The poor bankers and oil companies behind the "grassroots" Tea Party don't have a chance against the overwhelming financial might of the tree-hugging hippies!
If history keeps repeating itself, today's tree-hugging hippies are tomorrow's bankers and big oil executive.
I only report to one person, who in turn reports to one VP, who in turn reports to one SVP, who in turn reports to a Director, who in turn reports to Meg Whitman.
... and Meg Whitman is born in New-York City, where Kevin Bacon went to launch his acting career. You win!
The company I'm employed by is "Hewlett Packard Ltd." [...] Try not to act too bitter about it though.
I am not sure why you picked HP. If one wants to pretend that he is working for a famous company, why not pick a successful one? Or if you really wanted to associate with losers, Zynga or Groupon would have been more impressive.
It would have been more convincing if your story had taken into consideration the fact that the company is usually called "HP" and that they have shitloads of VPs, not one, but just for the sake of avoiding more of that bullshit story I'll agree that if an executive makes a phone call to get his retarded cousin a job in the mail room HR may end up binding the rules. Bravo.
in most large companies you can't go about hiring people without following the official process
I was hired by a very large company two years ago. My hiring process was essentially backwards: I did a 'phone interview with the VP first where he did most of the talking, was told I'd got the job and then spoke to to the HR person. The HR step was just a formality; she'd already been instructed to hire me.
Personal connections always beat the official process.
That must be indeed a very large company if "the" VP took the time to make a phone interview. I guess he then told the CEO all about you and together they pressured the head of HR to bypass the typical hiring process while they were all waiting for they turn to use the microwave in the break room.
This should come as no surprise though. In these modern times of recession and people being made unemployed due to robots it really is a buyer's market and employers can pull as much "shit" as they like and still have a queue of people outside the door looking for jobs.
A queue of desperate people. The good people will never put up with this shit and get jobs through their own personal network that bypasses HR. Ask any manager who needs to fill a slot about the quality of people they get from HR. And I have not gotten a job through traditional means for about 20 years.
I do not know why companies still put up with this...
I don't know in what kind of organization you work, but in most large companies you can't go about hiring people without following the official process. Many times when I had good candidates in my network I had to tell them to send their resume to HR - event trying to get them together with the hiring manager for a coffee would possibly jeopardize their application.
With the Bible, the things are even worse. Nobody knows who actually wrote the core part, the gospels.
The other half of the NT, Paul's writings, which predate the gospels by a few decades, dont even mention that Jesus was somebody who actually existed outside of Paul's visions and theological concepts.
How the gospels were written and how the new testament was put together is a fascinating subject. There is a scholar named Bart Ehrman who did tons of book about early Christianity, the historical elements of the gospels, etc. Unfortunately this topic is a very delicate matter because many people apparently don't see a difference between a genuine historical interest and religious fanatism and lose their sh*t when the word "bible" comes up, so talking about gospels on this forum is counter-productive, which really is too bad.
It seems that you have some form of belief in supernatural beings of some form or another, such as angels, demons and gods.
Taking from my comment that I believe in God is like saying the ACLU is in favor of pedophilia because they defended NAMBLA. It's simplistic and wrong.
You are not very good at insulting people because you lack empathy, which is another tell-tale sign of a Gen-Y entitled brat.
What makes me nauseous is not the God/no-God part of the discussion; it's the fact that you stated that those scrolls that were written 2000 years ago and that Google was kind enough to digitize for everyone to see are not *worthy* of your time.
Instead of being amazed that you have access (for free) to such valuable historical artefacts (a privilege that was limited to a very small number of people until now) you come out and complain that you'd rather see documents from Leonardo Da Vinci - themselves written at a time where those unworthy Dead See scrolls were already about 1500 years old.
A vast majority of the emails sent worldwide since the last time you charged your iPod are gone forever; yet there is a bunch of documents written 2000 years ago on goatskin and papyrus that have survived (in part) until today. How can you not find that fascinating? These documents could be a wine merchant inventory and it would still be awesome.
Uh oh, turning burdens of proof around again!?! I say the Easter Bunny wrote all those books! But he stole most of it from the FSM. All just as plausible as any other fairy tales. Without proof of existence all the gods are just like any other imaginary character.
