What Would You Demand From Your IT Department? 671
ZombieLine asks: "The IT department at my company (approximately some 500 people) is showing signs of incompetence, and has been ignoring knowledgeable user input for about a year. Additionally, they haven't been able to sell needed changes to senior management. Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice. We users are staging a revolt to make IT more responsive to users by creating a group from the company divisions and IT to discuss needs and solutions. What would you put in our charter?" What services and responsibilities would you demand out of your IT department?
What would you demand from your IT users? (Score:5, Funny)
3 easy steps (Score:3, Funny)
Step 2: Unleash the bofh into the IT department
Step 3: Rightly cower in fear and reverence of the new effective (and renamed!) Network & Systems department.
A piece of the action (Score:2, Funny)
Incompetence? Check.
Ignoring front-line workers? Check.
Stretching resources until savings are overwhlemed by resulting inefficiencies? Check.
Don't complain -- your company sounds like it's ready to go public!
If you're writing a charter (cute!), just be sure to ask for some preferred stock options or a pre-IPO allocation from the underwriter. If you don't know what those are, just ask the IT department, they are clearly up to speed.
Not on tech, of course. More important stuff!
Masturbation. (Score:0, Funny)
wait... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What would you demand from your IT users? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Have you thought about... (Score:2, Funny)
Raymond M. Simms
(Washington DC, USA)
Nickname: raymondsimms
Shipping Address: Raymond Simms - Alexandria, VA
Sorry Raymond. E-mail address + Amazon = Wish List.
You can try it out for yourself: http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/search.html/?ty
What's the moral of the story?
Don't use your regular e-address when posting to slashdot.
Re:Have you thought about... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What would you demand from your IT users? (Score:2, Funny)
That depends. Is death by roundhouse kick acceptable?
I Demand LARTs! (Score:2, Funny)
Oblig. Jackie Brown Quote (Score:3, Funny)
Incompetent... (Score:4, Funny)
The IT department at my company is incompetent. But I work for the goverment, so I guess that's to be expected.
Re:From the non-tech perspective (Score:1, Funny)
For those of you who talk about what HIPAA is, please start by using the correct acronym.
Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
Re:What are we starting with? (Score:3, Funny)
I don't know your situation...
Dude, hang up your hat and start gardening, if you can't diagnose that they're running Exchange from that description, you're either very lucky and have never had to deal with Exchange, or shouldn't be posting at
The best way to lose your job... (Score:1, Funny)
I worked for a small place a few years back as their developer/net admin/engineer etc etc. Had a guy lodge a formal complaint that I was unhelpful (he was a serial pest. The only problem with his machine was between the chair and keyboard). It motivated me to notice the amount of time he spent on the internet, for personal, completely non work related use. I felt it was my duty to report this, in accordance with company policy. He was gone shortly after the proxy logs were produced.
They should work as a team (Score:3, Funny)
I even love saying the word team. You probably think I have a picture of my family on my desk - it's not. It's the A-Team. Bodie, Doyle, Tiger, Jewellery Man. The whole lot of them.
Re:What would you demand from your IT users? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:From the non-tech perspective (Score:5, Funny)
(cricket sounds)
Congratulations: this is the new empty office after everyone was fired for not being able to follow this terminally assinine password policy.
Re:Knowledgeable user input? Yeah Right... (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder how the OP and these two teachers would take it if the IT guys started telling them how to do their jobs? Shoot, I've read some books about teaching, so I must know how to do it, right? I can add and subtract, and that's all you need to be an accountant, right?
Re:Oblig. Jackie Brown Quote (Score:2, Funny)
Not knocking the post, it made me laugh.
Re:*quickly* is relative (Score:5, Funny)
Get used to unexpected consequences to your decisions, if you're going to run your own business. You MUST learn to think things through - i.e. "look before you leap". You have to do it as a doctor; so just remember to do it as a boss, too.
