the catastrophic failure.
I got myself a cup of coffee and one of the managers got in my face and demanded that we implement the backup plan.
I told him, "Sir ... our Plan B is Plan A."
So, they bought me some servers and stuff and I'm running things from my fucking computer room.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The situation IT faces has some interesting parallels with that of vaccines, but multiplied to be exponentially worse. An ignorant subset of our society is convinced that vaccines are a Bad Idea. There are a lot of reasons for this we don't need to get into, but similarly to IT, one of the reasons is that vaccines became so ubiquitous and effective that what they save us from has become invisible. These days we are seeing spikes in horrible and preventable diseases because some people have an overriding "out of sight out of mind" component to their cognitive life. The same is true of IT.
IT is critical to any organization. It doesn't matter what organization you're talking about. Efficiency of IT can improve the productivity of every industry. It has permeated them all. I had lunch last week with a nice lady who works in a very large insurance company. This company has a fair number of employees devoted to answering certain kinds of email (negative ones) and a lot of time gets spent forwarding emails to the right person. She was lamenting that there is no way to do that automatically. "There is.." I pointed out, "It is called sentiment analysis and is a branch of NLP. It can probably do what you want with at least 80% accuracy. You would have to hire a computational linguist and pay them 95k a year to make it happen."
And that's the rub. It costs money. People who run large organizations rarely understand technology. That means they need to completely trust the CTO/CIO on every recommendation, because the CEO is entirely unequipped to themselves evaluate any such proposal. It's also the case that large corporations are under the laughably inaccurate opinion that people work harder to make up for being unproductive. That is to say, many think "well it has to get done, they are paid to do it, and it does get done, so why do we need to spend more money on tech"?
The application of technology is nuanced. It is not possible to directly quantify the gains in all circumstances, though the gains could mean an order of magnitude difference in productivity. It doesn't fit easily into a spreadsheet, a sharepoint page, or a powerpoint presentation. Thus, the pointy haired boss will remain impossible to convince.
Anyone with a credit card can buy IT services, throw a bunch of corporate data into them, and no one knows they did it. When that person leaves, and the boss suddenly wants that data, or legal needs it for eDiscovery, or IA needs data for the quarterly report only to discover all the data is in an non-SOX approved app with un-approved, undocumented access to a random collection of employees who all had read/write access...GAH! Need the revenue report for Q3? Okay, here, go to mega.nz...
A lot of the technology itself has gotten easier, the products available are robust and fully developed. The difficulty is often as it always has been in the human side of the business. People in the past didn't have options outside of IT and we used to actually be able to say no when someone wanted to bring in their own device or use some outside service. IT didn't used to have much power, but now we have almost none. Businesses pay us because we are experts in our field, but then constantly make decisions that contradict our input. So what if marketing wants some cloud thing, since when should their desires matter in the equation? I long for management that says "I don't give a fuck what you want. Tell us what you need, we can define the solution if one is warranted." My job got easier when I stopped fighting the businesses on decisions, but now I know I'm not actually doing what I think is in the interests of the companies I work for, rather just bending with the wind so nobody actually has to deal with conflict.
I'll start worrying when the users can figure out how to automate a file copy on their own.
LCARS 3.0 was a disaster.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Creative (noun)
ABE blocked
No, it's not harder manage. Just the hiring/promotion criteria for management in IT is largely based on your skills as a... programmer.
It's also hard for Tennis players to play Football.
Oh and all the bro-mance, patriarchy, social ineptitude left over from the last 30 years doesn't help much either.
"I'm going to sit here and drink my coffee."
Assuming, by Enterprise, you mean Godzilla sized network, then it is a royal pain in the ass to maintain.
:|
Take the internal networks of a well known ( and very much hated ) telecommunications company. Depending on which data center you're visiting, you can have absolute bleeding edge state of the art money is no object hardware in one corner and state of the art circa 1975 banks of modems sitting across from it. Stuff that was manufacture discontinued before most here were even BORN.
