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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 WildWombat on Wednesday February 19 2014, @11:47PM
There are a ton of different reasons that IT is often so poorly done. I think the main one is that IT isn't looked at as being vital, as being a core part of what a company needs to do well in order to succeed. This leads to it being viewed as nothing but a cost center to the people who make the spending decisions.
To do IT well I think you need to following to be true:
* The leadership of the company needs to value IT. They don't just need to be willing to spend money, they need to understand the role it plays in their organization.
* They also have to be willing to spend the money.
* The CTO needs to be competent, not the CEO's cousin's son but someone who Knows Their Shit.
* It needs to be in house to the largest degree possible. If you need to buy generic software like an office suite or your OS from other companies, sure, but if an important part of what your company does is tied to some proprietary software package you're probably not going to be able to customize things and streamline them as much as needed. If you based your software on open products or just rolled your own you have the opportunity to streamline and make things more efficient.
For example: Restaurants. You look at a restaurant and you don't think "IT", you think chefs. But IT is vital to restaurants. I've worked at some in the past so I'll share some specifics. Next time you go watch how much time your server spends at one of the POS terminals entering orders and dealing with payments. Its a pretty significant fraction of the time. Those systems are pretty much universally wretched lowest bid turnkey solutions that someone did the bare minimum amount of work to customize for that restaurant. Better POS systems could significantly decrease the number of mistakes made and decrease the amount of time it takes to enter the orders, but since the people in charge don't value IT and don't understand how it can be used to make things more efficient, it doesn't happen. Even if management sees a problem or an opportunity they often can't do anything about it because the POS software, which is pretty much a core part of what they do (taking orders, processing payments), isn't in house. Its all off the shelf and they don't control it. Oh, and have you ever been at a busy restaurant when their POS system crashes? Pandemonium and lots of pissed off customers but the system still isn't seen 'core'.
I think that is why IT is almost universally done so poorly, its just undervalued. I think that things will improve in the long term as companies who do it well succeed and the ones that don't fall by the wayside. Just my thoughts.
Cheers,
-WW