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Ask Slashdot: Are Companies Under-Investing in IT?
Long-time Slashdot reader johnpagenola writes:
In the middle 1970's I had to choose between focusing on programming or accounting. I chose accounting because organizations were willing to pay for good accounting but not for good IT.
Forty years later the situation does not appear to have changed. Target, Equifax, ransomware, etc. show pathetically bad IT design and operation. Why does this pattern of underinvestment in and under-appreciation of IT continue?
Long-time Slashdot reader dheltzel argues that the problem is actually bad hiring practices, which over time leads to lower-quality employees. But it seems like Slashdot's readership should have their own perspective on the current state of the modern workplace.
So share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Are companies under-investing in IT?
Forty years later the situation does not appear to have changed. Target, Equifax, ransomware, etc. show pathetically bad IT design and operation. Why does this pattern of underinvestment in and under-appreciation of IT continue?
Long-time Slashdot reader dheltzel argues that the problem is actually bad hiring practices, which over time leads to lower-quality employees. But it seems like Slashdot's readership should have their own perspective on the current state of the modern workplace.
So share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Are companies under-investing in IT?
The problem is always the same: how to scrape by paying the minimum amount for labor and supplies. It's literally called cutting corners. It's not a new problem and it only really gets solved through the application of regulation.
This isn't rocket science, people!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
To the average person, the only reason IT people exist is to make sure they can check in on Facebook every 30 seconds while at work and replace their keyboard when they spill coffee or soda on it.
Aside from that, IT has no useful purpose and thus is seen as a debilitating cost. Why spend money on something which provides no value?
If you skimp on accounting, there is a lot of case law where you end up in jail.
When you have an IT disaster you never go to jail so far. Target, Equifax, etc. certainly haven't.
With both, if you skimp too much you might end up bankrupt. E.g. if you don't know your invoices and who owes what to whom, you go bankrupt. If that ransomware disrupts your business too long you also go bankrupt. So there is a certain needed minimum standard in both, but thanks to centuries of experience with it, accounting has much better laws, standards and especially case law than IT, raising the needed minimum bar much higher.
Because people don't like the stinky nerds, and don't care about "nerd things".
Its because students get out of college and think they're the shit and know it all which comes down to Dunning Kruger syndrome. Companies and Corporations aren't willing to invest in self taught life long IT professionals and hackers who have dedicated their entire life to learning security and technologies, but instead want the unskilled grads who have the paper without the experience!
My experience reflects a very reactionary industry;
- Don't buy disks till current storage is redlining.
- Don't buy LAN till the current one is swamped.
- Don't patch till someone else (if you're lucky) gets raped.
- Don't train till you you get bitten by a big knowledge gap, likely a result of the aforementioned rape.
- Don't spend till someone bigger than you tells you to, even if a condition exists that leaves you vulnerable to any of the above points.
If accounting operated like the IT industry, accounting as we know it would not exist. A server is recoverable, an empty ban account due to negligent or facetious handling, is not.
I would however suggest the problem is not poor quality employee's but, as it turns out, poor quality accounting by the broader organisation. Time and time again I have seen projects and upgrades get bumped from capex to cpex till something happens that resonates high enough up the food chain for someone to open the loot box, no matter how hard the guys on the ground are petitioning for it. Perhaps it is accounting that has the poor quality employees?
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Security is hard, and there is no one who knows how to have perfect security. That's an unsolved problem.
There are a lot of things you can do, easy things, but there aren't enough people who know how to do them. For example, not letting someone log in with an empty password. That is a solved problem, it should never happen. But even if every company tried to hire good people, there aren't enough good people to fill every company. So they hire not good people. Unfortunate.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
As someone that owns a software company, I am constantly attempting to push my customers towards proactive, forward thinking maintenance. It's not like CTOs, executives, and decision makes are dumb. Many times organizations are aware of systemic problems, and they would prefer to be in a break-fix model than a preventative maintenance model. Decision makers have to balance allocation of resources to different projects, and if something is presently working, why spend the resources to ensure that it continues to work? This is one approach. Additionally, I've seen IT professionals scoff at anyone with technical skills AND an ability to get their ideas into motion, and move money towards their ideas ("sales" / "suits.")
