back to article Organisational change and IT

It is great to theorise about all the good things IT can bring. Indeed, a fortunate few have that as their jobs. Just imagine what life would be like, for example, if it were possible to provision virtual servers on the fly, or provide real-time business intelligence tools to everyone who needed them, or implement management …

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  1. James Ollerhead

    Brown Bag off

    I started to read your PDF but as soon as I saw "Brown Bag" I switched off. My lunch hour is a precious hiatus in the middle of the day where I choose to do what i want for a whole hour. You can stuff your "Brown Bag" sessions where the sun don't shine -- you have my attention and exertions for the whole of the rest of the working day, I am buggered if you are going to spoil my dinner by mithering me about work-related crap.

    In the inimitable words of Jim Royle, "Brown Bag My Arse!"

  2. Trevor Pott o_O Gold badge

    IT and the business

    I imagine the responses to "does IT consider the business implications of the technology they deploy" and "does the business consider the technology implications to their business decisions" are as many and varied as there are organisations out there. Often times you will find two or more different answers to those questions from the same organisation.

    In my case, I'm fortunate enough to be party to many of the business decisions being made, and the technological considerations are given air time before anything is set in stone. The other side of that coin is that (Nearly) any technological change must have a solid business case to it. (Including what type of change in routine will be required by the users and/or maintainers of this technology.)

    Technology exists to make our lives easier. Unless it actually meets this need, then it serves no purpose. There is no benefit to "newer for the sake of newer," "technology for the sake of technology," "well that looks cool," or "oooooooooh shiny."

    Business computing isn’t the consumer computing world. You don’t get bonus points for your brushed metal exterior, your brand name or how many glitter crystals are on your transparent windows when they minimise. The only questions that matter are “how much money can [X] make the company” or “what kind of efficiencies can [X] bring to the company such that we would then save money.”

    Problems can be solved with software, hardware or wetware. The most efficient (and profitable) businesses have no religion as to which they apply to a given situation. This agnosticism leads to picking the most efficient path for the foreseeable duration of the project. If a given problem can be done cheaper or more efficiently by throwing a human at it, then throw a human at it is exactly what you do.

    a

    There is a story in the article about a company having the jesus device of all jesus devices, and the company that decides to implement it only implementing a fraction of the features. I agree this happens all the time, but I find it hard to see this as a bad thing. Your new shiny router might be able to fling bits, write Shakespeare and do a pole dance all while making me tea and crumpets but if I have to rip up my entire network design in order to integrate all this new whizz-bangery then I start asking some very hard and pointed return-on-investment questions, as well as doing implementation cost studies.

    At the end of the day, whether it is software, hardware or wetware the only singular thing that matters is TCO. (And true TCO calculations are /complex/.)

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Brown Bag II

    Not only that - but if you're want to use people's brains and get the best from them - downtime is important.

    things like brown bags/working lunches are the product of our rather masochistic assertion that the number hours worked directly correlates to effectiveness.

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