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Ask Slashdot: Biggest IT Management Mistakes?
snydeq writes: Sure, nobody's perfect. But for those in charge of enterprise technology, the fallout from a strategic gaffe, bad hire, or weak spine can be disastrous, writes Dan Tynan, in an article on the biggest management mistakes in IT. "Some of the most common IT gaffes include becoming trapped in a relationship with a vendor you can't shake loose, hiring or promoting the wrong people, and hiding problems from top management until it's too late to recover." What are some other career- and company-destroyers you've witnessed in your years in IT?
Executives with no IT experience running IT departments.
In about March, we started moving everything to Microsoft, and they audited us in August. About $250k worth of internal time later, they gave us the final bill. We didn't know, for example, you couldn't run Visual Studio Professional on Amazon on nondedicated hardware. Amazon charges $2.185 per hour for that which is $19,140.60 extra per year. We're paying $1,199 per year already for VS for every developer, so we assumed we'd be allowed to use it with no extra charges. We were wrong. I think the total bill after the audit was over $130k plus the extra almost $20k per year on Amazon. We don't even yet use Windows for production(customer facing stuff)!
Implementing SAP
Outsourcing
Outsourcing your SAP implementation
Whenever I talk to someone from a company that uses SAP, I always ask if they are satisfied with SAP and would choose to use them again.
So far, this many have said yes: 0.
For comparison, this is the number that have said they are happy with Oracle's ERP: 0.
Practically every mistake in IT is recoverable, except for failing to manage customer expectations.
Ok, let's see:
1) Threatening to expose hackers AND using the same password everywhere including in your unpatched CMS (HBGary Federal)
2) Botch manual deployment of a trading algorithm and lose $440 millions in 45 minutes (Knight capital)
3) Do not handle race conditions properly and expose patients to doses of radiation 100x higher than expected (Therac-25)
and the list goes on...
lucm, indeed.
The biggest mistake any company makes? Treating IT as a cost center.
Unless your company sells IT services, by definition IT is a cost center. This is basic accounting.
There was a good Dilbert about this in 1997.
http://dilbert.com/strip/1997-...
lucm, indeed.
No I work directly for an SAP customer (have done for 5 years now, cannot say which one unfortunately). SAP is not an inherently bad system, it really depends on how knowledgeable your implementation team are. SAP has some really dedicated developers and some very good support. There are definitely SAP horror stories out there - that people seem to love repeating forever and a day, but I can honestly say that I have worked with SAP for 25 years, and 20 of those were as a consultant, and in that time I saw one bad implementation (So its really not that bad).
If you look at which large corporations run SAP - really the question should be inverted - and ask which ones do not? Now if SAP was as bad as its image here on Slashdot, the statistic here would also be inverted.
Did you know that Apple run SAP, MIT university run SAP, NASA run SAP, IBM run SAP, Nike run SAP, Coca Cola run SAP, Disney run SAP, Sony run SAP, Nestle run SAP, US department of defence run SAP, Tata Steel run SAP, Volvo run SAP, VW/Porsche run SAP, Shell, BP, the list goes on forever... AND SO ALL OF THESE MULTINATIONALS are not happy? I wouldn't be so sure if I were you.