Another approach is taken by companies with successful products, big teams, very cheap costs of capital, that are sitting on tons of cash. Those companies are able to invest tremendously into forward thinking projects, and have redundancy at all levels of their organization, and can afford to fail proactively rather than reactively. My friend at Google said for every code change he makes, two other engineers have to sign off on his code, and it has to run through a battery of automated tests before it is (carefully, and reversibly) integrated into production. I think this is the other extreme from my experience in developing, and supporting, software in New Mexico.
I don't think it makes sense to sit on an armchair, and discuss what "companies" should, and shouldn't do - unless you are employed by such a company either as a contractor, an employee, or own a fraction of that company and you have voting rights. I'm often times able to convince people to invest more into proactive solutions, especially after a predicted disaster that has been warned about repeatedly. Even without such a motivating disaster, I'm usually able to convince people to take some proactive steps, even if they're not willing to spend as much as I'd like to convince them to, or move as fast as I'd like.
Try convincing someone, (or yourself!) to go to the gym and you'll see what I mean with the difficulties in convincing organizations to spend money maintenance.
I had to give up a career in IT in favor of the military for a while and then legal practice. That's because IT is an unlicensed profession and employers can say they cannot find American talent, and can apply for far cheaper foreign IT workers.
Aside from cronyism/nepotism, nobody intentionally hires crap people.
It's the difficulty of finding the balance between IT investment, where to invest and retaining profitability as a company.
IT is as expensive as it is important. People don't make shit decisions on purpose, this really is a bloody difficult area for business leaders.
There is a simple solution: randomly promote people to arbitrary jobs each year. It cannot possibly be worse than the present situation. And look: we can solve inequality and "pay gaps" by paying people arbitrary salaries too.
OK, its true, I need another coffee.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Do companies care more about stock holders (or the board) then _________ (fill in the blank)
... it is evident that companies are under-investing in IT.
Under-invest is subjective, just like under- or over-fund. If the company chooses to invest one cent in IT, that is exactly the correct amount. Assuming they made that decision with a correct understanding of the consequences. "under" fund or invest can only exist with a defined objective. We might ask "is IT underfunded if companies want to acheive X or Y?" but to ask generically if something is underfunded is a nonsensical question.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
...in IT people.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
How to pay "the minimum amount for labor and supplies."
Yes, but it appears to me that is not the main problem. The main problem is the EXTREME lack of knowledge and lack of interest in technology by most people in upper levels of management. They didn't have computers in their childhoods. They don't want to learn now, partly because they are overly busy, working 50 hours a week and having 4 children.
That will change. Recently I was in a library when a man approached the checkout desk with his son. His little girl went to the self-checkout computer, pulled a stool from underneath the counter, stood on the stool, and started the computer checkout process. I laughed and asked the man about that. He said his little girl is 2 years old and his children are "almost like a different species".
Dilbert cartoons often show a lack of knowledge of technology by top management. The cartoons are somewhat exaggerated but usually have a strong element of truth.
For example, "We have only bad data...."
It is underinvested, poorly organized with focus on maximizing income streams for health care systems rather than improving health care outcome.
I've seen enough at this point in my career in several organizations - some are hospital systems, some a health IT vendors - to be confident about this. Much of the developed systems were overseen by people with little to no real world healthcare experience. They made decisions directed to satisfy hospital system leadership which has had no serious vested interest in improving outcomes until the last few years. Most hospital systems leader have no background taking care of patients or whatever experience they have is seriously limited.
Because I've practiced medicine (and still do) it is been appalling to me to see who is making the decisions and why.
Now that I work for a large healthcare IT vendor and I have quite a bit of autonomy directing our resources to create content and tools that are more useful to the actual health care providers, the problem is we are understaffed to provide these products as thoroughly with as high a quality as they should be. One reason is because we have to undo much of the legacy crap - 20+ years of having non-clinical people doing this has led to frankly incorrect data and logic. If we could start with a fresh plate it would be much easier. Another is, no one wants to pay for clinically experienced people who know how to review scientific data to actually research the problems or the clinical literature to make fully informed decisions.
As the old saying goes, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. So, just think for a brief moment: who do you go to, to find out how to save the money? Thatâ(TM)s right: accountants. But what does IT tell you that they desperately need, whenever you go to them? Thatâ(TM)s right: more money. And so, since people generally tend to listen more intently to (and spend more money on) someone who is already telling them what they want to hear, and nobody really wants to hear from the guy who is always costing them money, it shouldnâ(TM)t be a mystery when corporate funds are increasingly diverted to accounting, and away from IT.
