Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Are The Lesser-Known Roles Of The IT Department?
chadenright writes:
On the same day that I was hired into a new IT position, my new employer also bought a pair of $1,500 conference phones from a third-party vendor, which turned out to be defective; I've spent a chunk of the last two weeks arguing with the vendor. During the process I've learned that, as the IT guy, I'm also the antibody of the corporation and my job is to prevent not just malware and viruses but also junk hardware from entering my business's system. As a software engineer who is new to the IT side of things, I have to ask, what else have you learned about IT?
What fresh hell has this software engineer gotten themselves into? Leave your best answers in the comments. What are the lesser-known roles of the IT department?
What fresh hell has this software engineer gotten themselves into? Leave your best answers in the comments. What are the lesser-known roles of the IT department?
You may have been living in some sort of fantasy world of siloed functions.
In a large enough organization, there might be specialists in telecom, desktop hardware and server hardware, but usually IT, in general, is charged with all facets of the IT plant... Workstations, servers, networking hardware and telecom (including switching, carrier interconnect and endpoints like conference phones).
If what you want is to JUST develop software, you need to be in a different role.
I've learned that, as the IT guy, I'm also the antibody of the corporation and my job is to prevent not just malware and viruses but also junk hardware from entering my business's system.
You know how some people have their immune system turn on themselves.
Some IT-departments becomes like that.
Instead of stopping malware and junk hardware they stop everything. It makes their job easier.
A good IT department tries to figure out what the person they stopped was trying to accomplish and tries to find a secure way of doing that.
Blocking everything would be like a janitor keeping everyone else out since maintenance gets easier that way.
While the method works for their immediate task the company cannot survive such measures.
What you did was not a "lesser-known role" of IT department, it was doing something completely outside of your job role.
Your employer should have asked legal department to do the legal work for dealing with defective purchase. If your employer bought an office chair that broke, would you get involved also? How about defective air conditioner? Or a defective TV? Would you get involved because the TV was "internet enabled"?
If conference phone should be supported by IT, *you* should be the one sourcing and buying it. The IT dept has no input in the purchase, then it has no role when the purchase went bad.
If the vendor claimed that the internet TV was not working due to a deficiency in the corporate network, then yeah, I'd imagine that IT would be involved in proving that the network was not the problem. Which is likely the same argument that the phone vendor is making. "Your firewall is not allowing SIP transit", or "your ISP connection is too unstable for reliable VOIP calls" or some such excuse. If the phones were completely DOA out of the box, I doubt the vendor would be putting up a fight.
In any case, if I went to my company's legal department to dispute a small $1500 purchase, they'd put it on the bottom of their pile of work and get around to looking at it in a few years.
My role in IT was to stop people buying hardware and software without thinking through how it would be used, how all the bits would integrate together and who would support it. I work in hospitals, and they are the worst so far. Clinical departments think it is a good idea to spend a pile of money on some piece of hardware or software, only to find they either can't use it, it is too complex for their staff to learn, it doesn't fit with anything else, it has a huge dependency on something they didn't buy and so on. Most of it ends up not ever being used - hence shelfware.
Not so wise.
Imagine running a company without IT. Compete with typewriters, rotary phones, snail mail, and nothing but manual processes.
IT is the bedrock of every modern business. Without it, you might as well be Amish.
- maintaining a high-traffic quake 3 arena server on company Hardware without anyone noticing
- coming up with elaborate and well worded excuses as to why I don't have time to set up and maintain MS Office 365 and it's groupware mess and have them let the intern/media-communications do it (the poor fellows)
- explaining for the n-th time to the utterly clueless online team and the consultant PMs what the difference between a client and a server is, why versioning is important, that it's not *my* versioning but *our* versioning, why ci is a good idea, why manual ftp and working directly on live is a bad idea
- stareing, day in and day out with awe and amazement at the ultimate shitfest that is WordPresses application architecture and wondering how we as a human race even got this far ... That's just from the top of my head.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Fuses are tricky. Just use a penny and pit the old dude back in. Works great. I work in fire insurance, btw.
I've done I.T. for everything from "running out of a large garage" type businesses to mid size companies with multiple offices.
I'd have to say the weirdest variety of job expectations were at the smallest places. When you're the only I.T. guy hired full-time at a small business, you're immediately viewed as one of the "smart guys" who surely knows how to do X, Y and Z that people want to do - regardless of if it has much of anything to do with computers.
