Well later today I’m going to be in the office, defending my position as a freelance consultant that is about to tell a business – that as far as your IT is concerned you actually don’t know whether your arse’s are punched or bored. Most people will know that this really isn’t like me. But this crowd deserve absolutely no mercy, by a long way they are one of the worst outfits that I’ve worked for.
Two weeks ago they fired (in all but actions) their only IT person, he was escorted off the premisses no more than 15 minutes after he typed his resignation letter. Now they have come back to me as the body on site, the one that is migrating everything to an other office – to see if I can help them piece together what is happening with the IT infrastructure. Oooh, that’s easy I hear some of you say – well it bloody isn’t for your information especially when you have been told that none of the standard stuff is your responsibility. I’ve got to get this done at short notice and provide a top quality service, so how does that work? Not sure? well neither am I – I could build the best of systems. I can performance tune systems that don’t work, I can even tweak systems that do work and mostly make them go faster.
Is any of the above enough, no it bloody isn’t. When you get to my age in the IT world you are generally an old fart, but I can tell you this – if I have to and have free reign – then I can make the systems sing and dance. As an example there is a small problem with the backups, actually it’s quite large there are some but there doesn’t seem to be any control over what they are – or where they are for that matter. The tapes in the library all seem to have been there for a long time, none seem to have been sent off site for a long time – probably because there are no more tapes to implement new schedules.
Given the importance of the data you would expect them to take more care of the data, but it would seem that the whole library and the schedules should be rebuilt from the bottom up. There isn’t a huge quantity of data, probably a total of 20Tb or so. But it’s incredibly valuable, the design and test data for bank cards with chip and pin and NFC cards in particular. I will resolve the problems time permitting, but it’s not what I signed up for.
When I started work 40 years ago things were different, people seemed to try to do things properly. Now people seem to think that waving the company flag will protect them, well in the line of work that I’m in I know that that’s not how it works. So later today I’ll be breaking some bad news, to a few people – none of whom will probably listen. Out will come the big flag and everything will be expected to work, it might as well be Harry Potters Wand for all the good it will do! In the Navy they trained me as a……….damned if I can remember now! Ah well an other senior moment and an other day to look forward to.