Well it’s been a little while since I’be been here, mainly due to work load – bat also because I’ve been a bit hacked off with the work I’m doing. Well in truth probably more to do with the people I work with, along with the attitude that they have to the job and the way that they perceive things. So how did we get here, not that hard to see when you look at things objectively.
I recently attended an IT team get together in Europe and came away feeling shocked and bewildered, not just by the attitude of the people but also the lack of clear objectives for the whole IT department. A classic incident that came to light recently was just plain careless, a minor infrastructure upgrade of a few laptops has turned into a major logistical nightmare – consuming hugely inappropriate resource and alienating some of the users. How did this happen, well the age old issues – lack of planning, lack of management and no clear objectives.
Just to show how easy it can go Pear shaped, there was an IT person in Europe – partly for induction and partly to agree a standard build for the UK laptops that will be ordered in bulk and delivered to the European head office where they would be prepared to a defined standard. Well all that I can say is they delivered them to the correct place! They have arrived in the UK fitted with a mixture of UK, US, French and German keyboards. The wrong or no software, under specified and not fit for purpose.
In general the whole exercise has been one in futility, with no sign that anything has been learned from it. Even the users have been put off by the experience, not the most auspicious of starts I would say. However when you hear the IT director tell the whole IT team of a manufacturing and design team that the most important server in the company is the email server – you have to worry. It would be nice to hear the customers that we deliver the crypto products to agree – but somehow I don’t think they would.