I teach CS 428 ("Software Engineering") at BYU. The three texts my students read are:
-- The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks (originally published in 1975, anniversary edition in 1995)
-- Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister (first published in 1987, currently in its 3rd edition)
-- Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert Glass (published in 2002)
I also recommend to them (but don't require) The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerry Weinberg (first published in 1971)
I tell my students if they read those first three books, they will be in the 1% (or less) of people in the IT industry who have. Yet they clearly lay out all of the foundational issues in IT, including bad hiring, bad management, bad environments, lack of understanding (by management) of how to build teams and nurture talent, and so on. They explain why we have such crappy software and why we lose $50B or so each year in failed IT projects.
My other work is as an expert witness in litigation involving IT. About 50% of my cases are failed/disputed IT projects. My job is made easy -- though I am often depressed -- by how common and well-documented the root causes are. You'd think we'd learn. You'd be wrong. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
IT people don't do that. And since there is no real punishment for giving away your customer's credit cards and other data, it is pretty simple accounting. that an accountant is a better investment for profit than an IT security person.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
We completely fail to understand the business and therefore canâ(TM)t provide adequate information for business leaders to make good decisions...Chances are we could make the business solution better and more affordable if we looked at the end goal and presented an alternative.
We completely fail to understand the business? What bullshit.
Forget about the FUD tactics of selling decent Security for a minute, if an IT manager does NOT know how to gather the requirements (a.k.a the "end goal"), present multiple solutions (a.k.a. the "alternatives"), and then create a proper SLA (which includes budget for adequate support agreements and staffing up front to perpetually support a service), then they have no place in IT or business.
And yes, I've been in IT long enough to understand those are still challenges we face today, but it's still not an excuse for doing the common sense legwork. IT doesn't need to understand "business" beyond maintaining the systems and services that keep a business alive, which is why you don't find CPAs or MBAs in IT. If management is too stupid and ignorant to understand the value of IT for their business and help define the very SLAs that keep IT systems functioning properly, then they tend to get what they deserve.
And it's not hard to define an SLA. Walk over to the server and turn it off. Then ask management how long they can do without it. After they stop jumping around like monkeys, you'll get an answer to create a budget with.
IT is perceived as a combination of the worst parts of HR (intrusive security and rules) and building maintenance (it's easy so anyone could do it).
Management wants to consider everyone as being replaceable _and_ cut costs, making outsourcing, cloud, and SaaS appealing. The devil is in the details: the companies providing these services will be very well protected by their contracts and SLAs. The result is that the outsourcing company will bear little risk for breaches, while the paying company (and it's customers) will bear the full brunt of outages or security gaffes.
I'm sure there are anecdotes about this in personal or professional work. I've seen a major SaaS player - who guarantees uptime and data retention - email businesses effectively stating "We lost your data. Feel free to choose another provider if you don't like it."
What's an MBA? Basically, an accounting degree.
Managers understand accounting. They understand how to judge accountants. They understand how to determine if they're hiring the right people and they're doing the right things. They can tell if an accountant is BSing them or not. This lets them make, more or less, reasonable judgements.
They don't understand computers, even though they use them. This is not unusual. I don't understand my car, my microwave, or my dryer, beyond knowing which buttons to push.
So they can't judge what's good and what's bad when it comes to IT spending. They can't tell if someone is BSing them when they ask for more money. They do know if they spend too much money, they'll get yelled at by their boss, but if they spend too little, it's the IT department that will get blamed. So, without a good sense of what is "too much" or "too little", they'll lowball it. No one ever gets fired for spending too little money, right? (Well, not if they know how to shift blame and kick someone else under the bus, and if you don't know that, you don't get to be in the position were you're making these kinds of decisions.)
IT: We want to prevent problems before they happen! Accounting: How much will that cost? IT: Less than paying for a security breach + fines Accounting: What if a breach never happens? What would we have to get in that scensario? IT: Well. . . Accounting: I'll allocate you the money to pretend it will never happen. Good luck!
Back when I started in IT in 1982, the most senior IT person in most organizations had risen through the ranks as a developer, then analyst, then team leader, etc. These days, you need little more than a project management designation to get in the door, and with a little hard work, you can soon be leading teams of developers and making important IT decisions. So in essence, the senior ranks of IT have become "polluted" with non-IT folks who lack the experience (and resulting vision) to make high quality long-term decisions.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
Thanks. I'll make a note of these (some I've heard mention before), and at some point I'm going to have a thorough read.
