Cloud no cure for IT department haters

Doesnt have to be like that.

I left a large firm a few years back after being an IT Manager for several of them. I was known for getting stuff sorted, reducing noise and generally having a good relationship with my customers.

Working with them was far more fun than against and actually meeting them and seeing how they worked payed major dividends. I rarely got any hassle and work was really smooth. I hated the IT bunker mentality and avoided it at all costs. Let them know you are a decent bloke rather than an arsehole essentially.

I then tried to get a similar role in other companies. Same story over and over. I would tell the grey little middle aged senior IT director how I worked (i.e. with the customer rather than against) and how well it worked. But I could tell it terrified them as thats how they should be working and he couldnt have me putting the wind up his lazy bunch of IT managers.

Suffice to say I'm now self-employed.

Why did I leave my long terms role? I was told that as there was no IT budget left I would have to sit and say "No!" to all the folks I looked after. No fun I thought and I fancied taking a risk.

When I go back to the job hunting lark I'll just try to appear an average arsehole that doesnt appear to be a threat to anyone and happy to let others take credit. Seems thats what firms like these days.

Here's the answer...

IT rates are on the rise because after the other departments make their move to the cloud and make a right, royal, complete hash of it, the IT staff that have to sort the mess out, are then more highly valued.

Sorry but...

You speak as if all that's been migrated to "the cloud" has had a great effect on IT.

The fact is... the cloud has not been adopted enough to have a real significant impact on IT in general, especially at the SMB level...

As usual, your "cloud" article is just hype.

I hope you guys get paied well to hype it so much.

Different Planet?

In a couple of decades of IT management, I never felt hated.

Of course, the pressure could be intense when things went wrong, but mostly, the IT department was very much part of the company team.

Think of a premise: spout.

"Cloud" = same old 'trust big company'

Not so long ago, we had the old "nobody got fired for buying IBM". IT departments would hand their budgets to Big Blue and be grateful for being allowed to use a clunky mainframe, until departments went around them and bought in more flexible stuff for a fraction of the cost. You could get a dumb terminal and a tiny sliver of mainframe time, or a PC to do the same job faster and more cheaply. Eventually, out went the deadweight iron, and the IT department switched to managing the PCs.

Now we have them throwing lots of money at Novell and StorageTek-Sun-Oracle, to pile all of our data (well, all the email, most of our home directories, payroll, website...) into an enormous shiny SAN, which is dog slow and costs a bomb but can't poss - whoops, what does that red light mean, and why isn't any data going in or out? 12 hour outage until the designers (in California!) connected in remotely to fix whatever had failed inside their kit. Meanwhile, we pay £20 per Gb internally for dog-slow Netware shares with multi-month lead times - or pay a fraction of that to an off-site provider to have service in minutes with more frequent backups we can restore from instantly without paying extra.

I've always regarded our lousy email system's auto-correction of 'helpdesk' to 'helpless' as a Freudian slip. Everything has to go through them - even things far beyond their competence. Tracking, I can understand, but routing it all through the "have you try switch off, on again?" temps is just obstructionism.

"1A-E-07 is patched to the wrong VLAN, is on ..., should be on ..."

"What's a VLAN?"

"Never mind, just pass it to (name) or (name), they'll know what it means."

Increasingly, instead of having servers to babysit, I expect the central IT department will be managing the user accounts in a Google Apps instance or similar. Just like the switch to PCs, we'll be getting far more functionality for the money, with far less admin overhead - and just like that switch, first they'll be ignorant of it, then afraid of it and fight it, and finally accept it's the right way to do it after all, but of course everything needs to be controlled by them. They'll add lots of overhead and uniformity, some of which will be useful, and pretend it was all their idea in the first place.

Much like the government, I suppose, I wish they would do a lot less a lot more cheaply and reliably, while those scared of taking responsibility will want it to attempt everything because at least they won't be blamed for the mess.