When my son was in high school, he took an online community college course. It was a disaster. He didn't read the material, didn't do the work, and basically just blew the whole thing off. I think it's like anything else - if the kid is self-motivated, interested and wants to learn, it will work - if not, it won't.
... is why the WTO hasn't gone after Santa for violating import/export & tariff laws, and why the AFL-CIO & the Teamsters haven't shut him down or made him disappear.
BTW, the house I grew-up in didn't have a fireplace, therefore we also didn't have a chimney. When I was a kid, I believed Santa came down our sewer system vent pipes.
... when IT departments were given unlimited resources to buy and support whatever anyone in the company wanted. You can't have it both ways - you can't consider IT as company overhead that should be squeezed for budget and headcount until they bleed *AND* also say that IT has to support any wild technology the rest of the company wants to use.
So - sure use anything you want - just don't call me for help when you want to integrate your wacky personal software with the ERP system and the data warehouse, or when the SOx auditor wants to know how your 2 TB USB drive that you have been using to store all the key business data is being backed-up.
How about this: Partner with me - give me the time, money and headcount to research the technology and how it will affect the existing systems. Take the time to understand the risks as well as the benefits, and don't assume that just because you saw it on a web site or a trade show, that the new technology is actually ready for use in the enterprise. Assume some of the responsibility for doing your own research on issues and how to resolve the inevitable problems - don't just throw it all over the wall and consider IT stupid for not instantly knowing how every SW/HW in the universe works. When you do find problems (and you will) consider that perhaps this new technology may not be perfect, it may not work as advertised or it may simply be the wrong solution - and instead of blaming IT for the situation - admit it's not working and work with IT to get rid of it.
Or, just keep being a complete dick and and see how that works for you...
You must be that same age as me! I had Clackers and Sizzlers - loved them both - but I used my clackers as a sort of bolos weapon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolas) - I used to fling them at posts, poles, small trees and occasionally the dog.
Sizzlers rocked!! I took mine apart and taped a 9-volt battery to the roof and wired it to the motor. That made them go like a bat out of hell!
I really hope you have good categories for your tickets. One of the things the business never understands (or refuses to understand) is that a significant number of the tickets should NOT be used as a metric to indicate there is a problem with the IT systems. If someone calls you because they need access to a shared folder, that's not an IT "issue" - it's a user request. Yes, they all take your time, and they need to be counted to show the total workload - but those types of tickets should not be used by the business to say "there's too many IT issues - you suck". Of course, there are many other types of tickets that should be categorized separately from real "issues" - including user training issues, password issues, client SW requests, etc. Just because you track it as a ticket doesn't mean it's a "problem".
Also: If there are lots of "easy" things you do that are not tracked as tickets - then you're hosed. Without metrics to back-up your claim that you spend XX% of your time talking to users, you have nothing.
Anyone that uses OC as their primary implementation partner is an idiot. None of the dozen or more Oracle sales reps I know recommend OC to their customers because they know the deal will go bad.
You provide several examples that support my point. EDI was created to make it easier for B2B transactions to happen. In theory, any commercial software with the ability to send/receive the standard EDI messages should be able work together. Unfortunately, EDI "standards" are anything but "standard" - and the result is that companies who should be able to easily do business with each other are forced to hire developers to write custom EDI integrations. The fault is in the implementation, not the concept.
I never said "one size fits all" - I said that companies often don't even try to understand how they can modify their processes to fit commercially available software. You mentioned UPS. I worked at a national company that had delivery trucks traveling all over the country from local depots. They wanted the internal IT department to build a custom application to optimize their routes. This is madness - as you correctly point out, there are much larger companies who have spent millions of dollars tackling this problem. There is no need to reinvent the wheel when you can leverage the work done by others. God bless the innovators who do it first - but the companies who come after them are foolish if they do not use what came before them. Know your market and your industry - building from scratch should be your last resort, not your first choice.