(I work mainly in support, so once I get exposure to a system, it's already written. However I do get curious as to how some of the stuff that we support actually get developed!)
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
Seriously.
In IT more so than any other industry I've seen, people believe google searches are an acceptable substitute for training, talent and experience. Sure, an internet search can extremely helpful in finding the missing piece to a puzzle ("what was that command line option I needed to make this work?"). But so many people base their entire work efforts around google results ("how do I do --fill in the project/task--?"). While this may work in some short-term cases, in the long run it always shows in projects that are riddled with security flaws, unscalable and impossible to maintain (just to name a few).
Yet, the IT industry still hires such people. I suppose we're lucky this is fairly unique to IT. Would you want a brain surgeon who had to pause an operation while he checked something in google? Or a paramedic who had to search for CPR instructions? Or an airline pilot who had to dig thru pages of search results on emergency landing procedures?
how do you hire the good engineers so you can have good IT infrastructure?
I see that in action at a Fortune-500 company every day. They have "developers" and "system administrators" that are completely clueless and cannot even do the most simple things. Of course, not all of them are like that, but when you (rarely) run into somebody that actually knows their stuff, you soon after find out they are leaving or they are waiting for retirement or they are external consultants.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The Mythical Man-Month is still very accurate in its analysis and recommendations, yet not only is it ignored today, it is often completely unknown. That is staggering, but it explains why so much IT is managed in a completely clueless fashion, despite all the major issues actually having been known for a long, long time. I have to admit I did not read the other two though, probably should fix that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Look at how rabid the defense can get for BYOD or programming in C. THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE to standard practices in IT, the inevitable failure modes are argued to be a case of imperfect humans ... to which everyone here is the supposed exception to the rule.
IT is fucked, money doesn't help. You need to genocide the IT industry and start over.
In my experience, at least in the last 20 years or so, most IT decisions are driven by sales people who need new and fancy enhances to the application(s) because their client's are demanding it and they say, "We need it yesterday!" What usually happens though, there's not that many client's who want the new addition(s) to justify the cost, nor are the specs very clear, and what ends up being released is buggy and ill-thought out enhancements. And what's usually driving this frenetic release, is an Excel spreadsheet. The programmer usually gets blamed for all the bugs in the new release making him/her sinking lower and lower in the eyes of the people upstairs. JMOHO
Some companies view technology as an expense. Those companies are short sighted, seldom successful and have weak IT leadership. It is the job of IT leadership (the CIO, IT Director, etc.) to educate the entity at the "C" risks and rewards of technology. Also as employee, it is your job to protect yourself and your family by working for those organizations that reward you. As someone who has run IT shops for many years now, I have been the highest paid of all my peer management. My job is risk mitigation and education. If my insights and experiences fall on deaf ears, it's my duty to myself and my family to go else where.
Broadly speaking, business leaders are largely unable to discern the difference in effectiveness of half-assed IT and good IT. Except for two facets:
-You become the next equifax
-Good IT costs more
Of course, even if they want good IT, they can't tell the difference, so they my try to invest to get "good IT" and still get bad IT and have expectations calibrated that there is no good or bad IT, only cheap and expensive.
One sign of bad IT is your employees complaining about how bad the systems are. From a business perspective the answer is to tell your employees to suck it up, perceive them as whiners. They can't imagine better. The tools selected come from big reputable companies with reassuring salespeople talking it up and how it has improved other customers, while the pitiable users are comparatively less well equipped to precisely explain how or why the system sucks. In the meantime, often this phenomenon is offset by the users by "shadow IT", peer support to give each other what they need to get their jobs, without telling official IT about it (because the relationship between IT and people gets adversarial). This is a strong indication IT has picked the wrong tools for the job, but it also tends to create invisible business critical systems with 'admin' as the password.
Note that sometimes it's what bad IT does to otherwise well made software, imposing maddening workflows that make no sense on software that was designed for a sane world.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
IT is seen as an overhead expense and it results in a lot of pressure to keep costs down.
I think an unseen contributor to this is that IT vendors (hardware, software, etc) too often label needless churn as innovation in order to collect more revenue, resulting in a lot of business process redesign to manage the changes imposed on them by vendors.