Unless you live in France, the burden of proof is always on the accuser. So if you want to get your panties in a bunch because some people believe in God, you need some kind of evidence that they are wrong, it's not the other way around.
Your personal belief that there is no God is not a fact (unless someone is writing an article about you) and therefore does not qualify as evidence. This belief is shared by about 10% of the American population (14% world-wide) so that makes you part of a minority. Which means that even if the existence of God was to be decided by a jury, by an election or by an "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" process, odds are that God would win.
Talk about throwing pearls to the pigs... You must be one of those entitled Gen-Y.
Here is an idea that would be "worth your time" [1]: why don't you build an internet company that is worth billions of dollars then use some of the profits to fund a project where Leonardo Da Vinci's manuscripts are being found (or made available), digitized and published online for all to see?
I suspect that the day you accomplish that, your opinion about the Dead Sea scrolls will have a bigger impact. Meanwhile feel free to tweet about it, I'm sure your 8 followers will be delighted, you may even get a Like if posted on Facebook.
[1] with those quotes around "worth your time" I hope to convey how annoyed I get by reading the part of your comment where you talk about things that are worth spending your time with.
Hard to believe, but many, many people still believe the stories told in these documents are the literal word of God
I don't know a lot of religions where the sacred book is advertised as containing the literal word of God. Most are (allegedly) God-inspired. The closer you get from the "source" is with the Q'ran because it was never translated - however it was written from memory by followers of Muhammad so if this was a CSI episode one would have to admit that the chain of evidence is somehow broken.
In any event by suggesting that those books are *not* inspired by God (which according to current scientific knowledge may or may not exist) you are taking a position that is not supported by established facts, therefore promoting yourself a "fable". If you want to drape yourself in the cloth of Science make sure you follow its basic tenets. Hypothesis are only the 2nd step in the scientific method.
Those are products which have different licenses for the "community" edition and the "real" ones. I've used both and even the commercial editions are quite unpleasant to deal with, plus they steer you to a proprietary stack, just like more mature offerings (Cognos, BO, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.)
Commercial BI products are usually either brutal or too clever for their own good. Those two, Jasper and Pentaho, are more of the same, plus they feel like you need to have the guy who designed them to sit besides you and explain what to do. And community/forum-driven support is not that great.
Also, accounting perspective is miopic. That's why accounting is a department, not a C-level position.
I don't know in what kind of organization you work, but in my experience when there are C-level positions the first one to be created after CEO is CFO. And in most organizations the CFO has more power than the CIO/CTO (if there is even one - in many organizations IT is directly reporting to the CFO). I could provide you with links about the growing power of CFOs in IT but I'm sure your Google works just fine.
Obviously with such a disconnect between our individual experiences we will never see eye-to-eye.
Also so far my experience with cloud providers (mostly Azure+Office365, some AWS) has been terrific and every setup I've done includes a backup or sync on a different provider (or locally) so the actual risk of getting locked out is inexistant, and for most organizations I've worked with the risk of having a major cloud disruption versus the risk of a major production incident with the local infrastructure makes the cloud very attractive. Which is why I suspect that you don't have a different experience with cloud providers (if any experience at all) but merely a preconceived idea.
Something about Russian culture makes long periods of isolation more tolerable for them somehow
The US has ballisitic missile submarines, with crew members that get isolated for months.
Sometimes they get to live on nice islands and sleep with cute native bar owners. And since there is not a single non-NATO army that has at the moment the naval capability to sink them they have it good.
This used to be good advice, because Macs were such a small share of the market that the malware authors didn't bother with them. This isn't quite so true any more.
It is true that Macs are not (relatively) free from threats anymore, but damn, they sure have a lot fewer to deal with. No?
You have to take off your IT hat and think about it from a business perspective. A cost center like IT is a nightmare from an accounting perspective because it puts a lot of weight in the capital expenditure column (while cloud hosting is a operational expenditure, which is much easier to swallow).
