IT Leaders Aren't Getting Listened to, and Now They're Ready to Walk Away:
It's not just software developers that companies risk losing: a survey of more than 500 US IT leaders suggests that 58% are actively looking for a new role because they aren't being listened to in company decision-making.
[...] For instance, the report found that non-IT departments have the final say when it comes to decisions around purchasing apps and IT software for the company (54%), facilitating IT audits (52%), purchasing devices (45%) and hiring tech talent (48%).
Tech decision-makers also feel unappreciated by senior company leadership in the transition to remote and hybrid working models: 81% of IT decision-makers felt that they should have had more support from their employer over the last two years. Likewise, more than half (56%) of IT leaders said they felt less loyalty to their employer than they did two years ago.
Vijay Sundaram, chief strategy officer of Zoho Corporation, said even though IT teams have been "indispensable to business innovation and continuity" in recent years, senior management continue to overlook their input in larger business decisions.
This is despite the fact that 88% of respondents believe IT is more responsible for business innovation than ever before, while 85% agree IT could drive even greater innovation in the business if they had a stronger leadership position.
Sundaram noted that the role of IT within organizations would become increasingly important as hybrid working and decentralized teams became mainstream. Indeed, 99% of survey respondents said their organization had already moved to a hybrid model. "This will require the expertise and involvement of ITDMs to identify appropriate technologies and meet corporate guidelines in areas like compliance, privacy and security," he added.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 25 2022, @09:36AM (3 children)
The article needs to start out with what the investigators mean by "IT" and more importantly by which metric(s) they use to determine "innovation" in their unlinked-to survey. Those key terms are left undefined and each reader will end up defining them in different ways using their unique imagination. A link from the article to the survey would have helped, too.
Despite the vagaries if they're still talking about buying software in 2022, then no wonder these employees are not listened to. They shouldn't even be employed if that's how they roll. It's not the 1980s any more. It's quite feasible to hire or contract talent (and contribute financially) for Free and Open Source Software and thus own the technology not just rent temporary access. The same goes for the knowledge brought in-house to manage or develop such systems, and financial contributions to projects buy attention not just good will. Anyway, FOSS systems are not just for servers and routers any more. As I am wont to go on and on about, moving to FOSS on the desktop would be a strong mitigation for the tsunami of ransomware currently washing over government, business, and academia. Even partial solutions like OpenZFS on some FOSS operating system on the server would reduce the damage that any remaining Windoze desktops could do in a work environment. So that's what the article should have mentioned at least in passing.
Zoho Corporation ostensibly makes web-based tools. That is to say they use javascript to treat your computer's browser like a virtual machine to run dodgy code of unknown provenance on your machine at each click. Yet, even so, since they are web-based their tools ought to run just fine in the web browser regardless of host operating system on the client. But mention of platform independence would lead to a discussion of vendor-lockin and what it is and why and how to avoid it. That would lead to approaches like open standards and open formats. Which would lead to questions of hosting, which would lead to discussions that would lead away from Zoho and their business model.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Tuesday October 25 2022, @01:48PM (1 child)
FOSS is simply not an option if you want a competitive engineering or manufacturing company. There is NO FOSS that is comparable or competitive to professional grade proprietary CAD or CAM software, not even close, and to develop it would require an investment of quite literally billions of dollars, with a "B", based on the cost of development of existing professional solutions.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 26 2022, @03:55PM
I don't even think there is a FOSS offering in my particular Environmental Health & Safety Compliance niche.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 25 2022, @02:41PM
You sure you haven't got that backwards? As the IT guy, I am the one pushing for open source, and avoiding vendor lock in is just one reason why, albeit a big one. Management wants IT problems to just go away, they don't care about the details, but they're believers in the sophistry that "you get what you pay for" (YGWYPF), suckers for FUD especially the prospect of being stuck with a big complicated system and no Uncle Bill or other authority to run to for help should it break, and many even have a sort of capitalist religion that blends YGWYPF, FUD, and ownership thinking. Yes, some do see the logical extension of open source thinking as a threat to their world view and their own business model. You talk as if the IT department is selling the proprietary junk and management is the enlightened group.
