It would depend on a few things, but I might take a small amount of money for a job from a well-connected guy, IF I thought it yielded some bigger benefits. You know that some people would just take it to be near a star, though.
It's like car companies - they give cars to celebrities in the hope of a paparazzi snapping them getting out of it. A few photos can yield more publicity than the car costs.
I heard an interview with David Lichfield, a well known UK photographer who had gone digital, and said that most of his friends had too. Most of his work would have been calendar/magazine work.
The key things for him were reducing the cost of film stock (thousands of pounds per year), and being able to instantly review the shots. Quality was not an issue.
I hear where you are coming from, and right now, I'm using a 4mp camera and feel the limits when trying to zoom in on detail.
However, for many people 4mp is more than enough. Most people don't crop much and don't go above prints that are 8x6.
It's a little like audio. Most people are more than happy with CD and MP3, even though there are better technologies that play better given good equipment. 8mp+ probably has a similar market share to people using SACD.
I once drew up a cost justification for a new machine because I had to run some massive batch jobs locally and buying a new machine (I proved it on a new box) ran nearly twice as fast.
A faster PC paid for itself in about a month.
Optimising existing code to give performance (beyond things like taking out redundant code) is getting to be less and less of a good idea. Why spend a couple of weeks on changing code to have some spaghetti-like caching mechanism when you can just add some more memory at half the price?
There used to be a feature on a UK radio station called "don't you know who I am?" about people being hassled by long-faded z-rated celebs trying to use their celebrity power to muscle things like restaurant tables.
It's not about being subhuman or slave labor. You get paid to do a job. It's your choice to do it.
If you work in a store or on a call centre, what do you do if a customer starts getting angry because you didn't deliver? Say "excuse me but I'm not going to help you if you're impolite?"? You've just made the customer twice as angry.
I expect people in departments that are supposed to serve me in the internal supply chain to do their jobs. If they don't, they aren't going to get me coming down their offering them beers. They'll get me escalating it up the line to their manager until the problem is resolved. Beers are a reward for a job well done.
Every company I've worked in with a "change board" or "change/quality control" department has achieved nothing in raising the quality of the service to the users.
As a rule, they get in the way, and still don't detect problems before they go live. And when things do go wrong, there's a witch hunt for who to pin the blame on. In addition, none of those companies had any sort of post-implementation review to try and learn lessons.
The companies that I have worked in that did quality right gave skilled staff the responsibility for their own quality and reviewed the reasons behind faults, and then worked on either training or procedures to raise quality.
I've done work in "nailed down" companies. Basically, the internal IT department was offering a 12 month timescale. I ended up building the thing in MS Access because it was already installed (it worked well too!).
If anyone wants to know a reason why web apps will take off, it's this. If you want a project management tool, do you put in a request for an app that then has to go through IT and be installed, or just pay for something like Basecamp that you reach through a browser?
That's my experience of bureaucracies. The guys who deliver look at the rules, and then work out how to follow them, without following them, if you catch my drift.
Things like splitting a project order into a number of invoices, so that no invoice hits a ceiting that then requires the invoice to be signed off by a committee that will take months.
I'm not sure about the proactive side in the way you explain, but they should certainly be responsive to your needs, as well as looking at the alternatives and constantly reviewing (even if in an informal way) the architecture.
Nothing pisses me off more than someone taking a dismissive "nothing changed" attitude. I've done things like on-call support, and I know that about 90% of faults relate to something either failing on first run, or within the first few runs. Rarely will a system that has been running for months without a failure suddenly develop a fault.
It's one of the only times that will make me disagreeable with suppliers. Well, that and repeated errors where it seems that no-one is addressing them. An ISP I dealt with would not admit to an error, even after twice, there were reports all over the message board and in one case a link to how some server maintenance was being done in my area. I dropped them.
The change always comes from the top. If you are working in a company that makes delivering things like walking through treacle, hope for a new CIO or quit.
I worked for a company that had a terrible IT manager as a contractor. There was no way I was prepared to work for them permanent. They changed the CIO to a positive, go-ahead manager, and I came on board.
Well, go as high as you can. If you still don't get any joy, looking elsewhere is a good option.
I once left an organisation after telling everyone I could reach up the management chain what was wrong and being brushed off. The one time that people actually wanted to listen was when I handed in my notice. Management and HR then wanted interviews to ask why I was leaving. I told them that as I was already leaving, sharing that information was hardly in my interest.