Now if you take actual numbers (from Azure but you can get equivalent with a mix of AWS and Google): -hosting a 10GB SQL Server database on Azure: $50/month (backup, licenses and maintenance included) -add up to 10 web apps: $100/month (backup, licenses and maintenance included) -add a service bus with 10 million messages a month: $10/month -add two Windows VM to run those weird proprietary apps that can't go web: $20/month
You are now facing a $180/month bill for a 3-site redundant infrastructure that gives a 99.9% uptime SLA (that's Azure, other may vary) that is absolutely not dependant on the local staff vacation schedule. Over 3 years this means a bit under $7k for machines you don't have to buy, power, cool down and maintain (except for patching those 2 VMs). A single physical server will cost more than that (many times if it's running Windows and SQL Server) and there is no way you can get a 99.9% uptime with a single server that you have to patch, maintain, etc. and that may end up offline a few days if the RAID controller goes bad and the battery is backorder.
Now let's run numbers for office stuff (email, groupware, etc); -Exchange online is $4/user/month (max 25GB inbox). For the 150 employees in Company C, this means about 7k$ a year. -Full online services (unlimited email, archiving, voicemail integration, SharePoint, etc) is $20/user/month. this means about $35k a year. (again - same is available from other providers like Google)
So the total for a full cloud scenario with unlimited email and no need for hardware/backup/maintenance/monitoring is around $40k/year. At Company C their current IT staff alone cost them about 10-15 times that; if by hosting their applications, databases and emails in the cloud they can get rid of 1-2 dudes they are in the black. Plus savings on hardware, power, cooling, licenses and whatnot. And guess what, with fully monitored and maintained cloud services, Company C could probably live with a very small IT group.
As for SLAs: when you have a 15-person staff, with vacation, sick days and variable skill set you cannot expect to have the same availability as a well-staffed, established cloud provider. Volume speaks.
So spin this any way you want, the cloud is a good scenario for Company C (and there are a lot of them out there).
I am not sure about the union part but it absolutely should have engineer type signoffs. Just like other things require a certified engineer to sign off on something (with legal consequences) but also prevents businesses from just going ahead and doing stuff anyways.
However to go along with this would be the required education and certification to actually do the work to make sure the signoff is correct. I doubt that many people actually understand the work you have to do to become a certified engineer.
At the very least you should have to pass a test like the FE exam and later the PE exam if you want that signoff capability for IT. You should have to take appropriate courses also. You would also have to get the laws changed so that operations required that signoff.
I once had to deal with a client whose IT manager refused to encrypt the SAN, refused to encrypt the databases and saw no point in filtering the traffic between Development and Production servers. Apparently this was all overkill. And guess what, that IT manager was an engineer.
I have seen people with Vista with only 512 megs of ram waste 1 hour a day booting up and waiting as the system crawls for every 8 hours a day. Why? They needed a business case to spend $40. I mean COME ON?!
It costs probably $150 in lost wages to find out if htey need the $40. IT is turned down usually as it does not boast the share price. People then get mad at IT.
The TOGAF model is divided in 4 equally important areas: Business, Applications, Data and Technology. The situation you describe is typical in organizations where the Enterprise Architecture team is weak or does not cover properly the four areas. Technology is often the black sheep.
Business cases cannot be done at the unit level; they are a strategic asset that should guide and shape IT policies. In the RAM example it would be quite easy to demonstrate in actual numbers that with the cost of RAM, providing everyone with at least 8GB is cost-effective; once an executive has seen this business case they will update the IT policy to either automatically give those 8GB to everyone or deny it and accept the consequences on productivity - but one way or the other once a decision is made there is no need for yet another business case each time a new laptop is to be upgraded.
It is not unrealistic to build a good EA team who can spin decent business cases to PHBs and solve that kind of problems. However in my experience the biggest resistance does not come from the executive level (those who sign or decline actual business cases) but from IT middle management where people tend to be penny wise and pound foolish (spending $40 on RAM for a laptop is insane, but spending 20% more on HP server hardware versus identical Dell server hardware is ok because HP is "better").
Defining a company by "big" or "small" is a sure way to make a bad decision. Here is an example;
Company A is in the manufacturing industry and has over 5,000 employees. Every week they must process terabytes of data extracted from their production line machines in order to keep a lean inventory and lay off or hire people as needed. They are in a cut-throat industry and can't afford a huge ERP rollout and their shoestring IT budget merely allows for a bunch of commodity servers.
Company B is a hedge fund that has 35 employees and 50 billions in assets under management. Their management fees alone provides them with basically unlimited funds for IT.
