

Why Can't I Pick the Technology I Use in the Office? - grellas
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703567204574499032945309844.html

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tptacek
There are good reasons for a lot of the restrictions he's talking about (and
"virtual machine software" is not an adequate solution), but he highlights one
restriction that has no place in a modern enterprise: email storage
restrictions.

Email storage quotas are such an outrageous false economy that it's surprising
that the people suggesting them aren't drummed out of the company. It is not
hard to figure out how much 10-15 minutes of someone's time is worth; divide
their fully loaded cost by the number of work hours in a year.

Compare:

    
    
        1 minute of admin/office work @ 0.35
        1 gigabyte of disk storage @ 0.07
    

Companies should be looking for ways to shove more gigabytes down people's
throats, in the hope of getting a 30-50% _chance_ of an extra minute's
productivity.

[ _note: the math doesn't even work out at NetApp's $/g_ ]

~~~
snprbob86
Many companies offer intentionally small email quotas to encourage expiration
of messages beyond the legal data retention requirements. Should you get sued,
you don't want to reveal any more than absolutely required by law during
discovery.

~~~
tptacek
Then they should just auto-delete messages older than the retention period.

~~~
BigDamnDeal
They should do something, but I expect auto-deleting old messages would be an
even worse solution.

~~~
tptacek
If the company thinks old email puts it in legal jeopardy, why should the mail
be kept at all? I hear this excuse all the time, and "excuse" is exactly what
I think it is.

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Poiesis
I completely sympathize with this viewpoint. That said, I've been on the IT
support side:

1\. You have to support whatever is in use. Even users who say "you won't have
to support me" end up needing support. This may be due to user error, or a
host of other things like incompatibility with current
network/firewall/computer policies. Best case, the new app doesn't work and
the user ignores it, knowing it's unsupported. Common case, the use asks for
help anyway "just this once". Possible case: the new app actually breaks
something for other users (a quick example being generating abnormally high
net traffic).

2\. One big problem is the insistence on keeping all data in-house. This may
or may not be more secure depending on a host of things. However, Joe Random
user is not necessarily prepared to make the determination of "Is this company
a reliable repository for my company's proprietary data?" (Yes, much of
"proprietary" data isn't all that, but that's beside the point of this
argument).

There are a number of companies that I would trust with sensitive information.
Regardless, plenty of companies do banking via online portals, but reject
putting other data in the hands of third parties.

3\. Backups. This is a biggie. If I can't touch it, I can't be sure it's
backed up.

But, man--I'm a corporate wage slave and these apps I have to use are like
pulling teeth. I get that there are obstacles (see above)--but nobody seems to
be doing anything to convince people/mitigate risk. And until the guy doing
the purchasing can tell good design from bad, this isn't going to change.

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zuck
The reason is that the entity (IT department) making the technology decision
is optimizing for themselves. They will choose the product that minimizes work
for them. They are not accountable nor do they care about the user's
productivity.

Contrast this with an individual or startup, where the technology decision
maker has a vested interested in its usability.

~~~
blhack
This is a bit inflammatory...

IT departments are trying to maximize aggregate efficiency across the
organization (which includes themselves). While it might marginally increase
productivity of office staff if they're allowed to choose whatever mail client
they're used to, it is going to require a _considerable_ investment in IT
staff to support it.

Please keep in mind that an office full of programmers is absolutely _not_ the
norm. While programmers and engineers might hate the evil IT department, most
offices wouldn't be able to exist without their mean policies.

~~~
dtby
_most offices wouldn't be able to exist without their mean policies._

Man, talk about inflammatory. Offices have existed for centuries without mean
IT policies. I'm not even sure how to read your comment in such a way that it
models ANY reality.

~~~
blhack
_Offices have existed for centuries without mean IT policies._

Are you suggesting that we do away with computers in the workplace?

Unfortunately, the IT systems that people use in their offices, and the people
supporting said systems are compliments to one another.

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gamble
Corporate IT today is a microcosm for the way established corporations become
sclerotic and fail to compete with new businesses.

When you're building from scratch on a green field, it's easy to buy the most
modern and efficient technology. Most corporations didn't build out their IT
infrastructure until the early 2000s. Once you've invested in these systems,
you're stuck balancing the cost of maintenance against the short-term cost of
starting again, and the latter rarely wins.

This is why Windows XP and IE6 aren't going away anytime soon, but it's also
the reason the last few steel mills in the US are going out of business with
century-old equipment while cutting edge plants are built in south-east Asia.

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Periodic
One thing I often run into is that the financial people at our University
regularly send Excel spreadsheets to one another. There will regularly be
email chains of 3+ people that result in the same document being sent back and
forth by email 10 times in one day. And then I get complains that people are
hitting their email quota of 500MB.

The problem seems to be that you can convince individuals to switch to using a
shared folder on a server (got my department using one) but they can't seem to
make everyone switch. They've got email, it works well enough, and now it's
hard to switch.