It's so damn big it takes entire organizations to mange portions of it. The sheer amount of money required to update it to current standards would be staggering. Anyone remember Datakit ? Hahahahaha. . . . Still in use. Very much in use.
So, for now, while all your super high tech skills are handy, knowing the old school is still very much in demand.
Viva la X.25 !!!! lol
Working for one of the world's largest company's, and seeing what they're doing, that's working, the answer is simple.
Stop trying to manage, start trying to educate. Give users full control over their computer, and educate them on the risks. Make it clear that if they perform certain actions after educating them on why they shouldn't do them is going to get them fired.
It's probably been said already but, you know. The Enterprise is famous for its security flaws, ranging from a lack of seatbelts to cope with its gravely-disfunctional artificial gravity system to computer passwords you can guess or bypass in ten seconds to... oh, don't even start me on the flaws in the holodecks. This is what you get for taking the cheapest bids. Naturally, Microsoft won everywhere and insisted that the holodecks needed to support Word and Excel plug-ins, then there was this deal with Adobe, and... dude. There may be Extraterrestrial Intelligence, but Enterprise Intelligence is just not even. Don't make my cry. Those poor ensigns.
Slashdot Beta sucks.
It is an acknowledged fact that the operating systems we use cannot be made secure even without end user interaction. They are just too complex. And yet we must trust them to do business. Even without the acknowledgement the proof comes weekly. Despite this we still use them, and worse - old versions of them that are a parody of secure code and known to be exploited.
We spend the end user's trust too readily. And we let them spend it greedily.
If I were the man I was five years ago, I'd take a FLAMETHROWER to this place! *
I don't post here much any more.
The problem with firewalls and antivirus is they all locking the door after the cattle are fled.
Your data will never be secure.
*Scent of a woman Great movie.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The problem has been the same since the PC first came out: users can "do things" with a PC/laptop/smartphone/tablet and think that "doing things" makes them an expert on IT. So when they come up with a "great idea for a new application", they can not and will not fathom the fact that it can take months or years to implement, is going to cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, and will be obsolete before it ever hits production due to changing business needs.
There is no cure for the "wisdom" of people who tell you how to do your job, or how their 14 year old nephew could write the application in a few weeks. They've made up their mind that you're just a lazy SOB trying to milk the company for money and a cushy job, and will never, ever, ever understand just how much effort goes into security, design, testing, porting, etc. To them, everything is "easy."
The real problem is that companies let such users and managers make business decisions based on "their gut instinct" instead of properly planned and projected schedules. Because heaven forbid you should ever tell the marketting manager that he can't have his shiny Sharepoint solution because it doesn't provide anything useful to the company that can't be accomplished with a properly organized set of folders on a shared drive/server somewhere.
No, they're the ones who sign for the budgets, and they're the ones who like the "shiny", so you're the one who gets stuck trying to make the shiny work with all the line of business systems that are actually important to the operation of the business.
And if you even hint that you can't do it, well, there's a company overseas that's promising to do it in a month as an offshore service, so you're fired.
Which, in a nutshell, is how the bean counters and their ilk get away with their bad business decisions: they constantly hold the threat of offshoring and termination over your head to beat Mr. IT into submission.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I have been in IT for about 10 years, so I am not sure I am completely qualified to say since forever, but I would say that the issue is we are now competing with cloud providers as to the expectation of our customers. For example, Gmail offers you 15 GBs for free and IT customers wonder why they only have 2GBs at work. Most cloud services have pretty amazing up times, and people wonder why your IT dept. can't do the same thing (no matter how well staffed it is). People are seeing the consuming of resources as free and then trying to IT accordingly.
http://freedownloadsofts274.blogspot.com/
http://softwarescollectionawesome.blogspot.com/
No. Just buy LANDESK. Then learn to use it. It will make enterprise IT quite straight forward.