There is a big difference between developing a new, more efficient process for creating your product, and creating the SW to run your company's backoffice. If you can truly show that a new process results in ROI for your company, fine - have at it. I am willing to bet that if Henry Ford had been able to purchase an assembly line that provided him 90% of the capability with much less investment, he would have contracted for the work to be done. Henry Ford was driven by cost reduction, not the belief that his business was "different".
You need to decide what business you want your company to be in - if you want to be a SW development company, fine - be a SW house. However, if you want to be anything else, then don't write your own SW. Keep your business focused on what you really do. You don't want to spend resources tracking, designing and coding the annual changes to the tax code, or all the deprecated functions in your chosen framework or the latest trends in user interface design. There is no way you can do all the industry research, application design and code maintenance for the price of the annual SW maintenance, let alone match the amount of resources a large commercial SW vendor can devote to the same problem. His R&D costs are spread across all of his customers - are yours?
Oh - and lets not forget a little thing called Sarbanes-Oxley. Do you really want to prove to your auditors that you have built the same level of controls into your homegrown ERP system that are put into tier 1 or 2 commercial systems?
In the vast majority of companies, the "unique business processes" are a very small percentage of the application - and many of those are simply stubborn and egotistical business users who refuse to believe that the vanilla solution would also work just fine for them if they were just willing to try to understand it.
I subscribed to Netflix specifically to get streaming, but I was very disappointed in the movies available for streaming. I know - this is probably the fault of the studios more than Netflix - but nonetheless, after only a couple of months, I had watched everything worth watching and I was really digging to find good content. Netflix has taught me that the *number* of movies is only part of the story - because Netflix has far too much worthless crap.
The technology works fine - I'm not a video/audio snob, and I was plenty happy with the quality of streaming through my Time-Warner cable to my Blu-Ray player. Now just give me the content!!! Whoever can figure out how to deliver the best content with a flat monthly fee will win. I'm not interested in any form of pay-per-view.
*We* (slashdotters) are the techies that are enabling the marketing dweebs to do this to the internet that *we* created!! When will the technology warriors rise from the ashes of dot-com to once again take our places as the rightful rulers of the technology stack?? Fight back!! Were it not for our own weaknesses, the idiots in marketing would still be off creating the next print ad to be included in the Sunday paper, and we would have all of that precious bandwidth for ourselves.
...Management will blame their internal project manager, NOT the outsourcing. To them, it is clear that the failure is in *your* ability to properly manage the activities of a resource you struggle to communicate with and who produces half the code at half the quality of your own internal team or the majority of more expensive onsite resources.
The worst case scenario is not that you must compete with the $14/hr offshore programmer - it is that you need to *manage* them!
... was combing through the new server-side SPAM filter to look for false positives and forward "legitimate" email to the rightful owners. I saw racist jokes sent between executives and their buddies, wives & girlfriends talking dirty and scheduling "play dates", job hunting employees, back-stabbing gossip and internal/external confidential information. Payroll information would have been the least of the issues...
I came to IT late - I was in engineering for 15 years before moving to IT. At 45 I was finally a senior director - now I'm 50 and my career is quickly moving in reverse. IT middle management is the first to be laid-off when the sales forecasts dip. Director level jobs are hard to find, and corporate recruiting is seriously f'd-up - if you apply for a job with a lower salary than your previous job, they won't hire you because they think you will leave at the first opportunity to make your old salary. Well duh. Who wouldn't? But in the meantime, they are getting a *more* experienced worker than they would normally get for that salary. But that isn't what they want - they want the best of all worlds - a happy little drone toiling away forever - AND - the ability to downsize you out with no thought for the work you have done for them.
My advice: Be a salesman or an accountant, not a tech worker. You will hate your job, but at least you will have a job to hate.
Don't be a sap - the company would dump you in a heartbeat if the accountants told them it was advantageous to the bottom line. But don't forget - so would the new company. So - the *real* question you should be asking yourself is: How stable is the new company? Why is there an opening, and why are they willing to pay you? Does the new company have a history of ramping up and down with their shifting sales revenue? When was their last downsizing? Just because they are "bigger" does not mean they are more stable. If you leave now, and 6 months from now the new company decides they don't need you - what will you do then? If you can live with the worst case scenario, then go for it - money in the hand is better than any company's promise.