Company C is a real-estate firm that has 150 employees. They have a 15-people IT group that does everything from replacing inkjet cartridges to patching the Oracle databases.
Now which one is a "big" company and which one is a "small" one? The entire payroll and yearly expenditures from Company A and C is less than 3% of the profits made by Company B on an average year. The entire staff from Company B is smaller than the night shift team in charge of emptying recycle bins at Company A. Etc.
If you take a quick look at the actual needs from those companies, you will see that: -Company A can't afford a cloud provider or even licenses on local machines, their best bet is a bunch of commodity servers (or glorified workstations) running something like Hadoop/Hbase (and at least the cool factor keeps the poorly paid IT staff some incentive to stay for a while) -Company B can't afford downtime and they are worth more than many cloud providers so they would never let a byte stored on someone else's computer; plus the VP probably has a kick giving a hard-on to IT vendors and sysadmin candidates with his "money is no object for our IT infrastructure" speech and that alone seals the deal -For Company C IT is a cost center and they don't have the volume to justify highly-skilled experts in database or servers management, so their best bet is to put all their stuff in a cloud where there is no lock-in or contract (such as AWS or Azure) and keep a skeleton crew to reset passwords and remove spyware from laptops.
Now take the yellow pages or drive around downtown and see how many companies you can compare to A, B or C, and you will see why there is a future for cloud providers.
why anyone would put anything critical in Oracle's hands is beyond me
And where exactly would you rather put it? for your convenience here is an overview of the main database cloud offerings:
1) Oracle 2) Microsoft SQL Azure 3) EnterpriseDB (Postgresql) 4) Amazon RDS (MySQL) 5) A bunch of NoSQL providers (like MongoLab)
Granted, Oracle has the worst SLA in all these offerings but until IBM comes out with a DB2 Cloud service, Oracle is still ranked near or at the the top of that list. And anyways if you read the fine prints in any of those SLAs you'll see that the penalty for downtime is peanuts, like it is almost always the case in IT [1]; the real question is who you trust the most, not who puts the most 9s in their ads.
It's easy to bash a product without coming up with a relevant alternative. Let's see what you propose.
[1] One exception: high-end Hitachi SANs that come with a 100% uptime SLA by contract - a terrific peace of mind if you don't mind the hefty price tag.
Dumb ass, here's a clue for you. Don't put you and your company is a position vulnerability in the first place and you won't have to worry.
HA!
Spoken as someone who has never had a cost accountant and or/addition to a PHB up your ass about wasting money, needing business cases for every action/reaction, and following trends on the latest cost saving measures, or even worse listens to their sales people FIRST and then dictating to you what needs to be done without hearing your input.
Truth be told, lots of business people are already feeling like they are being held hostage by their own IT group and running to Whatever-As-A-Service is like The Great Escape for them. To them IT is like power and fedex, they just want it done and they don't see a reason to keep that cost center in-house.
The fact that business users require business cases shows that they are being rational and don't fall easily for the latest gimmick. It's a good thing. What is not good is feeling threatened by this approach instead of using that opportunity to streamline the internal IT offering. (And this just between us, your point about Oracle raising rates by 350% is FUD - it's not a nice mode to fallback on as experienced business users will smell it from a mile away).
The cloud providers are just getting started; they have nice brochures, case studies and satisfied customers to call upon. If you think the internal IT department is a better option for the business it's up to you to make your point; you even have the benefit of being the incumbent. And if you don't like that culture, quit and send your resume to Oracle, they'll need people to maintain the servers where your former employer is moving all their stuff like everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not comparable.
The poor bankers and oil companies behind the "grassroots" Tea Party don't have a chance against the overwhelming financial might of the tree-hugging hippies!
If history keeps repeating itself, today's tree-hugging hippies are tomorrow's bankers and big oil executive.
I only report to one person, who in turn reports to one VP, who in turn reports to one SVP, who in turn reports to a Director, who in turn reports to Meg Whitman.
... and Meg Whitman is born in New-York City, where Kevin Bacon went to launch his acting career. You win!
The company I'm employed by is "Hewlett Packard Ltd." [...] Try not to act too bitter about it though.
I am not sure why you picked HP. If one wants to pretend that he is working for a famous company, why not pick a successful one? Or if you really wanted to associate with losers, Zynga or Groupon would have been more impressive.