~~~
smcq
Technology can fix this! It was never the users problem to begin with...

    
    
        MAX_ATTACH = 50 * 1024 #50 kb
    
        def minimize_size(msg):
            if size(msg['attachment']) > MAX_ATTACH:
                upload attachment to s3 like storage
                insert link into email body
            return msg
    

It obviously needs fleshed out (I bet it ends up around 20 lines of python
after everything is said and done). But seriously, the fact that your users
would ever even need to think about this is just wrong.

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loudtiger
I cannot stress how much I agree with this article. At work our corporate apps
are all IE6 only, and even new machines purchased just last month were imaged
with Windows XP. Outlook E-mail boxes were limited at 90mb. Speaking with the
IT team proved fruitless - they were not interested with catching up with the
times, or doing anything that required work on their part. As far as they were
concerned, every XP machine came with IE6, and that's all they needed to ever
support. Aggravating.

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drinian
Corporate failures to make good technology choices should not be conflated, as
they are here, with being unable to look at YouTube at work.

The fact of the matter is that 90% of office workers shouldn't be using their
office computers for general-purpose computing. They shouldn't be stifled from
taking initiative by the IT department, but neither can they be allowed to
jeopardize the electronic security of the entire organization.

In short, the real problem is that many IT departments are complete failures,
for a whole host of reasons. Duke University is the only large organization
that I have ever encountered with a really well-run IT group. Two years after
I graduated, management decided to outsource @duke.edu email to Sun. There was
a nearly week-long unscheduled outage, and many people lost their email
archives (some going back 10 years or more). (In fact, they seem to be having
another serious problem right now):
<http://it.pratt.duke.edu/aggregator/sources/1?from=60>)

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netkahuna
Yes, I am so tired of seeing this. I've been listening to this user whine
since the days of the Apple II vs the mainframe. Yes, tech advances faster
than organizations can absorb. Eventually, the organization will catch up.
Until people stop worrying about unmanageable IT costs, prevalent breaches,
and dumb users this will never change.

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BerislavLopac
The problem is not with the IT policies. They exist with a reason, because in
large systems a free-for-all approach will quickly end in chaos.

The problem lies with the large organizations. In the informational age, we
don't need large organizations,

~~~
towndrunk
Really? No large organizations. So what is the limit? Number of people?
Revenue? What?

~~~
mmt
Number of people. Specifically, Dunbar's Number, which is only theoretical but
is generally accepted to be around 150 (presumably +/- 149).

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RyanMcGreal
Reminds me of a similar argument in Slate,

<http://www.slate.com/id/2226279/>

followed by this astonishingly angry reply from an IT guy:

[http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/08/its_that_time_of_year...](http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/08/its_that_time_of_year.html)

~~~
BigDamnDeal
Wow, I rarely take Farhad Manjoo's side, but this IT guy sounds like he simply
wants to avoid doing his job.

He even ruins his excellent point – that sometimes the real enemy is the
management who set ridiculous policies for IT to execute – by calling it
insane for anyone to go over IT's head and complain to, say, the secretary of
state in a meeting held precisely for such questions.

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raheemm
I am part of an IT department and I would gladly move our 350 users to Google
Apps, Gmail, etc. Google could do more to make their products seem less
"mavericky" for the office environment. For one thing, it would be great if
there were Google certified partners, the way MS/Orable/SAP has thousands of
partners.

~~~
smhinsey
What would such a partner do?

~~~
thwarted
Collect a fee for providing a warm fuzzy for executives who claim they need
someone to call or blame when things go wrong.

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numbchuckskills
Corporate apps are another real barrier to advancement. How many SAP (and
other) apps out there work in IE6 only?

~~~
Periodic
I work at a University. Every time I have to work with one of our admins to
get something through the Oracle purchasing app I feel like I just jumped back
10 years to Windows 98 and Web 1.0. It drives me insane how many things have
to be clicked on to get a simple thing done and how it really looks like a
very thin layer over their database.

So who is going to be the innovator who can supply the enterprise apps for
10k+ employee companies that actually work?