How much will it cost business to adapt to Windows 10? New rollout and patching processes and systems, software compatibility testing and possibly even software changes to work with it, employee training, and so on. All because Microsoft wants to up their licensing revenue or jump on the touch screen bandwagon?
At the end of the day it doesn't surprise me that non-technology business leaders are reluctant to spend on IT. They know they're being taken for a ride by their vendors from a business perspective. Many wind up pinching too many pennies, but a lot of times it looks to me not like a spending problem but just not being able to chase the tail of IT "innovation" fast enough.
That's a great way to run a company if you are only interested in cutting costs, and care nothing about the future viability of your company.
I blame this on the perfect storm of Financial management taking over the business leadership role combined with the âoeour current quarterâ(TM)s results matter more than anything elseâ approach of business today. Technology played an important role in enabling Accountants/Financial folks to hold the reins. With tools like spreadsheets and data warehouses we have given the, the keys to the kingdom. The problem is that most of them are MBAs and they are trained to 1) believe it unquestionably once itâ(TM)s in a spreadsheet and 2) to be totally disconnected from both the innovation and human impact of the business. Why innovate? Will it help the current quarter?nope? No can do. All of those folks losing their jobs to improve the (non GAAP) results for the current quarter are just numbers, etc.and besides, itâ(TM)s my job to reduce expenses (since that is the easy way to improve earnings.)
At the same time, in todayâ(TM)s business environment the markets only care about the current quarterâ(TM)s results and the regulators really only care about prior quarters. Thereâ(TM)s definitely no motivation to look ahead. It doesnâ(TM)t matter if what you are doing will destroy the company in a few quarters, only this quarter matters. I used to have a boss whoâ(TM)s background was as a C-level at lots of tech companies and his favorite saying was âoethis is the most important quarter in the history of the company.â
As long as the comp plans of management continue to reward them primarily for the current quarter and the markets and the regulators agree with that approach, this isnâ(TM)t going to change. Right now success in business is defined as growth in revenues and (in a few industries) earnings. That means that non productive actions like mergers that combine existing revenues and reduce expenses are defined as success.
We need to rethink the whole way we define and reward success in a business.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
As workers in the information technology field, we sometimes lose site of the fact that information technology is a means to an end. Businesses invest accordingly.
Just as if you asked bakers if it's good for you if you eat more bread.
For most companies IT is like taxes, it's a drag on your bottom line but it's unavoidable so you try to take as many shortcuts as possible. From a business administration point of view, IT doesn't generate revenue so investing in it isn't attractive even if the company is vulnerable without proper IT.
Corporations who's stocks are publicly traded on the stock exchange are evaluated by the market for one thing - and one thing only: profitability. The constant refrain of CEO and bean counters is they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to increase profits and grow dividends. Whatever responsibility they have to customers is secondary and largely defined by law and regulation - with a thin veneer of social responsibility thrown in when customers hackles are raised on a subject. As corporate lawyers are quick to point out, a corporation is not guided by ethical or moral considerations, but by whether an action is legal or not at the end of the day.
As long as the risks and costs of breaches are less than the costs of ensuring a secure infrastructure, publicly traded companies will continue to choose the cheap way out to maximize profits. Corporate law and regulatory changes could change this equation to make it more costly not to address security, but in the current climate, unlikely to happen.
As consumers, we can also impact this by abandoning companies that do not have our interests at heart (which is basically all publicly traded companies with rare exception). This has the effect of raising the cost of not addressing security through loss of revenue, and therefore loss of profit. Consumers also need to realize that we really don't get anything for free. There are hidden costs that we will pay sooner or later, and we need to decide if it would be better to pay upfront for guarantees, or pay later in terms of injury or death in the worst cases (and by injury and death I'm not only talking about physical, but also other areas of our lives including our economic, social, and civic lives).
Finally, people who design and build systems (and this is not just the programmers and architects - this includes anyone impacting the choices regarding the design - including bean counters, project managers, marketing/sales people etc) need to recognize what mechanical engineers and architects learned in the last century: our creations can injure and kill people if care is not taken, and standards established for the deployment of these systems in the real world. Companies need to be held liable if they do not take care and build safe systems. Technologists need to band together, and share that message at every opportunity on every project. If the company isn't going to take responsibility, then who is going to be left holding the bag when things go really bad?
