Companies who don't fully utilize technology.

msteinhilber

I'd like to lay out a scenario that's been bugging me for a while, nearly since I took the job a couple years back. Some brief history on the company is it's a mid-sized company with 40 offices, around 1200 users. Three people in the IT department, nothing gets out-sourced so we're taking care of all of the technology demands from basic PC repairs to network issues (mostly Cisco and HP gear) and phones.

My rant:

We get so busy we can't keep up with anything even in the slow times like we are in now. If a big issue crops up (we've had a rash of server failures lately) then we are totally hosed for a day or two dealing with that and everything else gets even further behind. Because this has been going on since well before I replaced one of the 3 of us in IT, they run things as simple as possible. By that I mean each office is independent from one another with no communication to the others, even though many of our users travel between offices - they are just expected to carry files on a flash drive if needed. As such they are only setup for printers for their main office, unless they travel back and forth to a few often then we setup other printers as well. Each office has one big file share for everybody so I am often hunting down a users folder that another user accidentally dragged to a different folder, or perhaps somebody accidentally deletes somebody elses files. There is no use of group policy or anything to hinder people from treating office workstations as their own and loading up programs and generally causing problems.

I could go on forever really, but the ultimate point is that end user productivity is definitely being impaired in several ways, and I don't agree that this "simple" setup as our department calls it is easier to manage - it's harder because we spend so much more time dealing with issues that should never become issues.

Has anybody else been in this situation? How have you handled it? I have very open communication with my boss as I consider him a friend, but I can only seem to get as far as him agreeing that it would be more beneficial to set it up the way it should be but when it comes time to acting out and following through it never happens. I think part of the issue is everybody is tired of feeling well overworked and very much under appreciated. It doesn't help that the only fulltime person in our department is my boss, and myself and the other guy were cut down to 4 day weeks to cut costs, so that has morale pretty much tanked. I'm also partly annoyed with this because a lot of the studying I've been doing over the years is kind of going to waste since we don't really use it like we should and instead are basically setup like a simple home file/print sever setup.

Any ideas how I can get everybody onboard with making things right?

the_Grinch

My suggestion is that since he isn't listening to reason and good practice that you try it with a couple of your real problem users. Say one user calls 6 times a week, switch them to good practice, and then show that the calls are less. I don't see a whole lot of options, but I'm now experienced so perhaps one of the many people on here could really help you!

skrpune

honestly, until there is some major MAJOR issue that was easily preventable by instituting proper practices & using the technology for what it's meant for, things are probably not going to change. I've been in offices where there have been major antivirus infections and lost files and bad network performance because folks are using internet radio and and and...but they still don't make use of policies to centralize control or keep folks from having too much control over their individual workstations. I just don't get it. At one job, I was always looked at like I was a whackjob because I tried to institute policies that *gasp* made sense and used the tools we had, but I could get no one to follow them because I wasn't allowed to actually create or enforce the policies/permissions.

Meh, you do what you can to educate people about the consequences of not following proper practices, but in all seriousness, you may have to wait until there is a major catastrophe in order for them to really listen up.

blargoe

skrpune wrote: »

Meh, you do what you can to educate people about the consequences of not following proper practices, but in all seriousness, you may have to wait until there is a major catastrophe in order for them to really listen up.

Unfortunately, this is too often the case. Last two places I have worked didn't buy into locking down workstations from users until we had a major outbreak caused by such practices.

My current job had some similar types of situations, but we've been allowed to remedy them and things are much smoother these days.

msteinhilber

skrpune wrote: »

Meh, you do what you can to educate people about the consequences of not following proper practices, but in all seriousness, you may have to wait until there is a major catastrophe in order for them to really listen up.

That's the most frustrating issue, I wouldn't say we've had any major catastrophe, but some of the minor problems we have related to the lack of security can have a significant impact. This is a company with a lot of independent contractors, and many of them do not have their own computer so they use one of our workstations. Even having just one workstation down can cause problems for a good number of users as they are trying to get contracts out and there isn't a computer available. Just the other day another person had been working on a spreadsheet and put in several hours of work - the next morning it was gone and it had not been backed up yet. We were able to recover it through some data recovery software but by time we had it, it was well overdue and of no use to the user anymore since they had to recreate it. So there are definitely issues occurring that are causing problems for both the users and us in IT, but nobody seems to care.

Malware is one of the big issues now, it's not uncommon to get anywhere from 3-5 PC's a week with malware issues. Since we don't follow best practices, and all user data for the computer is stored on a local profile, we spent a fair amount of time backing up data, wiping and reloading the machine and restoring data. Doing that 3 to 5 times a week is a significant amount of work when it's just a 3 man shop.

I think the only way it's going to get done right is if I do it, and I'm sure I could get the go ahead - I'm just not sure I'm willing to pull it off entirely by myself. The other issue here is the other person besides me and my boss really has a "I don't care" attitude, he's not even confident IT is what he wants his career to be and it certainly shows. He has not kept up with the industry, so many things that should be a common sense thing for anybody in the industry he often has to think about long and hard to comprehend it. My concern is anything I would implement wouldn't be followed by him and he would just keep using the old ways. Incredibly frustrating, sometimes feels like with him around it's more of an inconvenience because we're cleaning up after him - that and he just comes and goes as he pleases, comes in late all the time, leaves for the most ridiculous excuses. I was excited not too long ago because he started looking for a different job, but he completely bombed the interviews. One he said they asked why he liked working in IT and he responded something like "I dunno, I like playing games and things like Madden blah blah blah" and the other he slouched through the whole thing and rested his head on his arm.

I guess I just need to focus on making myself more marketable and landing a different job

unclerico

msteinhilber wrote: »

I have very open communication with my boss as I consider him a friend

Reason #1 why I will never work with or for someone whom I consider a friend outside of shop hours. Sometimes you need move up the chain of command to get heard and if your direct supervisor is your "friend" it will end your friendship. There are basically two ways someone in IT can get the rest of the organization to listen; 1) if you know of an issue that can have legal ramifications, and 2) if you have a financial problem. In your case it's #2. I know you're overworked as it is, but you need to gather hard numbers and translate the lost productivity into real dollars. You need to take this information to the people that control the money flow and if they're smart they'll listen. Obviously spare the technical details of the problem because they won't care. Now, since you've identified the problem you MUST have the solution ready to be implemented. If there's one gripe I have about people coming to me with problems it's that they never have a solution. If your other co-workers are dead weight, get rid of 'em and hire some people that actually want to work because I guarandamtee you there are a lot of displaced IT workers just dying to get back to work.

I was working for a company a few years back that had terrible inefficiencies in their payroll process. The payroll people tried and tried again to get finance to listen to them but they just wouldn't because they thought that a new payroll system would cost them way too much money. We ended up forming a "task force" of people that participated in each phase of the payroll process. After about 1 week of long nights we were able to get in front of these same decision makers one more time. They listened. Do you know why they listened?? Because we had raw numbers to back up our claims. We found how to eliminate almost 100k of costs off the top by streamlining some of the manual processes and over the first year we were able to calculate an additional 300k of cost savings. Each additional year the cost savings would go up as the company grew and people started to earn more money. Before our presentation was over we were interrupted by one of the head finance guys telling us to get a CapEx project in line within the next week to fund an electronic payroll system.

My story and your situation are not all that different. By going to the powers that be and just saying we spend a lot of time doing x you are going to be ignored. You need to say we spend a lot of time doing x and this is how much it is costing us.