And yes, I know how this works from experience - I was laid-off 8 months after doing exactly the same thing you are contemplating, and now I'm screwed with no opportunity to go back to my old job and (so far) no new offers. If I had considered more carefully the terrible history of the new company for ramping up and down, I think I might have stayed where I was - but I didn't!
...that the tens of thousands of people in the Oracle Sales organization have no idea what discounts are being given to all their customers. My dozen or more Oracle reps don't even know what each of them has sold me over the last 2 years. Oracle has the most dysfunctional and customer-unfriendly Sales organization in the industry. I don't want different Sales reps for Databases, ERP Apps, Hyperion, Middleware, Identity Management, etc, etc AND I don't want to be shifted around from an industry vertical account to a strategic account to a regional account to gawd knows where every 6 months. I want ONE Oracle sales rep! Is that so hard to comprehend??? Apparently, yes, it is...
Corporate IT ALWAYS prefers taking electronic delivery of software so that they avoid sales tax charged when receiving physical media. We haven't received physical media for *anything* (including gigabytes of ERP software) in years.
... You will come back here crying that you are stuck in a developer's role and some snot-nosed newbie with an MBA is telling you what to do.
Programmers are a dime a dozen - *if* you can find a job in the USA, you will be competing directly with offshore resources that cost the company 1/3rd what you do.
You have 2 choices: 1) Make your own fortune by creating the Next Big Thing, or 2) Grow the fuck up and start thinking about what you are going to do when you are 40 years old, not what you want to do today.
Slashdot Mirror
When my son was in high school, he took an online community college course. It was a disaster. He didn't read the material, didn't do the work, and basically just blew the whole thing off. I think it's like anything else - if the kid is self-motivated, interested and wants to learn, it will work - if not, it won't.
... because no Jew would ever buy presents for their Christian friends, or vice-versa...
... is why the WTO hasn't gone after Santa for violating import/export & tariff laws, and why the AFL-CIO & the Teamsters haven't shut him down or made him disappear.
BTW, the house I grew-up in didn't have a fireplace, therefore we also didn't have a chimney. When I was a kid, I believed Santa came down our sewer system vent pipes.
... I would camouflage my ship to look like common space junk too.
I must have, I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.
... when IT departments were given unlimited resources to buy and support whatever anyone in the company wanted. You can't have it both ways - you can't consider IT as company overhead that should be squeezed for budget and headcount until they bleed *AND* also say that IT has to support any wild technology the rest of the company wants to use.
So - sure use anything you want - just don't call me for help when you want to integrate your wacky personal software with the ERP system and the data warehouse, or when the SOx auditor wants to know how your 2 TB USB drive that you have been using to store all the key business data is being backed-up.
How about this: Partner with me - give me the time, money and headcount to research the technology and how it will affect the existing systems. Take the time to understand the risks as well as the benefits, and don't assume that just because you saw it on a web site or a trade show, that the new technology is actually ready for use in the enterprise. Assume some of the responsibility for doing your own research on issues and how to resolve the inevitable problems - don't just throw it all over the wall and consider IT stupid for not instantly knowing how every SW/HW in the universe works. When you do find problems (and you will) consider that perhaps this new technology may not be perfect, it may not work as advertised or it may simply be the wrong solution - and instead of blaming IT for the situation - admit it's not working and work with IT to get rid of it.
Or, just keep being a complete dick and and see how that works for you...
You must be that same age as me! I had Clackers and Sizzlers - loved them both - but I used my clackers as a sort of bolos weapon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolas) - I used to fling them at posts, poles, small trees and occasionally the dog.
Sizzlers rocked!! I took mine apart and taped a 9-volt battery to the roof and wired it to the motor. That made them go like a bat out of hell!