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
There are two components missing from this concept: quality and consumers. As we move into a world where quality matters, offshore vendors will not cut the mustard. Time and time again from my own experience, and that of others we have seen vendors fail to deliver quality systems that meet security standards. If all companies slim down to the size you define - then there would be no employees - and therefore no consumers to generate the economic demand for the services they sell.
That's why any company trying to go to this extreme will fail.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I'm not sure from where the idea that accounting is paid better than IT comes from. Unless by 'accounting' you mean CFO of big company, I don't think this is the case.
It is bit hard to qualify what you mean by 'good accounting' and 'good IT', but let's try.
First anecdotal evidence - average IT guy in my area (Central Europe, medium sized city) earns 2-3 times more than average accounting guy.
Then let's look at some official stats for US.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Sala...
https://www.glassdoor.com/Sala...
Accountant - 55k average, 40-74 range. Programmer - 66k average, 50-90k range.
Let's switch to 'good'. Large company, 15+ years experience.
Accountant - 59k average. Programmer - 84k average.
Not only IT is paid considerably better, but also their experience is better rewarded (while with accounting job, it seems that you will move from 48k to 59k in 15 years of experience).
I have rarely met an MBA who had the time of day for an Engineering type. You tell MBAs that such and such needs to be encrypted moved, backed up, or whatever critical thing for $10,000 and you won't get the budget. Then an interior designer comes in and redoes the front lobby for the 3rd time in 5 years for a cost of $250k.
Then there are the pay scales. In any large not obviously IT company (many of which delude themselves into thinking they aren't nearly all IT like banks) you get an MBA with 5 years in getting $120k and the Engineers getting $70k. Then they wonder why they can't keep the talent.
The MBAs even treat the accountants like trash.
What I see are people of near zero talent who are genuinely scared of those with it. The more talent you have outside of their MBA world the more scared they are. You realize that you can save the company $10 million a year through something you found in the data and you get a pat on the back. Some MBA does a stupid deal worth $10 million (worth, not makes) and they get a rockin' bonus larger than the Engineer's salary.
Then, hidden among the corporate world are the companies that are pretty much just Engineering people some of whom are good at sales and business. Those companies attract the top talent and often run circles around the old guard. An old guard who realize that they need to up their IT game so they outsource to India and lay off half of their employees.
I have a simple formula. If a company has a large number of H1Bs in its staff then it will gain a short term advantage as it reduces costs and rides on its earlier momentum. In the long term it will start to find the ride bumpy, and then it will sink into oblivion. Think Yahoo, SUN, Compaq, etc. These companies were taken over by their MBAs who thought that Engineering was a commodity business.
So to answer the original question. Crappy companies that are not going to be competitive in the long term are not investing in IT. The companies that are kicking ass and taking names are.
I too work in health care. I am now employed by a giant corporation that has bought up many local hospitals, a la 1980's style mergers and acquisition, for no benefit to the hospitals or the community or the patients they serve. The depth of stupidity and moral corruption defies belief, yet the system gets away with it because the board is no longer the fiduciaries of the community or sponsoring organization, rather appointed by the corporate heads.
Diatribe aside, IT is a mess. In reading the many comments in this thread, they all ring true as to the ineffectiveness or ineptness of IT in this organization. I am not an IT insider, but I am tech savvy enough to smell the BS. Not to sound overly cynical, but the IT department seems to survive and thrive by NOT solving problems, or by making problems which they then must "fix". I acknowledge that they do something useful in keeping workaday nurses, doctors, and other staff "up and running" at each computer station, but the number of times that systems crash would not be tolerated in reputable companies. My corporate email account is a giant spam bucket filled mostly with messages from IT alerting us to the almost daily crashes or hacks and then congratulating themselves for fixing it.
Everything you said either has the ring of truth, or is readily recognized as the truth by others like ourselves who must live and function within these abortions and evil corruptions of the once honorable and reputable system of hospitals and healthcare in this country. I will however take issue with one statement, ". . . hospital system leadership which has had no serious vested interest in improving outcomes until the last few years." From where I stand, I see nothing now or on the horizon to imply any "interest in improving outcomes". It all seems to be getting worse. Things run in cycles, and maybe in 20 years or 50 years things will flip back to reason, ration, and righteous motivations, but for now, where I am, I see nothing promising.