It would have been more convincing if your story had taken into consideration the fact that the company is usually called "HP" and that they have shitloads of VPs, not one, but just for the sake of avoiding more of that bullshit story I'll agree that if an executive makes a phone call to get his retarded cousin a job in the mail room HR may end up binding the rules. Bravo.
I was hired by a very large company two years ago. My hiring process was essentially backwards: I did a 'phone interview with the VP first where he did most of the talking, was told I'd got the job and then spoke to to the HR person. The HR step was just a formality; she'd already been instructed to hire me.
Personal connections always beat the official process.
That must be indeed a very large company if "the" VP took the time to make a phone interview. I guess he then told the CEO all about you and together they pressured the head of HR to bypass the typical hiring process while they were all waiting for they turn to use the microwave in the break room.
Someone had to spend time emailing, calling, and skyping to interview for job? I think I might cry...
+1. They could rename this post: how Facebook dodged a bullet and avoided hiring a wuss.
This should come as no surprise though. In these modern times of recession and people being made unemployed due to robots it really is a buyer's market and employers can pull as much "shit" as they like and still have a queue of people outside the door looking for jobs.
A queue of desperate people. The good people will never put up with this shit and get jobs through their own personal network that bypasses HR. Ask any manager who needs to fill a slot about the quality of people they get from HR. And I have not gotten a job through traditional means for about 20 years.
I do not know why companies still put up with this...
I don't know in what kind of organization you work, but in most large companies you can't go about hiring people without following the official process. Many times when I had good candidates in my network I had to tell them to send their resume to HR - event trying to get them together with the hiring manager for a coffee would possibly jeopardize their application.
Print copies of this fable for the break room and make sure your boss and the project manager read it.
http://www.slideshare.net/faisalkhadia/the-ant-fable
This is gold!
With the Bible, the things are even worse. Nobody knows who actually wrote the core part, the gospels.
The other half of the NT, Paul's writings, which predate the gospels by a few decades, dont even mention that Jesus was somebody who actually existed outside of Paul's visions and theological concepts.
How the gospels were written and how the new testament was put together is a fascinating subject. There is a scholar named Bart Ehrman who did tons of book about early Christianity, the historical elements of the gospels, etc. Unfortunately this topic is a very delicate matter because many people apparently don't see a difference between a genuine historical interest and religious fanatism and lose their sh*t when the word "bible" comes up, so talking about gospels on this forum is counter-productive, which really is too bad.
It seems that you have some form of belief in supernatural beings of some form or another, such as angels, demons and gods.
Taking from my comment that I believe in God is like saying the ACLU is in favor of pedophilia because they defended NAMBLA. It's simplistic and wrong.
You are not very good at insulting people because you lack empathy, which is another tell-tale sign of a Gen-Y entitled brat.
What makes me nauseous is not the God/no-God part of the discussion; it's the fact that you stated that those scrolls that were written 2000 years ago and that Google was kind enough to digitize for everyone to see are not *worthy* of your time.
Instead of being amazed that you have access (for free) to such valuable historical artefacts (a privilege that was limited to a very small number of people until now) you come out and complain that you'd rather see documents from Leonardo Da Vinci - themselves written at a time where those unworthy Dead See scrolls were already about 1500 years old.
A vast majority of the emails sent worldwide since the last time you charged your iPod are gone forever; yet there is a bunch of documents written 2000 years ago on goatskin and papyrus that have survived (in part) until today. How can you not find that fascinating? These documents could be a wine merchant inventory and it would still be awesome.
Pearls to the pigs. 'Nuff said.
Uh oh, turning burdens of proof around again!?!
I say the Easter Bunny wrote all those books! But he stole most of it from the FSM. All just as plausible as any other fairy tales. Without proof of existence all the gods are just like any other imaginary character.
Unless you live in France, the burden of proof is always on the accuser. So if you want to get your panties in a bunch because some people believe in God, you need some kind of evidence that they are wrong, it's not the other way around.
Your personal belief that there is no God is not a fact (unless someone is writing an article about you) and therefore does not qualify as evidence. This belief is shared by about 10% of the American population (14% world-wide) so that makes you part of a minority. Which means that even if the existence of God was to be decided by a jury, by an election or by an "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" process, odds are that God would win.
