Whenever folks trot out the costs of having an IT department as a justification for outsourcing it, I have to wonder about just who is doing the ROI studies on outsourced IT. My anecdotal observations are that outsourced IT resources tend to cost more than having resources on site and there is a loss of efficiency by having to go through an outside source and administer that relationship.
For certain highly specialized fields I can see outsourcing as being a win, i.e. if you have a short lived need for some high end processing resources it makes more sense to use one of the utility computing resources out there. For long running IT needs there needs to be in house staff.
Actually early adopters will simply improvie their operational effectiveness in relation to the competition, this is not the same as strategic advantage, Michael Porter discusses this rather nicely in his November 96 article in Harvard Business Review. As the competition adopts the technologies you had adopted earlier their operation efficiencies will match yours and there will be a gradual erosion of the advantage that you have. A strategic advantage is something which can not be easily duplicated by the competition.
If I recall correctly, you don't get routable IP Addresses from AOL, you get stuff in the 172.16.0.0/12 address range. Net requests are then all run through some form of proxy or NAT out to the real net.
> Damned fool for fighting to keep the jobs of himself and his coworkers?
Yes. They were rendered irrelevant by new technologies. Happens all the time, your choices are to fight it or to adapt and get a new job. Those who fight it either a) Doom themselves to failure as industry passes them by or b) Doom their company to failure as industry passes it by. It may seem like it's easier for me to day than do, but I work in the tech industry and my job is under constant threat, so I have to keep myself updated.
> For modern perspective look at the fight between labor and automation in the auto industry.
Point in case. Just how is the auto industry doing in the US today?
This is true. I was actually fairly surprised to find out the number of developers that my company actually has (or had before we were acquired). A few good developers is all that any good project/product seems to need. Adding more seems to simply result in more problems, not more progress.
Yeah, I've seen this a lot. At a former employer of mine there was a particular VP who was a screaming a-hole when communicating via email, demanding, unreasonable and altogether unpleasant. When dealing with him in person he was rather bashful, almost apologetic for bothering me with his silly requests. Never could figure him out.
This isn't the same thing at all. In this case the city had to kick in a sizable chunk of cash, most (all?) of Earthlink's efforts have been on their own dime. Earthlink backing out of these agreements leaves the city without that mode of Internet access, but I don't see it as fucking over the citizens. They tried to make a go of something and then decided that it wouldn't fly, so they shut it down. Is there anything preventing another firm from making a go of it in their absence? In Minneapolis Earthlink lost a bid to build out a Wi-Fi network to a local firm. That network is just starting to come online and should be completed soon. It will be interesting to see how the local firm does with what Earthlink considers unprofitable. If what you claim happened in fact occurred, then that would clearly be a case of the city bending over and taking it in the keister from ATT.
They have to make the source available, but not convenient. Currently they make SRPMs available, which makes the life of Whitebox, CentOS, et al, much simpler. If they really hated such efforts they'd just resort to making only tar balls available. Granted it's a short leap from tar ball to SRPM, but it's a step Red Hat doesn't have to take.
I suppose that makes sense, but it kind of blew my mind when I read it. I guess I couldn't tell you what the racial lines are up here regarding funeral homes, but there certainly are churches which are predominantly black and others which are predominantly white.
For any job that you do, be it IT or elsewhere, ask yourself what you're doing to provide value to the company. Not whether you're doing something for the company that needs to be done, but whether you're doing it in such a fashion that it provides genuine identifiable economic value to the company. Identify whether it could possibly be done in a cheaper fashion by an outside firm specializing in that task. If you can't specify how you're job creates recognizable economic benefit for the company and it is even remotely possible that an outside firm could do your job in a cheaper fashion, then you should be prepared to be outsourced. That's the reality of business today.
Couple points. Xpedio wasn't owned by IntranetSolutions, it was IntranetSolutions. IntranetSolutions changed its name to Xpedio for a brief period of time and then Xpedio changed its name to Stellent. Oracle bought Stellent.
And how is Sharepoint based on that product?
I work for a content management company and I've seen a lot of successes and failures with content management. Metadata is inconvenient for users, and a lot of times they just don't understand it, so they rarely get it right. The best bet for decent metadata is when you can ingest it in such a fashion that the metadata is applied automatically. Batch ingestion of content which has the same metadata is one way, depending on your content. Another way is to provide users a way to get contet into the system without having to specify the metadata. We have a webdav interface that customers can use to drag and drop content into folders from their desktop. The content inherits predefined metadata depending on the folder. It's a lot easier to train a user that this type of document needs to go to this folder. There are other ways, but these are two simple ones.
