Bad Applications Forced On IT Staff
from the executive-decisions dept
I’m sure this won’t come as a surprise to many folks, but many IT staffers feel that they’re being asked to install applications that suffer from serious quality problems, but which are still forced on them by management. Many of these resulted in some sort of application failure which harmed productivity and caused financial losses. Everyone’s dealt with these sorts of situations where some exec decides that the company “needs” to have currently hyped widget A, when the current system is working just fine. Even worse, of course, is when the executive is buddies with (or relatives!) with someone at company B that develops widget A. It’s the same old story. Technology is great for productivity – when implemented properly. Unfortunately, too many folks skip that last part and are just looking for the ability to say, “well, of course, we’re a widget A shop” without caring about how they use widget A or if they really need widget A.
Comments on “Bad Applications Forced On IT Staff”
cruddy software
many IT staffers feel that they’re being asked to install applications that suffer from serious quality problems
Windows comes to mind as a prime example.
Re: cruddy software
Correction: Windows is the ULTIMATE instance of
this phenomenon. The people making the decisions
are the ones LEAST qualified to do it. Hell, they
don’t care (or even know) that there are better
alternatives – they just force their crap on
everyone else.
The only comfort is that at least they PAY for the
mediocrity (not just license fees, but reduced
control, and lowered productivity).
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Yahoo Messenger.
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My company spent a huge amount of money on a Seibel server, pulled someone off other work to play with the server full-time, and still couldn’t get it to do what we needed it to do. Eventually the IT department was allowed to actually do some research and choose a better and much cheaper CRM package.
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This isn’t a surprise. EVERY IT company I’ve worked for (with my current employer the exception..which is why I’m still around) has worked this way. The CEOs and VPs buy software from salesguys who wine them and dine them and then they get IT to “legitimize and justify” the purchase and let the techs sort it out.
This was standard procedure once the small niche software company I used to work for was acquired. The CEO and VPs were all replaced by sales sharks from the US and the overwhelming directives from on high to the sales staff were (these were in many many memos):
(note that the average annual contract price until then was 15000$)
1 – if the contract is less than 500000$ you don’t return calls…ever
2 – never EVER make a sale to the IT staff..EVER. Talk to someone higher.
3 – promise whatever feature you need to and get the sale, our tech support department will handle the rest and we’ll plan it for the next upgrade.
(Being in tech support at the time, I LOVED this one…)
Needless to say, the company is out of business now, the CEO took it to its IPO, cashed in his options, made a few million and left.
As long as slimy practices like this continue, the IT climate vis-a-vis crappy software won’t change.