Perhaps you're talking about the SaaS kind of IT organization. That's a big way it's not the 1990s any more. Those dirtbags have a dozen different ways to lock you in. Some years ago, some big ISPs quietly blocked ports, so that, for instance, the home Internet user could no longer host a public web site. When you ask them what changed, they play stupid, insisting that nothing has changed or trying to divert down a rabbit hole in which they talk about all these supposed improvements to the service that have nothing to do with why your web site is suddenly invisible. Now it's run a web server all you want, no one outside your LAN will be able to see it. And, maybe, you don't want to do that now anyway, thanks to a variety of other factors, such as, the MAFIAA sniffing around looking for piracy. Wouldn't do to have a web site announcing who you are, now that one of the main defenses against piracy accusations is that they can't tie an IP address to a name without ISP help. But if your web site gives that info away, the MAFIAA won't need ISP help to nail you. A simpler, more technical issue is that service is very asymmetrical, with download speeds far greater than upload. If your website is the least bit popular, a single server on a home ISP connection is utterly inadequate for the potential traffic. There's little practical choice but to leap into the too warm and tight embrace of a hosting service. I particularly dislike obfuscated WordPress systems that make it too hard for the web site owner to back up their own website themselves. They can't stop you from keeping copies of the content, but there's a lot of system stuff you can't so easily save, such as, the javascript that runs a banner. Scale up a little more, and maybe you're back on your own hardware rather than renting cloud resources, but now, you're renting space in a server farm. And you're looking at such things as remote power cycling, so that an IT person doesn't have to physically travel to the server farm and go through their security check points just to flip a red switch whenever someone borks a server so badly that has to be done.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 25 2022, @09:59AM (3 children)
Recently, our IT department was feeling overwhelmed so they declared a "service configuration freeze" until they could get their shit together, took a couple months. Now the last three weeks of every quarter are "IT freeze" where anything to do with services configuration change is responded to with "we won't be working on your request until the first of next month."
It already took them six weeks to figure out the simplest of services, now that's boosted to 9 if you cross one of these quarter end dead zones. I suppose it's partly because I don't ask for "emergency high priority service," but come on...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ox0000 on Tuesday October 25 2022, @10:44AM (1 child)
Legit question: what is it exactly that your IT department does? Based on your description, it sounds like they are very much operating in a "pets, not cattle" mode (and I'm not saying that's inherently bad since I don't know the industry your org is in and thus don't know any regulations/compliance reqs/..., it's just an observation).
I'm not trying to slam them at all and am genuinely interested in hearing why they need or how they can justify that freeze. Is it fair to assume that releases/deploys of (new version of) new software are "a special thing" that's risky? How much automation do they do, should they do, can they do?
Again, the above are questions out of genuine curiosity...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 25 2022, @11:36AM
They do a lot of different things, 100k employees distributed globally.
My two recent needs have been a laptop refresh, my old one worked fine for me but they like to replace them every three years so they don't end up supporting old hardware in the field, mine was over four years old, so to keep them happy... Due to me requesting a RAM upgrade to 32GB that took over 6 weeks to process... Then, in 2016 I had them setup a VM for our department to use, now we want to expand its role and need to expand its disk space from 500GB to 1.5TB, that is still in progress, took them 3 weeks to understand the request, and now we are in quarter end freeze for another 3.
Part of the problem is globalization, in 2016 our local guys setup the VM, now they don't do that kind of thing anymore and my request is being serviced by a pool operating mostly out of India. The laptop was handled locally, but for whatever reason our local IT crew can't order 16GB RAM sticks, so I had to do that for them (through very specific purchasing channels) then hand deliver the RAM to their desk. I suspect their counterparts around the globe are equally impaired in various aspects of getting the job done.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by jb on Wednesday October 26 2022, @02:07AM
IT freeze? Is that what happens when you turn the CRAC up too high?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Tuesday October 25 2022, @10:14AM (18 children)
> decisions around purchasing apps and IT software for the company
Well, at the end of the day the users are the ones who have to use the product so it is entirely correct that they should, at the end, decide on which product they have to use. It is surprising to me that 46 % of organisations give IT department the final say - perhaps right of veto would be appropriate for the situation where something is not technically feasible.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 25 2022, @10:41AM (5 children)
For questions of technical feasibility or inordinate amounts of configuration and maintenance support, I would agree that IT should have some kind of veto power in the form of: purchasing this product as X proposes will require Y additional IT headcount at an annual cost of Z to be billed to X.