You have quite a defeatist attitude. Contrary to Slashdot common belief, responding to challenges by quitting your job doesn't solve any problems, unless your challenge is to find a job where you don't have to think or do any real work. (In that case, you should probably go join this company's bureaucratic IT group -- they seem to have that area covered.)
It depends on what challenges you want to deal with. The ones I want to deal with are about improving the productivity of an organisation, not having to get departments to do the job they are paid for. In the end, if you escalate such an issue, and nothing is done, there's not much more to do but quit.
In any case, the best way to get interdepartmental problems fixed is by providing rewards to both sides for working together. Short of that, you can start your own IT group or work with an outside company to get your solutions hosted. Your IT group should be a resource for you -- if they're not, you should be able to use other resources instead.
Thing is, those solutions don't always work. If you've worked in a large bureaucracy you'd know this. It's a case of rules that state things like "upgrades to PCs are done by IT. No unauthorised upgrades are allowed". Of course, you can go outside of that, but then you've often got to go through a massive set of procedures to get an external supplier on board (like budget approval committees, SLA committees, purchasing committees who will do a study on whether the supplier is sound and has all sorts of the relevant, and pointless certificates like ISO9000).
Some people suit large bureaucracies. Some don't like them, but live with them. Others fight them to the point where they realise that all their attempts to get their job done despite them are a complete waste of time and unappreciated. In the end, having "political" skills is often far more important than delivery skills in such organisations. In my experience, the people who rose up the ladder weren't those with sound delivery records, but those who could talk a good talk.
Been there done that. I work for myself now and avoid dealing with bureaucracies.
Paperwork is mostly there to cover people's behinds. I worked in a company with almost no paperwork, and it worked because they had a zero-blame culture. People just moved on and if a mistake was occurring repeatedly, something was put in place to deal with it.
Bureaucracies are the result of a negative culture. The paperwork is to defend you from attacks. When a system is not what the users wanted, it's not a case of accepting a miscommunication occurred and changing it. Instead, your paperwork means that you can show that you have something the users approved and have done your job when the inevitable scrap occurs. I've spent more time in meetings about whether a change is considered as a change to requirements or a fix, instead of just getting on and changing it.
The companies I have worked in that have systems like ISO9002 are those that actually have some of the lowest quality computer systems. Of course, it's all beautifully documented, but the bug and request lists are generally enormous because they are bureaucratic hellholes.
Yes, Change Control mostly means ass-covering. It generally means blanket and completely OTT procedures (change meetings with a dozen people, forms in triplicate, "change freezes") instead of a true appreciation of risk or impact management.
Every company I worked in that had a Change Control department also had a negative attitude towards their people. Mistakes could not be tolerated and were to be punished. Blame was to be doled out.
Still, when more people like him are gone, you and the rest of your bureaucratic pals can have a much easier life, at least until his company comes along and eats your lunch.
Has he tried forging some good rapport with the IT department?
Why should he? The IT department are there to serve him. As the supplier, it's up to them to forge a good rapport with him. If he's not happy, he's an unhappy customer, and it's the IT department's job to rectify that.
The only time any one remembers the IT department is when stuff don't work.
You want a medal for doing your job? It is not your customer's job to motivate you. The way my customers remember me is when they pay my invoices.
Sometimes acknowledging that they are part of the company and their success may lead them to co-operate more.
IT people have a very good living. Most often, they are professional. But having worked both IT departments and at times been sat in the call centre, the place I have heard the most cry-baby whining is in IT departments. People who have to put up with all manner of abuse from customers don't whine as much.
I worked in a large bureaucracy, and would have gladly done a JFDI job on things. However, I was constrained by procedures that stated what I had to get done (like almost the same information written out in 3 different forms, which had to be approved by 3 different departments).
I've seen companies go both ways - a new manager turns it from a bureaucratic hellhole to a sleak organisation or a control freak decides that new layers of bureaucracy are required. You can see the difference on the ground in people.
The depressing thing about bureaucratic organisations is that the only way people get anything done is by finding what the rules don't cover. That doesn't mean breaking the rules, but there is often more than 1 way to skin a cat.
Personally, I don't work for bureaucratic organisations if I can avoid it. The stress of having to use all sorts of tricks to get pass assholes just to get my job done got to be too much.
Functions like quality assurance, change control, central purchasing, IT security should be about adding to the organisation. Too often, they are actually self-promoting bureaucracies who just get in the way.