Today we rearranged our office. Impromptu - no planning - just "do it now" and "we'll figure it out as we go". Moving one row of cubicle dividers next to the wall meant that the power, phone, and data outlets along that wall were no longer accessible and the previously used outlets became too far away. Management said "no down time" and then had to accept down time for four production workstations while someone made a Home Depot run for extension cables - which, of course, are yet another kind of mistake. (Then there was a second run, as management had forgotten that power cables are not the only kind of cables . .
We needed to move our servers over by seven feet. "What do you have to take them down for? The cables will reach. We need our productivity!" So after sending everybody home when two of our 1-TB RAID volumes stopped communicating with the server, I got an earful from management about how we employees had bungled a "simple" rearrangement of the entire office. We employees also got blamed for "our" failure to plan!
I also got an extraordinarily polite ass-chewing from a Dell server tech about trying to physically move a running server with external RAIDs - and believe me, I did make it VERY clear to management that that move was NOT a good idea! We came very close to losing about 1.5-TB of data today; despite our backups the loss would still be hurting us months from now.
Hopefully you will do better.
Re:What would you demand from your IT users? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:how to remember a secure password? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:3 months (Score:5, Funny)
28 days! Pshaw! You're just *inviting* the bad guys into your system if you follow such a lax plan.
Every day should start out with changing your passwords. You may have to hire a few more people who's job is to reset forgotten passwords, but when you have to do it constantly it shouldn't take more than a minute per person.
Of course, if the bad guys learn that everyone changes their password in the morning, it wouldn't take much effort to be in the right place at the right time and get unrestricted access to the systems for 24 hours.
So you'll want to back this up with some sort of bio-identity methods. Fingerprint identification, retina scans, and instant DNA testing.
Some people say that these aren't secure enough, that someone can get fingerprints, a DNA sample, and a picture of your retina. There is an easy solution to this if you just think about it, the daily random mutation of all your employees before they change their password and give a DNA sample.
Anything less than the method outlined above simply isn't secure.
Right On Brother Barron!!! (Score:5, Funny)
The workstations would be even easier. I'd buy everyone the $300 AMD specials with Windows XP Home. That way they'd be more familiar with the OS since they probably have XP Home at home too. Just plug them into the network and away they go. They can all get their IP address from the Linksys router like I do at home and then they're online easy as pie. Don't need to get out any stupid manuals to manage Cisco switches or anything like that. All the gobbledygook is just for elitist snobs. For restoring a PC if it gets hosed, I'd just use a copy of Ghost. Sometimes you can even get Ghost for free if you buy the right hard drive. Just hook up a laptop with Ghost to a PC using a USB cable and make an image to burn onto a DVD. The next time the PC needs to be revived, just grab the DVD from the pouch on the side of that box, pop it in the laptop and Ghost the other way around! Easy as pie and FAST too!!
In this day and age, what company with a competent IT staff does it's own e-mail? I've been trying to tell the folks in my IT department to ditch our mail server (some antiquated Unix based thing that nobody really likes) and just let everyone get Hotmail accounts. Now that GMail is around, that's an option too since they give you a pretty comfortably sized mail box as opposed to the meager offerings of the clueless IT staff. E-mail should be able to hold whatever I put into it no matter how much or how big. Period.
The voice over IP thing is easy too. Just buy a VOIP box from Linksys and get a Vonage account for every group of ten users you've got. You'll need multiple DSL lines to do it, but that would still be far cheaper than having one of those snobby PRI or T1 lines to carry your voice traffic. Speaking of which... why on earth is anyone using T1s and T3s these days? They're so costly and they don't perform anywhere near what I get on my cable modem at home. Just get cable modem and be done with it. Your users will thank you forever.
Barron, I'm glad you gave me a chance to get that out there. The users need to know the truth.
Re:What would you demand from your IT users? (Score:2, Funny)
Unfortunately no. The company I had worked for has a retarded property manager that thinks cpu's could contain proprietary company data. Once we upgraded, the old ones were destroyed . . .
I don't work there anymore, it got very uncomfortable after the old hardware fiasco and I left for another company. Just remember folks, it's not always the IT folks fault!