The weirdest tasks of all had to be when I applied for a job in the local newspaper for a Macintosh tech for a small start-up business that wanted to refurbish older Macs and PCs to resell in daycare settings and secondarily to the public as "great first computers for small kids". I was unemployed at the time and needed to make the house and car payment, so wasn't being too selective. It turned out, the guy running this business came up with the idea because he already owned a number of daycare centers, as well as other rental property. He was a long time fan of Apple Macs, even though he wasn't that great at using them. (He was your typical older guy who attended those monthly users' group meetings held at the local library and knew just enough to be dangerous.) One of the interesting features of his house was this HUGE multi-bay garage built into the back side of a hill. He put about 6 rows of shelving units in part of it, where he collected up old, obsolete Macs that area schools, the local newspaper and others wanted to get rid of. He'd drive his van out to one of these places every so often with a trailer attached, and bring back 25 to 50 of the machines at a time.
The rest of this garage was stuffed full with other odds and ends that looked like a scene from one of those "American Pickers" episodes on TV. He had tool and die equipment (as he said he used to work in that field years back), a huge collection of paint cans of various colors (probably whatever was left when his rentals needed repainting), a lot of miscellaneous hardware like chains, bolts, hooks, and several vehicles including an older car with less than 500 miles on it, sitting under a cover.
Right away, this guy was maddening to work for. He insisted that I punch in and out on this old time clock he had sitting in the back on a desk. It was one of those green metal analog clocks where you had to line up the paper time card just right and press the big steel button on top to stamp your time on it. And as it was as ancient as most other junk in his garage, the clock often stopped -- so you had to make sure it was set right before punching your card. And the time it printed was barely legible either. I was supposed to be refurbishing these old Macs, putting collections of kids' games and learning programs on them, and tagging them with price sheets that told you exactly what the computer's configuration was. In reality, I'd get one or two finished only to find the hard drives were dying and they'd only boot correctly every other time. Then, I had to dig through a collection of used hard drives he kept around to try to find one that worked well enough so it would hold the information in a stable manner. Every so often, he'd come around trying to micro-manage my work and scold me about something or other I should be doing, in his opinion, in order to work faster.
At some point, he figured out I knew how to do things like update web sites, so he'd regularly pull me away from what I was doing to come up to his office in the main part of the house. There, he'd have me update his daycare center web site or upload photos and edit descriptions of his rental homes, or edit listings on his personal .Mac web page trying to sell some of those nuts, bolts and chains he had around.
In the winter months, he had this wood burning furnace contraption he built to heat the garage. So I had the task of tending the fire in it and adding logs to it regularly each day.
Eventually, he decided to try to sell a bunch of these computers at a computer show at an area
Your wise friend isn't very wise.
Within the past six months? IT saved a hundred million dollar contract because we made an incredibly simple reporting portal. Think web version of Excel. Customer loved it. They did not want random Excel files with literally ten thousand VLOOKUPs every morning, which was the previous 'solution'. IT engineered a last minute audio-visual display for a very high name project. We bought and built something for a fraction the cost of leasing, and ended up using the very nice TVs afterwards to upgrade our conference rooms. We not only saved the company money on replacement, we turned a profit. IT facilitated selling stuff the company used to throw out. More money.
If your IT department is a financial black hole, either you don't get what they do or their head needs to be fired. They should always be earning their keep.
You think that in house IT guy is taking advantage of you? Wait until IBM gets their hands on you.
Last time I was told "IT is just a cost center" I looked at the VP and asked where he heard that. When he responded with "Accounting" I pointed out that accounting was a cost center as well, heck even your management position is a cost center. I don't understand what IT being a cost center has to do with anything as everyone not in sales is a cost center.
I was the web/IT guy for an adult photography company. This company used to take test poloroids of in-coming models, to shop them around to the publishers, to determine if any of the publishers wanted the model to be featured in a layout. Now comes the advent of the digital camera, which would allow these test shots to be disseminated faster, and with less complications. So, being the IT guy, I'm tasked with working the digital camera, taking pictures of naked women in various poses, which jump-started a sideline business of being a nude (the girls, not me) photographer.
And fueling a major portion of my sex life.