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Walzmyn writes:
"The company I work for is not a tech company. We are, however, a multi-national, multi-billion dollar company that claims to be the largest of our kind in three industries (and second largest in a 4th). And yet, our company network sucks. There is a mishmash of Citrix and SAP, multiple web-portals, and none of them work with each other. The several thousand non-technical people that work for this company are routinely asked to interface with this system and end up spending time with the helpdesk or with a supervisor looking over the shoulder for something that was supposed to be private.
I've heard of similar situations with other companies, so I wanted to ask the folks that live and breathe the tech sector this: Why can't a company this size get something so fundamental done right? Why can't they at least hire a third party to do it right for them?"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by drac on Wednesday February 19 2014, @10:39PM
Everything IT is sometimes (not always!) seen as a cost centre. This is especially true for corporations where the main line of business is not directly related to, as in your example, networking. So they would do whatever is needed to get the job done at that point, and nothing more. Organizations of a certain size also have to deal with tremendous amounts of inertia and cannot simply write off previous investments to harmonize their networking infrastructure (how would they cost justify this? It's a potentially huge investment that doesn't necessarily contribute to the bottom line immediately).
Problems of this nature are hardly limited to non-technical corporations though - I've worked with truly arcane and horrifying set ups in major telcos.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @10:54PM
This x1000. IT for most non-technical(and even some technical) companies are seen as a drain on the resources of the business.