Talk about throwing pearls to the pigs... You must be one of those entitled Gen-Y.
Here is an idea that would be "worth your time" [1]: why don't you build an internet company that is worth billions of dollars then use some of the profits to fund a project where Leonardo Da Vinci's manuscripts are being found (or made available), digitized and published online for all to see?
I suspect that the day you accomplish that, your opinion about the Dead Sea scrolls will have a bigger impact. Meanwhile feel free to tweet about it, I'm sure your 8 followers will be delighted, you may even get a Like if posted on Facebook.
[1] with those quotes around "worth your time" I hope to convey how annoyed I get by reading the part of your comment where you talk about things that are worth spending your time with.
30% are copies of texts not canonized in the Hebrew Bible (i.e. fanfiction) from the Second Temple Period
For using the expression "fanfiction" to describe Dead Sea scrolls, you sir deserve a mod point I don't have.
Disclaimer: I opted out of the moderation system because I do not trust collective wisdom.
Hard to believe, but many, many people still believe the stories told in these documents are the literal word of God
I don't know a lot of religions where the sacred book is advertised as containing the literal word of God. Most are (allegedly) God-inspired. The closer you get from the "source" is with the Q'ran because it was never translated - however it was written from memory by followers of Muhammad so if this was a CSI episode one would have to admit that the chain of evidence is somehow broken.
In any event by suggesting that those books are *not* inspired by God (which according to current scientific knowledge may or may not exist) you are taking a position that is not supported by established facts, therefore promoting yourself a "fable". If you want to drape yourself in the cloth of Science make sure you follow its basic tenets. Hypothesis are only the 2nd step in the scientific method.
Those are products which have different licenses for the "community" edition and the "real" ones. I've used both and even the commercial editions are quite unpleasant to deal with, plus they steer you to a proprietary stack, just like more mature offerings (Cognos, BO, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.)
Commercial BI products are usually either brutal or too clever for their own good. Those two, Jasper and Pentaho, are more of the same, plus they feel like you need to have the guy who designed them to sit besides you and explain what to do. And community/forum-driven support is not that great.
The most interesting open reporting solution is definitely BIRT, it runs circle around Jasper:
http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/
Also, accounting perspective is miopic. That's why accounting is a department, not a C-level position.
I don't know in what kind of organization you work, but in my experience when there are C-level positions the first one to be created after CEO is CFO. And in most organizations the CFO has more power than the CIO/CTO (if there is even one - in many organizations IT is directly reporting to the CFO). I could provide you with links about the growing power of CFOs in IT but I'm sure your Google works just fine.
Obviously with such a disconnect between our individual experiences we will never see eye-to-eye.
Also so far my experience with cloud providers (mostly Azure+Office365, some AWS) has been terrific and every setup I've done includes a backup or sync on a different provider (or locally) so the actual risk of getting locked out is inexistant, and for most organizations I've worked with the risk of having a major cloud disruption versus the risk of a major production incident with the local infrastructure makes the cloud very attractive. Which is why I suspect that you don't have a different experience with cloud providers (if any experience at all) but merely a preconceived idea.
In blue water, no they can't. Russia used to, China will someday, but right now it's pretty safe out there except for friendly fire.
When you get closer to the coast it's a different story, but then, unless there is a war it should not happen.
Something about Russian culture makes long periods of isolation more tolerable for them somehow
The US has ballisitic missile submarines, with crew members that get isolated for months.
Sometimes they get to live on nice islands and sleep with cute native bar owners. And since there is not a single non-NATO army that has at the moment the naval capability to sink them they have it good.
This used to be good advice, because Macs were such a small share of the market that the malware authors didn't bother with them. This isn't quite so true any more.
It is true that Macs are not (relatively) free from threats anymore, but damn, they sure have a lot fewer to deal with. No?
Not anymore. Remember that story posted not so long ago?
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2012/11/02/microsofts-security-team-is-killing-it-not-one-product-on-kasperskys-top-10-vulnerabilities-list/
Apple is on that list twice (QuickTime and iTunes). Adobe is there a lot. No Microsoft products.
Feel free to bring the conspiracy/fraudulent research theories but really it's time people move on with old stuff.