Otherwise: the users should have first and last say about what software they want to use.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2022, @10:47AM
Can you come and talk to my organization? I have to deal with "Enterprise Architects" who love their fancy ivory tower from which they can edict and oracle (as in the Pythia, not the Ellison, kind) all over the place with seeming impunity because no-one understands what an EA does or is supposed to do.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 25 2022, @11:05AM (3 children)
Otherwise: the users should have first and last say about what software they want to use.
Indeed. A lot of the trouble comes from an inversion of that, where the group which uses the name "IT Department" has little to do with actual information technology and even less to do with finding, evaluating, and deploying tools to actually help people get their jobs done more effectively and more easily [dilbert.com]. The concept and the name have both become jokes and instead we have the tail wagging the dog. These computers are supposed to be tools to get a real job done, not for make-work [vox.com] or as a self-serving end in itself.
We very quickly lost this vision from 30 years ago, but during the brief time society embraced it, great things got done. Now there are tiny pockets here and there where advancement can occur, but only for a brief while, until detected and squashed. If society had taken a different path, one where computers were used as force multipliers for human skill and effort and the money which is now burned off as "profit" were actually reinvested into the companies, then we'd probably have our flying cars by now. Perhaps they'd even fold into a briefcase size between trips. Or fusion, or room temperature superconductors, or cures for common ailments.
Ok. Back to Earth now.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 25 2022, @12:58PM (2 children)
Something missing from that bicycle analysis was: the cost of building the infrastructure for the bicycle to run on. I'm sure the "blew the Condor away" numbers came from glassy smooth pavement or a close approximation thereof. Efficiency would go down considerably on a rutted road, further in an inhospitable terrain with no road at all.
Some IT projects that have been pushed our way are akin to hoisting the bicycle on your back and carrying it through the woods, occasionally having to disassemble the bicycle so it can fit between the trees, then reassemble it on the other side lest you lose some parts, with a detour to get the tools for disassembly and reassembly.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 25 2022, @06:17PM (1 child)
Yes, there is the risk that a lot of externalities are ignored. It costs both to establish and maintain infrastructure. The amount invested (or not) in cycling infrastructure varies a lot by country. While looking it up I got distracted by rail instead.
Jobs did not mention rail but I am pretty sure that rail tops it all, even counting the costs of building out the rail network [cbo.gov]. Trains are four times more efficient than trucks, moving one ton of freight 470 miles on just a single gallon of diesel fuel [dot.gov]. Trucking, in contrast generally does not include road repair and maintenance in their costs, especially with bridges, at least not to the full extent, since they pay a subsidized rate in road tax. Nor do trucks generally count the cost of the traffic congestion or the road accidents they cause.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 25 2022, @08:02PM
You forgot shipping by water... ultra low infrastructure costs for long distances, cargo capacities that absolutely dwarf train capacities...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 25 2022, @10:53AM (8 children)
Counterpoint: The users (or more precisely, their managers) know approximately nothing about software, and it makes it really easy for them to be flim-flammed into the latest utter crapware and vaporware. So if they get sold on something expensive and bad, and the IT team says, in short, "it's a crock, don't buy it", and then they buy it anyways and IT gets blamed for it not working, you can see why the IT team might have a problem with that.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 25 2022, @11:12AM (1 child)
Counterpoint: The users (or more precisely, their managers) know approximately nothing about software, and it makes it really easy for them to be flim-flammed into the latest utter crapware and vaporware. So if they get sold on something expensive and bad, and the IT team says, in short, "it's a crock, don't buy it", and then they buy it anyways and IT gets blamed for it not working, you can see why the IT team might have a problem with that.
It may have been like that 30 years ago. However, in recent years it is the group calling itself the "IT Department" which falls for expensive boondoggles and forces their deployment over the objections of those actually working.
I'm not sure what it would take to rid the market of the microsofters pushing broken hokum in the place of working tools. In a way the BYOD push was an attempt at getting back to using computers as effective tools. However, that only took the pushback off of the microsofters thus allowing them to destroy what was left of institutional infrastructure. It's a rare business or school which has escaped. One way out might be the zero trust model, if it leads back to using standard APIs and open protocols and formats.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2022, @12:46PM
FTFY
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday October 25 2022, @11:56AM (1 child)
Let's go farther, since we are talking about the upper levels of companies. Non-technical managers get wined and dined and taken golfing. Then they come back and say "We're going to go with XXX". It has nothing to do with any sort of requirements analysis and everything to do with the quality of the escort they met up with after golfing.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 25 2022, @12:30PM
>everything to do with the quality of the escort they met up with after golfing.