Where I am, IT and computer infrastructure are only partly a tool to get the job done. Remember, just a few years ago, we got the job done without the IT, and it was done just as well or better. When the products and services and day to day operations are better without the technology, then the technology is more of an indulgent toy rather than a productive tool. The whole IT department then becomes a burdensome expense operating in parallel to the core business of the organization, sometimes at odds with it. And because management seems clueless, IT gets away with insane and expensive projects like periodically replacing all computers and monitors, even though the old ones worked just fine to run low bandwidth low-res text based apps that have the distinctive earmarks of having been first coded with Windows 3.1 or Win 95 era tools.
Aside, I see that several posts have been made here about "the Peter Principle". That principle was published in 1969 in a book by professor Laurence J. Peter, stating that employees in organizations are promoted to their level of incompetence. It is sadly ironic then that my organization is run by a guy named Peter. It is the true and total embodiment of the principle.
This is normal. Nothing has changed.
IT is a significant foundation block of the modern corporation, even down to lowly small businesses. Nobody, and I mean nobody wants to pay for it. Even if they claim they will, they don't.
This is aggravated by the tendency of VPs in charge having a non-IT background. Which also includes executives coming from a different background, non-sales for a sales focused company.
Moreover, they are underinvesting in anything that can pay me vast sums of money
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
IT is enormous. Imagine if 'building' covered civil engineering, structural engineering, groundworks, bricklaying, plastering, painting... The only difference is that we have been doing the above for a long time - 'IT', not so much. It's difficult for companies to work out what they need when every guru out there is peddling a new world-class information technology *cough* blockchain *cough*... and the layman has to call it all IT.
The reason I said hospital system leadership today has some interest in improving outcomes is only because of standards and policies the government is imposing. It is not because any of them really care in action (most don't). It is because CMS will withhold reimbursements if a system is deemed to have bad care over a limited set of metrics.
They sort of care only because they don't want to lose money. That is all. I have been part of projects to improve the results of these metrics. The only reason the support for the project existed was these policies. Whether or not solving to the metrics really improves meaningful outcomes is a whole other issue.
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It's survival of the fittest when it comes to business.
How does one measure the appropriateness of investment in IT?
Programmers and tech people tend to think businesses spend too little, because they can see all the flaws up close. But flawed systems can often be sufficient to keep a company going, even thriving.
IT is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end. If the company is thriving, that's a good sign that they are spending the right amount, at least in the short term.
If they spend too little, they will eventually fail to keep up with the competition. This is, in the long run, a good thing. It's a self-correcting system.
I mean most companies just waste money in IT. Usually companies just follow dogmas which have little to do with reality. That's why they spend lots of money on worthless security products... or software products claiming to improve productivity, but wasting more for most people.
Companies are not under-investing, they're just investing in wrong and unimportant and unproductive endeavours because they don't let the IT people decide what's important.
The biggest problem I see is Ego. Most companies need a workforce of much lower skilled employees.
For retail, clerks, stockers, etc...
Even Hospitals, Doctors do not make the majority of the staff, but a large amounts of people just needing some trade schooling, and high school education to get in.
Then they have the IT Staff. Most of the company leaders don't know what to do with a set of staff who is often highly educated, Has their own vision on how to do things, and doesn't take orders literally. Their job often needs to span the scope of the company, so they know what everyone else is doing at a particular level. The solutions they create become what is needed to follow. So as a boss these IT guys as a threat to their Ego, as the Boss they are suppose to be the Smart ones, the successful one, the guy who knows what is going on. The IT guys are smart, to be competitive the Boss needs to pay a decent salary, and they know what is going on too, and to make it worse, an IT Requirement could override a business decision.
These guys know how to manage Underlings, but not Professionals.
For most jobs if you do your job correctly every day is the same as the previous. For IT if every day is the same, then you are doing it wrong, because that same job should be automated batter. And every day is about finding new problems to fix or improve. That sounds good, but difficult to manage. Because the IT workers needs to less like machines then much of the other workforce.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
but it is our own fault.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Businesses spend money on what they think is their "core-business". All businesses are in the "core-business" or making money, hence the reason why folks in accounting will always have a job.
I once had a job competition cancelled on me because it wasn't considered "core-business". When I said without the systems I support you won't have any business, I was only left with silence and dead stares.
If you want a job forever, get into financial systems, which having a accounting background would probably be an asset. They have all sorts of very strict rules, are huge and complex, and every business needs them nor can they get rid of them easily.