You have to take off your IT hat and think about it from a business perspective. A cost center like IT is a nightmare from an accounting perspective because it puts a lot of weight in the capital expenditure column (while cloud hosting is a operational expenditure, which is much easier to swallow).
Have a quick read on this topic:
http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/whitepaper/getting-on-the-right-side-of-the-capex-vs-opex-divide
(disclaimer: it's from a company that offers cloud hosting)
Now if you take actual numbers (from Azure but you can get equivalent with a mix of AWS and Google):
-hosting a 10GB SQL Server database on Azure: $50/month (backup, licenses and maintenance included)
-add up to 10 web apps: $100/month (backup, licenses and maintenance included)
-add a service bus with 10 million messages a month: $10/month
-add two Windows VM to run those weird proprietary apps that can't go web: $20/month
You are now facing a $180/month bill for a 3-site redundant infrastructure that gives a 99.9% uptime SLA (that's Azure, other may vary) that is absolutely not dependant on the local staff vacation schedule. Over 3 years this means a bit under $7k for machines you don't have to buy, power, cool down and maintain (except for patching those 2 VMs). A single physical server will cost more than that (many times if it's running Windows and SQL Server) and there is no way you can get a 99.9% uptime with a single server that you have to patch, maintain, etc. and that may end up offline a few days if the RAID controller goes bad and the battery is backorder.
Now let's run numbers for office stuff (email, groupware, etc);
-Exchange online is $4/user/month (max 25GB inbox). For the 150 employees in Company C, this means about 7k$ a year.
-Full online services (unlimited email, archiving, voicemail integration, SharePoint, etc) is $20/user/month. this means about $35k a year.
(again - same is available from other providers like Google)
So the total for a full cloud scenario with unlimited email and no need for hardware/backup/maintenance/monitoring is around $40k/year. At Company C their current IT staff alone cost them about 10-15 times that; if by hosting their applications, databases and emails in the cloud they can get rid of 1-2 dudes they are in the black. Plus savings on hardware, power, cooling, licenses and whatnot. And guess what, with fully monitored and maintained cloud services, Company C could probably live with a very small IT group.
As for SLAs: when you have a 15-person staff, with vacation, sick days and variable skill set you cannot expect to have the same availability as a well-staffed, established cloud provider. Volume speaks.
So spin this any way you want, the cloud is a good scenario for Company C (and there are a lot of them out there).
I am not sure about the union part but it absolutely should have engineer type signoffs. Just like other things require a certified engineer to sign off on something (with legal consequences) but also prevents businesses from just going ahead and doing stuff anyways.
However to go along with this would be the required education and certification to actually do the work to make sure the signoff is correct. I doubt that many people actually understand the work you have to do to become a certified engineer.
At the very least you should have to pass a test like the FE exam and later the PE exam if you want that signoff capability for IT. You should have to take appropriate courses also. You would also have to get the laws changed so that operations required that signoff.
I once had to deal with a client whose IT manager refused to encrypt the SAN, refused to encrypt the databases and saw no point in filtering the traffic between Development and Production servers. Apparently this was all overkill. And guess what, that IT manager was an engineer.
An engineer ring does not make one any wiser.
I have seen people with Vista with only 512 megs of ram waste 1 hour a day booting up and waiting as the system crawls for every 8 hours a day. Why? They needed a business case to spend $40. I mean COME ON?!
It costs probably $150 in lost wages to find out if htey need the $40. IT is turned down usually as it does not boast the share price. People then get mad at IT.
The TOGAF model is divided in 4 equally important areas: Business, Applications, Data and Technology. The situation you describe is typical in organizations where the Enterprise Architecture team is weak or does not cover properly the four areas. Technology is often the black sheep.
Business cases cannot be done at the unit level; they are a strategic asset that should guide and shape IT policies. In the RAM example it would be quite easy to demonstrate in actual numbers that with the cost of RAM, providing everyone with at least 8GB is cost-effective; once an executive has seen this business case they will update the IT policy to either automatically give those 8GB to everyone or deny it and accept the consequences on productivity - but one way or the other once a decision is made there is no need for yet another business case each time a new laptop is to be upgraded.
It is not unrealistic to build a good EA team who can spin decent business cases to PHBs and solve that kind of problems. However in my experience the biggest resistance does not come from the executive level (those who sign or decline actual business cases) but from IT middle management where people tend to be penny wise and pound foolish (spending $40 on RAM for a laptop is insane, but spending 20% more on HP server hardware versus identical Dell server hardware is ok because HP is "better").