I really hope you have good categories for your tickets. One of the things the business never understands (or refuses to understand) is that a significant number of the tickets should NOT be used as a metric to indicate there is a problem with the IT systems. If someone calls you because they need access to a shared folder, that's not an IT "issue" - it's a user request. Yes, they all take your time, and they need to be counted to show the total workload - but those types of tickets should not be used by the business to say "there's too many IT issues - you suck". Of course, there are many other types of tickets that should be categorized separately from real "issues" - including user training issues, password issues, client SW requests, etc. Just because you track it as a ticket doesn't mean it's a "problem".
Also: If there are lots of "easy" things you do that are not tracked as tickets - then you're hosed. Without metrics to back-up your claim that you spend XX% of your time talking to users, you have nothing.
Anyone that uses OC as their primary implementation partner is an idiot. None of the dozen or more Oracle sales reps I know recommend OC to their customers because they know the deal will go bad.
... I'll do it for half that and get the same results.
You provide several examples that support my point. EDI was created to make it easier for B2B transactions to happen. In theory, any commercial software with the ability to send/receive the standard EDI messages should be able work together. Unfortunately, EDI "standards" are anything but "standard" - and the result is that companies who should be able to easily do business with each other are forced to hire developers to write custom EDI integrations. The fault is in the implementation, not the concept.
I never said "one size fits all" - I said that companies often don't even try to understand how they can modify their processes to fit commercially available software. You mentioned UPS. I worked at a national company that had delivery trucks traveling all over the country from local depots. They wanted the internal IT department to build a custom application to optimize their routes. This is madness - as you correctly point out, there are much larger companies who have spent millions of dollars tackling this problem. There is no need to reinvent the wheel when you can leverage the work done by others. God bless the innovators who do it first - but the companies who come after them are foolish if they do not use what came before them. Know your market and your industry - building from scratch should be your last resort, not your first choice.
There is a big difference between developing a new, more efficient process for creating your product, and creating the SW to run your company's backoffice. If you can truly show that a new process results in ROI for your company, fine - have at it. I am willing to bet that if Henry Ford had been able to purchase an assembly line that provided him 90% of the capability with much less investment, he would have contracted for the work to be done. Henry Ford was driven by cost reduction, not the belief that his business was "different".
... "Acceptability" is determined by the amount of cash transferred from the the advertiser to ABP...
You need to decide what business you want your company to be in - if you want to be a SW development company, fine - be a SW house. However, if you want to be anything else, then don't write your own SW. Keep your business focused on what you really do. You don't want to spend resources tracking, designing and coding the annual changes to the tax code, or all the deprecated functions in your chosen framework or the latest trends in user interface design. There is no way you can do all the industry research, application design and code maintenance for the price of the annual SW maintenance, let alone match the amount of resources a large commercial SW vendor can devote to the same problem. His R&D costs are spread across all of his customers - are yours?
Oh - and lets not forget a little thing called Sarbanes-Oxley. Do you really want to prove to your auditors that you have built the same level of controls into your homegrown ERP system that are put into tier 1 or 2 commercial systems?
In the vast majority of companies, the "unique business processes" are a very small percentage of the application - and many of those are simply stubborn and egotistical business users who refuse to believe that the vanilla solution would also work just fine for them if they were just willing to try to understand it.
I subscribed to Netflix specifically to get streaming, but I was very disappointed in the movies available for streaming. I know - this is probably the fault of the studios more than Netflix - but nonetheless, after only a couple of months, I had watched everything worth watching and I was really digging to find good content. Netflix has taught me that the *number* of movies is only part of the story - because Netflix has far too much worthless crap.
The technology works fine - I'm not a video/audio snob, and I was plenty happy with the quality of streaming through my Time-Warner cable to my Blu-Ray player. Now just give me the content!!! Whoever can figure out how to deliver the best content with a flat monthly fee will win. I'm not interested in any form of pay-per-view.
... my tax dollars are not being used to fund this "research".