At where I work we've got a number of clients running DB2 on x86 Linux platforms, as well as larger AIX platforms and of course the mainframe. Seems to have a lot of capabilities but is a bit more finicky than Oracle and MS SQL. It seems to like to dead lock unless the DBA has really made sure it is set up properly.
Cisco has no choice. If you fail to defend a trademark, you lose your claim to it. If they allowed Apple to proceed with their use of iPhone Apple would win by default.
Actually, I had an HR briefing not too long ago and they didn't even really want us to ask things like "So tell me about yourself". If it wasn't related to the job, they don't want us to discuss it. There was a whole list of things that sounded fairly harmless, but which they wanted to be phrased in a particular way so as to be as completely innocuous as possible. It's too bad really, because an individuals personality means a lot about how they're going to fit into a team, and apparently now we're not allowed to find out about that. Bleh.
If I am not mistaken, there are already laws in place to try and regulate fatigue amongst commercial drivers in the US. Commercial drivers are typically required to keep a log of their driving and are prohibited from spending more than X number of hours on the road without taking a break. Not sure how effective this has been, still see a lot of "uppers" being sold at truck stops.
"And if so why are they charging $189 for a workstation product when Server now does the same thing?"
Support. That is the key word in software today. More and more vendors are focusing less on getting license fees and more on generating revenue from support and related services.
I hate to say it, but how the heck do they expect Java apps to run well on this $100 laptop anyway? I like Java, my company works mostly in Java, but it can be a resource hog. How is it that they would even want to run it on these stripped down machines?
There are always exception cases, that doesn't mean it is not a workable idea for some significant percentage of the population. In my case the wife and I each have a car. I have about 50 miles of commuting a day, not alot but with $3.00 gas it adds up. The wife has about a 5 mile commute. I could run an electric car because I do the majority of the driving, the wife keeps the gas machine for her stuff and long trips.
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Whenever folks trot out the costs of having an IT department as a justification for outsourcing it, I have to wonder about just who is doing the ROI studies on outsourced IT. My anecdotal observations are that outsourced IT resources tend to cost more than having resources on site and there is a loss of efficiency by having to go through an outside source and administer that relationship.
For certain highly specialized fields I can see outsourcing as being a win, i.e. if you have a short lived need for some high end processing resources it makes more sense to use one of the utility computing resources out there. For long running IT needs there needs to be in house staff.
Actually early adopters will simply improvie their operational effectiveness in relation to the competition, this is not the same as strategic advantage, Michael Porter discusses this rather nicely in his November 96 article in Harvard Business Review. As the competition adopts the technologies you had adopted earlier their operation efficiencies will match yours and there will be a gradual erosion of the advantage that you have. A strategic advantage is something which can not be easily duplicated by the competition.
If I recall correctly, you don't get routable IP Addresses from AOL, you get stuff in the 172.16.0.0/12 address range. Net requests are then all run through some form of proxy or NAT out to the real net.
> Damned fool for fighting to keep the jobs of himself and his coworkers?
Yes. They were rendered irrelevant by new technologies. Happens all the time, your choices are to fight it or to adapt and get a new job. Those who fight it either a) Doom themselves to failure as industry passes them by or b) Doom their company to failure as industry passes it by. It may seem like it's easier for me to day than do, but I work in the tech industry and my job is under constant threat, so I have to keep myself updated.
> For modern perspective look at the fight between labor and automation in the auto industry.
Point in case. Just how is the auto industry doing in the US today?
Make it three and we've got a deal
This is true. I was actually fairly surprised to find out the number of developers that my company actually has (or had before we were acquired). A few good developers is all that any good project/product seems to need. Adding more seems to simply result in more problems, not more progress.
Yeah, I've seen this a lot. At a former employer of mine there was a particular VP who was a screaming a-hole when communicating via email, demanding, unreasonable and altogether unpleasant. When dealing with him in person he was rather bashful, almost apologetic for bothering me with his silly requests. Never could figure him out.
This isn't the same thing at all. In this case the city had to kick in a sizable chunk of cash, most (all?) of Earthlink's efforts have been on their own dime. Earthlink backing out of these agreements leaves the city without that mode of Internet access, but I don't see it as fucking over the citizens. They tried to make a go of something and then decided that it wouldn't fly, so they shut it down. Is there anything preventing another firm from making a go of it in their absence?