Defining a company by "big" or "small" is a sure way to make a bad decision. Here is an example;
Company A is in the manufacturing industry and has over 5,000 employees. Every week they must process terabytes of data extracted from their production line machines in order to keep a lean inventory and lay off or hire people as needed. They are in a cut-throat industry and can't afford a huge ERP rollout and their shoestring IT budget merely allows for a bunch of commodity servers.
Company B is a hedge fund that has 35 employees and 50 billions in assets under management. Their management fees alone provides them with basically unlimited funds for IT.
Company C is a real-estate firm that has 150 employees. They have a 15-people IT group that does everything from replacing inkjet cartridges to patching the Oracle databases.
Now which one is a "big" company and which one is a "small" one? The entire payroll and yearly expenditures from Company A and C is less than 3% of the profits made by Company B on an average year. The entire staff from Company B is smaller than the night shift team in charge of emptying recycle bins at Company A. Etc.
If you take a quick look at the actual needs from those companies, you will see that:
-Company A can't afford a cloud provider or even licenses on local machines, their best bet is a bunch of commodity servers (or glorified workstations) running something like Hadoop/Hbase (and at least the cool factor keeps the poorly paid IT staff some incentive to stay for a while)
-Company B can't afford downtime and they are worth more than many cloud providers so they would never let a byte stored on someone else's computer; plus the VP probably has a kick giving a hard-on to IT vendors and sysadmin candidates with his "money is no object for our IT infrastructure" speech and that alone seals the deal
-For Company C IT is a cost center and they don't have the volume to justify highly-skilled experts in database or servers management, so their best bet is to put all their stuff in a cloud where there is no lock-in or contract (such as AWS or Azure) and keep a skeleton crew to reset passwords and remove spyware from laptops.
Now take the yellow pages or drive around downtown and see how many companies you can compare to A, B or C, and you will see why there is a future for cloud providers.
why anyone would put anything critical in Oracle's hands is beyond me
And where exactly would you rather put it? for your convenience here is an overview of the main database cloud offerings:
1) Oracle
2) Microsoft SQL Azure
3) EnterpriseDB (Postgresql)
4) Amazon RDS (MySQL)
5) A bunch of NoSQL providers (like MongoLab)
Granted, Oracle has the worst SLA in all these offerings but until IBM comes out with a DB2 Cloud service, Oracle is still ranked near or at the the top of that list. And anyways if you read the fine prints in any of those SLAs you'll see that the penalty for downtime is peanuts, like it is almost always the case in IT [1]; the real question is who you trust the most, not who puts the most 9s in their ads.
It's easy to bash a product without coming up with a relevant alternative. Let's see what you propose.
[1] One exception: high-end Hitachi SANs that come with a 100% uptime SLA by contract - a terrific peace of mind if you don't mind the hefty price tag.
Dumb ass, here's a clue for you. Don't put you and your company is a position vulnerability in the first place and you won't have to worry.
HA!
Spoken as someone who has never had a cost accountant and or/addition to a PHB up your ass about wasting money, needing business cases for every action/reaction, and following trends on the latest cost saving measures, or even worse listens to their sales people FIRST and then dictating to you what needs to be done without hearing your input.
Truth be told, lots of business people are already feeling like they are being held hostage by their own IT group and running to Whatever-As-A-Service is like The Great Escape for them. To them IT is like power and fedex, they just want it done and they don't see a reason to keep that cost center in-house.
The fact that business users require business cases shows that they are being rational and don't fall easily for the latest gimmick. It's a good thing. What is not good is feeling threatened by this approach instead of using that opportunity to streamline the internal IT offering. (And this just between us, your point about Oracle raising rates by 350% is FUD - it's not a nice mode to fallback on as experienced business users will smell it from a mile away).
The cloud providers are just getting started; they have nice brochures, case studies and satisfied customers to call upon. If you think the internal IT department is a better option for the business it's up to you to make your point; you even have the benefit of being the incumbent. And if you don't like that culture, quit and send your resume to Oracle, they'll need people to maintain the servers where your former employer is moving all their stuff like everyone else.