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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?
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.
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!
"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.