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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.
True.
I work in client computing. What 15 years ago was wandering around with an Office CD is now making sure that App-V Office works on non-persistent virtual machines while settings get captured by a third virtualization service. And making sure that last decade's mouse and keyboard would work has become making sure that users can get into systems from any device, anywhere, over VPN, to the aforementioned virtual systems, without them ever locking themselves out, needing to get to the password reset portal, or making sure the help desk doesn't overload their call volume. Even the proliferation of multiple monitors has left you upgrading Citrix clients and thin device firmwares, all of which connects to another byzantine layer of abstraction.
Wait, what? The filer is out? How many people are down?
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.
These have happened to me:
"Why do you need that $700 enterprise-grade AP? Just use the $69 linksys one like I do at home!"
Monday: "Support my new iGadget. Now." Tuesday: "We need encryption/security/firewall/2FA to meet PCI/CJIS/SOX requirements".
"Cost saving measure by centralizing printers!" By next month everyone who has the authority to ask for a personal printer again has one.
"Make an SSID without a password so that we can use our Chromecast."
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
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.
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.
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.
This. A million times this.
Getting so sick of the same old sub story about how the cloud is insecure, as if it is some rule of nature. The cloud will be as secure as the cloud vendor makes it.
The idea that sensitive data is more secure in-house than in the cloud, just because it is not inside your four walls, is not rooted in reality. It might make you FEEL more warm and cozy that the data is in your four walls, but does your company have all of the latest enterprise application level firewalls and IPS devices? Does your company have a well-staffed dedicated 24/7 SOC IN ADDITION TO a 24/7 NOC? Does your company have a defined IOC sharing procedure with it's peers?
So which has a better chance of having the resources needed to secure their environment - your tiny little IT shop with it's cash strapped budget, or an enterprise cloud vendor that has all of the above? My money is on the cloud vendor.
This is just another post for us to vent our increasing frustations with the way IT is being more and more undervalued.
We used to be called experts. Now we're virtual janitors.
The problem here isn't the "new kids", it's the company for buying into crappy "solutions" which are proprietary and keep the IT department stuck supporting them for years or decades. For instance, look at Rational ClearCase. It's a complete piece of shit compared to modern DVCS systems like git or mercurial; it's slow as hell, requires full-time administrators to keep it running, and is a PITA to use, and lacks all kinds of modern features such as atomic commits. Maybe in 1989 it was pretty cool, but so were patent leather jackets. So why do companies still keep paying millions of dollars for this POS? Because management is stupid and believes the marketing BS from IBM/Rational, and also probably because they've based all their development on it and are afraid of change (even though CC is so shitty it's costing them dearly in development time because it's such a PITA to use).
If companies worked harder to keep themselves independent and not reliant on proprietary products that only aim to lock them in, they wouldn't have this problem so much.