If you split your IT staff, then no IT person from Marketing really would know what's happening in Development, or Accounting, or Procurement.
Can you explain why this matters? If I have to look after the marketing system, then I'm not interested in the procurement system.
Or even on more of a systems level, you'll have 5 guys each buying 500GB arrays from different vendors and with different manufacturers stuff.
And each of the IT departments will have helped to make the decision and should have the knowledge of what is best, and how to support it, either internally or via a support contract.
Centralised control is a bad thing. I've seen small and large, centralised and distributed controls. The companies where I delivered the most productivity and efficiency for my clients were where the company gave the maximum freedom to the people.
I know you say later that you think you are trolling, but actually, you are right. The delusion is because people think in terms of "economies of scale". The problem is that larger organisations create complex patterns of communication and approval, many of which are based on distrust in the people working for them.
More often that not, my experience of computer departments is that "diseconomies of scale" exist. I've worked in 200+ man computer departments and their productivity per head was far below that in 10-20 man computer department. Want a new piece of software costing £150? In the 200+ man company, you typically had to place a requisition that your boss, who, even though he is running a key part of a company's IT, can't be trusted with a £150 order. The requisition would then go to a committee who would decide whether the purchase was justified. Then the requisition would go to the purchasing department who, at some time, would get around to ordering it. Maybe a month later, I'd get it.
The most successful work I've done is when I've been closest to the client, like in the 10 man computer department, where the user would come upstairs, request a change which we would code and test and have live in a few days. How would I order a new class library in a 10 man company? Go to my boss, tell him I need some software. I'd send him a URL and typically get an email back in a few hours telling me it had been ordered, along with the serial number.
Centralised purchasing doesn't work that well either. In my experience of them, they normally have "approved suppliers" and once the central purchasing department adds in their "charge" to the cross-charge, cost more than if the IT department had just ordered the part online, as well as taking longer to arrive.
Sometimes, things need to be worked on together, but we can see exactly what happens in the outside world. Companies form alliances to work on things together. The small companies I worked for didn't do everything themselves. They outsourced things that specialists could do better than they could. They formed strategic alliances with companies to work together in the spirit of enlightened self-interest.
Some users find a way, anyway. I know users who've found the guy in the admin team most interested in computing and got them to do things like build screen scraping systems to collate things in the way they wanted, because the IT department gave them a 2 month lead-in time.
I occassionally look after friends PCs. When I clean their spyware off, I install Firefox and I tell them that I'll only fix it again if they promise not to use the blue e again.
The problem for them is that we are reaching a plateau in PC computing. Office does everything that 99% of users needs. Firefox 1.5 is enough for 99% of users needs. Windows does 99% of what users need.
Most people have a PC that can outrun them for the applications they use - the things that slow most people down are the speed of their internet connection, and their hard drive speed. I know a lot of home and SOHO users running on 1Ghz laptops and they'll probably change them when the laptop breaks and not before.
Lots of people are still running Windows 2000 with Office 2000. In the companies that I do consulting for, it's about the most common OS/office combination I see. People have it rolled out, and it does everything they need. Doing a rollout to XP is a risk and a cost. In the past, people would have upgraded because the improvement was significant, and they were typically turning over machines at quite a rate.
There are architectural changes that can be made to improve stability, security and performance, but a lot of users don't think in those terms (until a resulting disaster occurs).
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry, the way their careers are going it won't be long before no-one will have to worry about working with a "Friends" cast member again. ;)
It's like car companies - they give cars to celebrities in the hope of a paparazzi snapping them getting out of it. A few photos can yield more publicity than the car costs.
The key things for him were reducing the cost of film stock (thousands of pounds per year), and being able to instantly review the shots. Quality was not an issue.
However, for many people 4mp is more than enough. Most people don't crop much and don't go above prints that are 8x6.
It's a little like audio. Most people are more than happy with CD and MP3, even though there are better technologies that play better given good equipment. 8mp+ probably has a similar market share to people using SACD.
A faster PC paid for itself in about a month.
Optimising existing code to give performance (beyond things like taking out redundant code) is getting to be less and less of a good idea. Why spend a couple of weeks on changing code to have some spaghetti-like caching mechanism when you can just add some more memory at half the price?
There used to be a feature on a UK radio station called "don't you know who I am?" about people being hassled by long-faded z-rated celebs trying to use their celebrity power to muscle things like restaurant tables.