In Minneapolis Earthlink lost a bid to build out a Wi-Fi network to a local firm. That network is just starting to come online and should be completed soon. It will be interesting to see how the local firm does with what Earthlink considers unprofitable.
If what you claim happened in fact occurred, then that would clearly be a case of the city bending over and taking it in the keister from ATT.
They have to make the source available, but not convenient. Currently they make SRPMs available, which makes the life of Whitebox, CentOS, et al, much simpler. If they really hated such efforts they'd just resort to making only tar balls available. Granted it's a short leap from tar ball to SRPM, but it's a step Red Hat doesn't have to take.
I suppose that makes sense, but it kind of blew my mind when I read it. I guess I couldn't tell you what the racial lines are up here regarding funeral homes, but there certainly are churches which are predominantly black and others which are predominantly white.
From the article:
"...funeral homes. "We have seven. Four for blacks and three for whites," Ms. Mauthe said, matter-of-factly."
Jesus Christ! It's 2007 and these people are still segregating their funeral homes? WTF!?!
For any job that you do, be it IT or elsewhere, ask yourself what you're doing to provide value to the company. Not whether you're doing something for the company that needs to be done, but whether you're doing it in such a fashion that it provides genuine identifiable economic value to the company. Identify whether it could possibly be done in a cheaper fashion by an outside firm specializing in that task. If you can't specify how you're job creates recognizable economic benefit for the company and it is even remotely possible that an outside firm could do your job in a cheaper fashion, then you should be prepared to be outsourced. That's the reality of business today.
While this is one of the few true and accurate statements to be found on Slashdot, I don't see its relevance to this thread.
Not everything, no. Certain assets are protected.
Couple points. Xpedio wasn't owned by IntranetSolutions, it was IntranetSolutions. IntranetSolutions changed its name to Xpedio for a brief period of time and then Xpedio changed its name to Stellent. Oracle bought Stellent. And how is Sharepoint based on that product?
I work for a content management company and I've seen a lot of successes and failures with content management. Metadata is inconvenient for users, and a lot of times they just don't understand it, so they rarely get it right. The best bet for decent metadata is when you can ingest it in such a fashion that the metadata is applied automatically. Batch ingestion of content which has the same metadata is one way, depending on your content. Another way is to provide users a way to get contet into the system without having to specify the metadata. We have a webdav interface that customers can use to drag and drop content into folders from their desktop. The content inherits predefined metadata depending on the folder. It's a lot easier to train a user that this type of document needs to go to this folder. There are other ways, but these are two simple ones.
At where I work we've got a number of clients running DB2 on x86 Linux platforms, as well as larger AIX platforms and of course the mainframe. Seems to have a lot of capabilities but is a bit more finicky than Oracle and MS SQL. It seems to like to dead lock unless the DBA has really made sure it is set up properly.
Cisco has no choice. If you fail to defend a trademark, you lose your claim to it. If they allowed Apple to proceed with their use of iPhone Apple would win by default.
Actually, I had an HR briefing not too long ago and they didn't even really want us to ask things like "So tell me about yourself". If it wasn't related to the job, they don't want us to discuss it. There was a whole list of things that sounded fairly harmless, but which they wanted to be phrased in a particular way so as to be as completely innocuous as possible. It's too bad really, because an individuals personality means a lot about how they're going to fit into a team, and apparently now we're not allowed to find out about that. Bleh.
Where is the mod for -1 Random made up bullshit?
If I am not mistaken, there are already laws in place to try and regulate fatigue amongst commercial drivers in the US. Commercial drivers are typically required to keep a log of their driving and are prohibited from spending more than X number of hours on the road without taking a break. Not sure how effective this has been, still see a lot of "uppers" being sold at truck stops.
Where is the -1 Shill moderation?
"And if so why are they charging $189 for a workstation product when Server now does the same thing?"
Support. That is the key word in software today. More and more vendors are focusing less on getting license fees and more on generating revenue from support and related services.
I hate to say it, but how the heck do they expect Java apps to run well on this $100 laptop anyway? I like Java, my company works mostly in Java, but it can be a resource hog. How is it that they would even want to run it on these stripped down machines?
There are always exception cases, that doesn't mean it is not a workable idea for some significant percentage of the population. In my case the wife and I each have a car. I have about 50 miles of commuting a day, not alot but with $3.00 gas it adds up. The wife has about a 5 mile commute. I could run an electric car because I do the majority of the driving, the wife keeps the gas machine for her stuff and long trips.