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Ask Slashdot: What Are Some 'Best Practices' IT Should Avoid At All Costs? (cio.com)
snydeq writes: From telling everyone they're your customer to establishing a cloud strategy, Bob Lewis outlines 12 "industry best practices" that are sure to sink your company's chances of IT success: "What makes IT organizations fail? Often, it's the adoption of what's described as 'industry best practices' by people who ought to know better but don't, probably because they've never had to do the job. From establishing internal customers to instituting charge-backs to insisting on ROI, a lot of this advice looks plausible when viewed from 50,000 feet or more. Scratch the surface, however, and you begin to find these surefire recipes for IT success are often formulas for failure." What "best practices" would you add?
ISO 9000
ITIL
TQM
CMM
You need to have to crawl before you can walk Management frameworks are for Olympic Class organizations.
Suggestion - Build your own policies, procedures, and get those in place so you know what the pain points are before you try to implement someone else's idea of what's ideal in IT.
Fred in IT
I am not talking about common tools such as email servers, word processing, spreadsheet...
But software core to the operation of your business. Companies will sell you massive enterprise solutions, filled with best practices and buzzword features.
However the effort in implementing this is usually much more complex and costly than a small team of full time developers to make simple solutions to solve the problems unique to the business.
These companies selling these solutions hire a team of full time employees just to support the company. Then they charge you for the software and their time plus the profit margin. So you end up paying more for features you don't use and extras that are hacked in and barely work.
Your organization offers solutions, products or services that are unique. Why would you expect software and best processes to be the same.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Best practice is code word to stop complaining and do it my way.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Forced password changes every X days. This just leads to people picking really shitty passwords. At one company I worked at for a while, they mitigated this by simply doing "simple word" + month + year. TOTALLY hard to figure out!
therefore, buy IBM
Or have very bad standards in the first place. That way, you are going to enjoy all "Web Application Worst Practices" that people can think of. I am currently assisting a customer wading thorough such a mess.
Also nice: Fire people that created and understand the application after they have finished, but before anything is documented.
And to top it off: Declare the proof-of-concept to be the final application. It is much cheaper!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I disagree with Bob's #6, that it is a mistake to charter IT "projects."
He says:
>
The problem is that IT does not have control over something like "increase sales effectiveness." It's nice to push that as a goal and justification for a project, but all IT can be held to is "implement Salesforce.com." That is our expertise and what we can deliver. Of course you can partner with other departments, but you shouldn't commit to nebulous goals that depend on them having their shit together and excelling.
Seems to be my employer's philosophy, anyway.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
It's because they have IT degree mills. Not actual learning facilities. The whole purpose is to drain other economies as theirs is shit in the streets bad.
Who have 20+ years experience in favor of outsourced "engineers" for 1/3 the salary and 1/10 the experience.
/ not bitter
Companies usually define IT as a cost center because money goes into the pit and no money comes out. They prefer putting $100 into something and getting $200 out of it. Give the sales staff a huge expense account and huge sales commissions and the money just pours in. Give the IT staff entry-level pay and continuously cut their budget because all you ever see is money going down the drain quarter-after-quarter. At some point they determine they really don't need IT and they save even more money. #Fail
"So at one point the company ditched a 'mostly high-quality' supplier for a consistently terrible one. Being able to tune the production line and let it run at a predictable rate was immensely more profitable than getting fewer average component rejections."
This is why the logic of capitalism will, ultimately, destroy us all.