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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @11:06PM
A largish university I used to work for had a very well run and competent computer services department. That department was run by people who knew computers, and who took seriously the advice they got from the people who worked there. They knew their systems well, in part because they built and/or assembled a lot of them. They did good work and were respected.
Then, faddish managers got control of the place, and started outsourcing more and more of the services. Responsibilities were poached away from computer services to other departments. Experienced staff either left or were let go, and buzzword-compliant, borderline incompetents replaced them.
Now, the old department is more or less gone, and has been replaced with a mish-mash of services that are either outsourced or scattered throughout the wider organization.
Put simply, the computer services department lost its autonomy and was broken apart. And the organization went from having a well-managed, centralized computing department to having poorly-managed, broken-up computing services.
Perhaps that is why the submitter's company is in such a bad way: the computing department lost an office-politics battle years ago, and what's left is run by non-specialists.