If you work in a store or on a call centre, what do you do if a customer starts getting angry because you didn't deliver? Say "excuse me but I'm not going to help you if you're impolite?"? You've just made the customer twice as angry.
I expect people in departments that are supposed to serve me in the internal supply chain to do their jobs. If they don't, they aren't going to get me coming down their offering them beers. They'll get me escalating it up the line to their manager until the problem is resolved. Beers are a reward for a job well done.
As a rule, they get in the way, and still don't detect problems before they go live. And when things do go wrong, there's a witch hunt for who to pin the blame on. In addition, none of those companies had any sort of post-implementation review to try and learn lessons.
The companies that I have worked in that did quality right gave skilled staff the responsibility for their own quality and reviewed the reasons behind faults, and then worked on either training or procedures to raise quality.
If anyone wants to know a reason why web apps will take off, it's this. If you want a project management tool, do you put in a request for an app that then has to go through IT and be installed, or just pay for something like Basecamp that you reach through a browser?
Things like splitting a project order into a number of invoices, so that no invoice hits a ceiting that then requires the invoice to be signed off by a committee that will take months.
Nothing pisses me off more than someone taking a dismissive "nothing changed" attitude. I've done things like on-call support, and I know that about 90% of faults relate to something either failing on first run, or within the first few runs. Rarely will a system that has been running for months without a failure suddenly develop a fault.
It's one of the only times that will make me disagreeable with suppliers. Well, that and repeated errors where it seems that no-one is addressing them. An ISP I dealt with would not admit to an error, even after twice, there were reports all over the message board and in one case a link to how some server maintenance was being done in my area. I dropped them.
The change always comes from the top. If you are working in a company that makes delivering things like walking through treacle, hope for a new CIO or quit.
I worked for a company that had a terrible IT manager as a contractor. There was no way I was prepared to work for them permanent. They changed the CIO to a positive, go-ahead manager, and I came on board.
I once left an organisation after telling everyone I could reach up the management chain what was wrong and being brushed off. The one time that people actually wanted to listen was when I handed in my notice. Management and HR then wanted interviews to ask why I was leaving. I told them that as I was already leaving, sharing that information was hardly in my interest.
It depends on what challenges you want to deal with. The ones I want to deal with are about improving the productivity of an organisation, not having to get departments to do the job they are paid for. In the end, if you escalate such an issue, and nothing is done, there's not much more to do but quit.
In any case, the best way to get interdepartmental problems fixed is by providing rewards to both sides for working together. Short of that, you can start your own IT group or work with an outside company to get your solutions hosted. Your IT group should be a resource for you -- if they're not, you should be able to use other resources instead.
Thing is, those solutions don't always work. If you've worked in a large bureaucracy you'd know this. It's a case of rules that state things like "upgrades to PCs are done by IT. No unauthorised upgrades are allowed". Of course, you can go outside of that, but then you've often got to go through a massive set of procedures to get an external supplier on board (like budget approval committees, SLA committees, purchasing committees who will do a study on whether the supplier is sound and has all sorts of the relevant, and pointless certificates like ISO9000).
Some people suit large bureaucracies. Some don't like them, but live with them. Others fight them to the point where they realise that all their attempts to get their job done despite them are a complete waste of time and unappreciated. In the end, having "political" skills is often far more important than delivery skills in such organisations. In my experience, the people who rose up the ladder weren't those with sound delivery records, but those who could talk a good talk.
Paperwork is mostly there to cover people's behinds. I worked in a company with almost no paperwork, and it worked because they had a zero-blame culture. People just moved on and if a mistake was occurring repeatedly, something was put in place to deal with it.
Bureaucracies are the result of a negative culture. The paperwork is to defend you from attacks. When a system is not what the users wanted, it's not a case of accepting a miscommunication occurred and changing it. Instead, your paperwork means that you can show that you have something the users approved and have done your job when the inevitable scrap occurs. I've spent more time in meetings about whether a change is considered as a change to requirements or a fix, instead of just getting on and changing it.
The companies I have worked in that have systems like ISO9002 are those that actually have some of the lowest quality computer systems. Of course, it's all beautifully documented, but the bug and request lists are generally enormous because they are bureaucratic hellholes.
Every company I worked in that had a Change Control department also had a negative attitude towards their people. Mistakes could not be tolerated and were to be punished. Blame was to be doled out.