*We* (slashdotters) are the techies that are enabling the marketing dweebs to do this to the internet that *we* created!! When will the technology warriors rise from the ashes of dot-com to once again take our places as the rightful rulers of the technology stack?? Fight back!! Were it not for our own weaknesses, the idiots in marketing would still be off creating the next print ad to be included in the Sunday paper, and we would have all of that precious bandwidth for ourselves.
...Management will blame their internal project manager, NOT the outsourcing. To them, it is clear that the failure is in *your* ability to properly manage the activities of a resource you struggle to communicate with and who produces half the code at half the quality of your own internal team or the majority of more expensive onsite resources.
The worst case scenario is not that you must compete with the $14/hr offshore programmer - it is that you need to *manage* them!
... was combing through the new server-side SPAM filter to look for false positives and forward "legitimate" email to the rightful owners. I saw racist jokes sent between executives and their buddies, wives & girlfriends talking dirty and scheduling "play dates", job hunting employees, back-stabbing gossip and internal/external confidential information. Payroll information would have been the least of the issues...
I came to IT late - I was in engineering for 15 years before moving to IT. At 45 I was finally a senior director - now I'm 50 and my career is quickly moving in reverse. IT middle management is the first to be laid-off when the sales forecasts dip. Director level jobs are hard to find, and corporate recruiting is seriously f'd-up - if you apply for a job with a lower salary than your previous job, they won't hire you because they think you will leave at the first opportunity to make your old salary. Well duh. Who wouldn't? But in the meantime, they are getting a *more* experienced worker than they would normally get for that salary. But that isn't what they want - they want the best of all worlds - a happy little drone toiling away forever - AND - the ability to downsize you out with no thought for the work you have done for them.
My advice: Be a salesman or an accountant, not a tech worker. You will hate your job, but at least you will have a job to hate.
Don't be a sap - the company would dump you in a heartbeat if the accountants told them it was advantageous to the bottom line. But don't forget - so would the new company. So - the *real* question you should be asking yourself is: How stable is the new company? Why is there an opening, and why are they willing to pay you? Does the new company have a history of ramping up and down with their shifting sales revenue? When was their last downsizing? Just because they are "bigger" does not mean they are more stable. If you leave now, and 6 months from now the new company decides they don't need you - what will you do then? If you can live with the worst case scenario, then go for it - money in the hand is better than any company's promise.
And yes, I know how this works from experience - I was laid-off 8 months after doing exactly the same thing you are contemplating, and now I'm screwed with no opportunity to go back to my old job and (so far) no new offers. If I had considered more carefully the terrible history of the new company for ramping up and down, I think I might have stayed where I was - but I didn't!
...that the tens of thousands of people in the Oracle Sales organization have no idea what discounts are being given to all their customers. My dozen or more Oracle reps don't even know what each of them has sold me over the last 2 years. Oracle has the most dysfunctional and customer-unfriendly Sales organization in the industry. I don't want different Sales reps for Databases, ERP Apps, Hyperion, Middleware, Identity Management, etc, etc AND I don't want to be shifted around from an industry vertical account to a strategic account to a regional account to gawd knows where every 6 months. I want ONE Oracle sales rep! Is that so hard to comprehend??? Apparently, yes, it is...
Corporate IT ALWAYS prefers taking electronic delivery of software so that they avoid sales tax charged when receiving physical media. We haven't received physical media for *anything* (including gigabytes of ERP software) in years.
Yes - *if* their budget for the position was so low that they had no chance of getting someone with a degree.
... You will come back here crying that you are stuck in a developer's role and some snot-nosed newbie with an MBA is telling you what to do.
Programmers are a dime a dozen - *if* you can find a job in the USA, you will be competing directly with offshore resources that cost the company 1/3rd what you do.
You have 2 choices: 1) Make your own fortune by creating the Next Big Thing, or 2) Grow the fuck up and start thinking about what you are going to do when you are 40 years old, not what you want to do today.