If your company is big enough, IT management also gets the special attention of sales. My neighbor used to do sales for Microsoft, seven and eight figure site license stuff. The attention paid to decision makers on those kind of deals is the same, regardless of their title, what matters is their influence in the final call.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 25 2022, @12:26PM (1 child)
Just because they work in IT doesn't mean they are immune to sales brainwashing.
We were told, from the top, to use a certain project management system for standardization across the company. Unfortunately the IT boffins who ran this system didn't know how to scale it for multi site deployment and what was a snappy useful system turned into a laggy crashing POS that was therefore unusable for the level of detail required to track software development, so the software team went rogue and deployed Team Foundation Server for the software program management. Several YEARS later they worked out how to deploy the chosen project management package across multiple sites with good performance, but it is still centrally administrated and changes that take a day or less to implement on our (now named) Dev Ops instance take months on the Corporate approved project management platform.
Point being: you can deploy good software poorly, and poor software goodly (sic). If your IT guys are supporting the deployment, you will want buy in from them before proceeding.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 25 2022, @03:30PM
Of course they aren't completely immune, but the senior-level people at least are probably going to know which questions to ask and which answers to not like.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Tuesday October 25 2022, @02:32PM
Or perhaps it works fine but half the data is in the cloud and half local such that a proper backup is nigh impossible. It works well until it doesn't work at all and there's nothing IT can do about it. Somehow, even though they predicted exactly what happened before the PO was signed, it becomes their fault.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday October 25 2022, @05:54PM
Yup. My boss likes to call it "if we can't be in on the takeoff, don't blame us for the crash landing."
A few years back my company bought in to a new manufacturing data collection package to replace the ancient but functional system. They didn't consult with us until after the check was signed. It mostly works, but it's kludgy as hell and an absolute nightmare for backend maintenance. With my semi-educated eye it looks like it was a standalone DOS program that was incompetently shoehorned into a client-server setup. Their support isn't the greatest either, though I suspect that is more because of the inexperience of who they have left to deal with it.
The old system was at least a lot simpler to administer, and their support was top-notch. *sigh*
Answer now is don't give in; aim for a new tomorrow.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday October 25 2022, @01:23PM
Yes/No. It's unreasonable to expect the end users to understand the attack surfaces their desired programs present. But if you want (or need) to minimize your vulnerabilities, you need to control that. (That said, the IT departments themselves have made a lot of really poor decisions in that area.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Tuesday October 25 2022, @05:21PM (1 child)
At the end of the day, the admins are the ones that have to make sure the product is working AND they get the blame if it isn't.
Force me to support a crappy product that you bought because the vendor took you golfing and you watch me walk out and tell you to maintain your crap yourself.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday October 25 2022, @06:06PM
Bricks have a very small attack surface, are cheap and very easy to maintain. Unfortunately functionality is somewhat limited.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JustNiz on Tuesday October 25 2022, @04:45PM (1 child)
In many companies the IT group is little more than just a Windows PC and network support team, but their admin access gives them significant power that they frequently use as a mechanism to empire build, usually to a point where they are no longer working as a support structure for the company's primary activity, but are the ones who are attempting to redefine it even though they have no clue.
(Score: 2) by jb on Wednesday October 26 2022, @02:10AM
Indeed. If they did any actual computing (as opposed to just using what other have built & rented to them), it'd probably be called a computing department instead.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by srobert on Wednesday October 26 2022, @04:29AM (1 child)
"more than half (56%) of IT leaders said they felt less loyalty to their employer than they did two years ago."
I'm surprised anybody feels any loyalty to his employer. My employer pays me pretty well. If they ever stop doing that, they'll find out that I have zero loyalty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2022, @12:52PM
That's ok, 98% of non-IT leaders say they have no loyalty at all to the IT staff that keeps their company in business and think that any IT cog can be replaced with a simple "Indeed" help wanted ad.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 26 2022, @03:53PM (2 children)
Whoo boy this whole thread is a really good example of everybody blaming everybody else for their problems!
Have we considered that maybe users have a useful and valid perspective and ALSO that the IT people have a useful and valid perspective and that NEITHER are going to get 100% of what they want because compromise is necessary in the real world?
Nah, fuckit! TEAM IT!!!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2022, @04:05PM (1 child)
The users are just cattle.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 26 2022, @04:20PM
Wrong. They are experts in a domain that you are ignorant of.
Being good at computers does not automatically make you good at everything else.