I met an IT manager recently and had an interesting conversation with him. He’s in an organisation/line of business where the IT budget would be generous and costs would be lower when compared to private business.
We discussed various things. He talked about one particular problem he has and how he’s going out to tender for a fix. He’s using an older MS product (1 generation behind) and he needs to make it site fault tolerant. Certainly he could ease those issues by going to the current generation of the product and the next generation (probably 6 months away) will definitely fix the issue. If he goes ahead with his tender plans he’ll probably have to spend €3,000 to €7,000 per server in his architecture! It’d probably be cheaper to upgrade the product. I suggested he have a look into doing this. I didn’t care either way – we don’t sell licenses and we’re not a consulting company. He then went on a bit of a rant about never using the current generation of Microsoft products. His policy is to always stay 1 generation behind the current release.
I know someone else in his line of work about 1 hour down the road. He works in a very similar organisation. But their attitude contrasts very much. They’ve embraced the latest stuff from Microsoft (and probably from others). They aren’t doing this because their Microsoft-philes or they’ve bought into the marketing. They do it to take advantage of new solutions, fault tolerance and flexibility. They’ve studied the products and made an informed decision. This is bringing their costs down substantially, increasing their automation and probably making their service better to the “business”. I bet the staff also are enjoying the job more too.
I think we’ve all encountered organisations like this where someone there has heard of a friend of a friend, that knows someone that met a person that bumped in a guy in the pub who had a new Microsoft product that “brought the business down”. I can’t say I’ve had that experience myself. But those networks with that attitude tended to be a mess. I can think of one company I did some work in that had that attitude. I left there scared to do anything major in case it all came down around me. I left … and it all came down. I met a senior manager from there not so long ago and he admitted I was right all along.
In the first organisation above I know they had a disaster. With some forward thinking they could have avoided it. I don’t want to get into specifics here because it’ll become clear to many who I’m talking about. The point is, being more open minded towards technologies and methodologies will allow you to avoid these issues and keep costs down. Shouting “boo” at the sunrise and making declarations of “witchcraft” won’t stop the sun from rising.
Maybe this is something like IT security? You can only do so much to the iron to secure things. In the end you have to look at the meat sitting between the chair and the monitor?