The issue is UNDER hiring. The perception that it is difficult to find qualified talent and the needing someone instantly who is an exact fit for a tech fingerprint are all symptoms of what should be overlapping and split duties across dozens of people being collapsed and folded under one "supergeek" over and over and over again... round after round. It should be no big deal if anyone in IT leaves and it takes 2 years to teach a high schooler to replace them.
You can lay off hundreds of thousands of tech workers a year, claiming there is a shortage of "talent" to fill the handful of heavily specialized job you replace them with. But those positions you just invented aren't hard to fill because of lack of experts in the world... they are hard to fill because they didn't exist before you just made them up. This isn't some new field or type of education people are missing, it is technology fingerprint unique the company and the handful of people they collapsed those jobs down to... who naturally don't stick around long. At that point you should either not do that in the first place or start paying them seven figures to stick around because you've boxed yourself in a corner. Worse, you've done it in a way that probably will take years to crash your fortune 500 ship.
Actually hiring correctly with modern technology means armies of tech workers who frankly fill most of their days learning and playing with tech or even watching a movie. You have hot spares and redundant data in your raid arrays... what idiot thought it was a good long term strategy to pull them all and sell them on ebay? That's what has been done across the board with the "hot spares" and redundancy in tech knowledge and the "talent shortage" is nothing more than complaining about the remaining drives not being able to cope as well under the extra wear and tear.
IT gets away with insane and expensive projects like periodically replacing all computers and monitors, even though the old ones worked just fine to run low bandwidth low-res text based apps that have the distinctive earmarks of having been first coded with Windows 3.1 or Win 95 era tools.
You know I used to work for a vendor who sold a software package to pharmacies. I asked why the tools look as dated as they do. The response was that they were originally developed and got HIPPA certified during the DOS era. Since they would have to get re-certified to update the interface, it's just much cheaper to keep intermittently fixing the original code.
In my experience it takes a team of people on-shore to micromanage the offshore. Stress is high, progress is slow, and you end up with MORE people involved. A perfect recipe for IT disaster.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I just watched a mandatory company video that stated company IT investment should be 2.2% of Sales Income (didn't say whether it was Net or Gross). If course it did not cite a source for that paradigm, it only stated it as fact. YMMV.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
root cause: proton decay
The biggest problem in IT is that we refuse to learn from experience, even when documented as amazingly as people like Brooks have done. If it's not a buzzword it's not real.
"So to answer the question: Companies are not under-investing, they mostly do not really know shit about their infrastructure and the few managers that get to talk about it, they mostly lie about it and the ones that can really speak about it, can not (as they will loose their job/career when they do)."
Seen this go down many times.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
"Leadership likes to be sold on things. "
One of the most insightful things anyone has said so far.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
"or by making problems which they then must "fix""
I have seen people propel themselves to stardom and recognition by fixing the disasters they directly created. It was not until I was a technical lead in a major "bet the company" project that I understood how important failed projects are to boosting the careers of people, not just in IT.
No one gets recognized adequately for a project that gets implemented without disrupting anything. It is when the projects blow up in the whole company's face that the people who caused it (and those who help fix it) are rewarded with promotions, raises, and stardom. People in IT think logically. Smooth project == good for my career. Yes, in some cases. If you really want to jump a few ranks in pay and title get on a big project that is doomed to fail.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
It almost like all health care are government agencies now. The acumen is generally horrible on all fronts. Some of them have good customer service if they have to service white people with good insurance that have choices. The rest of society is signaled quite clearly how much they are valued when engaging medical services.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Well said. But, if you are a fan of Futurama, you might remember an episode that explained the conundrum best. (If you are not a Futurama fan, it is futuristic cartoon series, with one of the key characters being Bender, an irreverent and cynical robot.) In one episode, he is flung to the far reaches of the universe where he meets a non-corporeal entity that might or might not be God. They have a conversation, at the peak of which the entity explains:
"Bender, being God isn't easy. If you do too much, people get dependent on you. And if you do nothing, they lose hope. You have to use a light touch . . . When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
It is sad that in corporate America, doing things right such that they are hardly noticed merits no reward, whereas screw ups win. The big Golden Parachutes that go to CEO's that bankrupt their companies are the most extreme examples.
That's where EY are going, they've already shifted their devs to Tata and are moving their Ops people next, now they offshored everything they could.
DTNFY,RIYHOD
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."