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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: 3, Informative) by brocksampson on Thursday February 20 2014, @02:20AM
I have worked at universities in North America and Europe, large and small, private and public, obscenely rich and threadbare. In every instance in which the department takes control over their own IT, we get excellent infrastructure. Since, say, the chemistry department doesn't need to interface with the philosophy department, or even another university, a skeleton crew of competent hackers can keep things running smoothly. At my current university, in which IT is centralized (because the university board things we're a corporation), our "work stations" are just now being updated to Windows 7 from XP. For the vast majority of us who have been running other, more modern operating systems than XP, they now offer a Citrix interface instead of using open protocols. Thus, with the upgrade, I've lost Webdav access to our network storage; use the Citrix client, they say.
At the universities with departmental level IT management, we are still forced to interface with the mighty bureaucracies that fund our research. Many American funding agencies demand that we use absolutely ancient, proprietary software to submit proposals... we're talking stuff that was written to replace the old snail mail system and then never updated. It is a huge time sync and many departments have full-time staff whose job it is to interface with external bureaucracies because you have to be an expert in this terrible software to do anything. The EU, for whatever reason, is much smarter and migrated to web platforms ages ago. But even that is complicated enough that they offer courses in Brussels on how to use the latest version (they're always rolling out new versions, probably to justify their budgets).
Point being, it has nothing to do with being a tech company or a university; the larger the scope of the IT infrastructure, the more inertia it has and the more difficult and expensive it is to make minor changes. As a tech savvy end user it is infuriating to witness and to be forced to interact with it. But I'm also sympathetic. We have some software running in the lab that I wrote 10 years ago. Everyone is terrified to touch it because hours spent fixing it are hours not spent doing research. Thus, we maintain outdated versions of software (in virtual machines) basically out of fear and laziness.