Yeah…we’re slow to adopt! What these friggin morons don’t say is that they frequently make decisions about technology by only talking to a vendor’s salesdroid and then order IT to “justify and implement” their decision.
A few years back I was working for a small dotcom that featured a VERY buggy software package…sales were small and declining until some new hotshot sales VP was hired and he spelled it out: “Don’t sell to the sysadmins…sell the CEOS”. The result? Contract prices went up (arbitrary) from 10grand to 50 or 100 (depending on the company) and sales went up through the roof!
Our helpdesk was FLOODED with angry sysadmins who basically had our package handed to them and told “I paid for this, make it work!”.
Yeah…I didn’t stay long there…but man it convinced me the evils of marketting and sales and the stupidity of upper-managment.
At my current job, its better, IT has a lot more say in what gets or doesn’t get done. The only problem is that our budget is mighty lean…so whenever a high muckety muck calls to complain because the mainframe’s slow and he can’t do the latest wizzbang thing he saw in a magazine we just tell him…”Hey, you cut our budget 20% last year and didn’t want to pay for upgrades because you felt they weren’t justified…this is what happens…you can’t have it both ways”