Still, when more people like him are gone, you and the rest of your bureaucratic pals can have a much easier life, at least until his company comes along and eats your lunch.
Why should he? The IT department are there to serve him. As the supplier, it's up to them to forge a good rapport with him. If he's not happy, he's an unhappy customer, and it's the IT department's job to rectify that.
The only time any one remembers the IT department is when stuff don't work.
You want a medal for doing your job? It is not your customer's job to motivate you. The way my customers remember me is when they pay my invoices.
Sometimes acknowledging that they are part of the company and their success may lead them to co-operate more.
IT people have a very good living. Most often, they are professional. But having worked both IT departments and at times been sat in the call centre, the place I have heard the most cry-baby whining is in IT departments. People who have to put up with all manner of abuse from customers don't whine as much.
I worked in a large bureaucracy, and would have gladly done a JFDI job on things. However, I was constrained by procedures that stated what I had to get done (like almost the same information written out in 3 different forms, which had to be approved by 3 different departments).
I've seen companies go both ways - a new manager turns it from a bureaucratic hellhole to a sleak organisation or a control freak decides that new layers of bureaucracy are required. You can see the difference on the ground in people.
Personally, I don't work for bureaucratic organisations if I can avoid it. The stress of having to use all sorts of tricks to get pass assholes just to get my job done got to be too much.
Functions like quality assurance, change control, central purchasing, IT security should be about adding to the organisation. Too often, they are actually self-promoting bureaucracies who just get in the way.
Can you explain why this matters? If I have to look after the marketing system, then I'm not interested in the procurement system.
Or even on more of a systems level, you'll have 5 guys each buying 500GB arrays from different vendors and with different manufacturers stuff.
And each of the IT departments will have helped to make the decision and should have the knowledge of what is best, and how to support it, either internally or via a support contract.
Centralised control is a bad thing. I've seen small and large, centralised and distributed controls. The companies where I delivered the most productivity and efficiency for my clients were where the company gave the maximum freedom to the people.
More often that not, my experience of computer departments is that "diseconomies of scale" exist. I've worked in 200+ man computer departments and their productivity per head was far below that in 10-20 man computer department. Want a new piece of software costing £150? In the 200+ man company, you typically had to place a requisition that your boss, who, even though he is running a key part of a company's IT, can't be trusted with a £150 order. The requisition would then go to a committee who would decide whether the purchase was justified. Then the requisition would go to the purchasing department who, at some time, would get around to ordering it. Maybe a month later, I'd get it.
The most successful work I've done is when I've been closest to the client, like in the 10 man computer department, where the user would come upstairs, request a change which we would code and test and have live in a few days. How would I order a new class library in a 10 man company? Go to my boss, tell him I need some software. I'd send him a URL and typically get an email back in a few hours telling me it had been ordered, along with the serial number.
Centralised purchasing doesn't work that well either. In my experience of them, they normally have "approved suppliers" and once the central purchasing department adds in their "charge" to the cross-charge, cost more than if the IT department had just ordered the part online, as well as taking longer to arrive.
Sometimes, things need to be worked on together, but we can see exactly what happens in the outside world. Companies form alliances to work on things together. The small companies I worked for didn't do everything themselves. They outsourced things that specialists could do better than they could. They formed strategic alliances with companies to work together in the spirit of enlightened self-interest.
Some users find a way, anyway. I know users who've found the guy in the admin team most interested in computing and got them to do things like build screen scraping systems to collate things in the way they wanted, because the IT department gave them a 2 month lead-in time.
I can't see a single good reason for wanting to use IE7.
I haven't had a single call since.
The problem for them is that we are reaching a plateau in PC computing. Office does everything that 99% of users needs. Firefox 1.5 is enough for 99% of users needs. Windows does 99% of what users need.
Most people have a PC that can outrun them for the applications they use - the things that slow most people down are the speed of their internet connection, and their hard drive speed. I know a lot of home and SOHO users running on 1Ghz laptops and they'll probably change them when the laptop breaks and not before.
Lots of people are still running Windows 2000 with Office 2000. In the companies that I do consulting for, it's about the most common OS/office combination I see. People have it rolled out, and it does everything they need. Doing a rollout to XP is a risk and a cost. In the past, people would have upgraded because the improvement was significant, and they were typically turning over machines at quite a rate.
There are architectural changes that can be made to improve stability, security and performance, but a lot of users don't think in those terms (until a resulting disaster occurs).