http://www.pcworld.com/article/223751/IT_workloads_up_as_tech_added_sans_staff.html#tk.rss_news
http://www.pcworld.com/article/223749/outsourcing_Study_Highlights_Impediments_to_Innovation.html#tk.rss_news
one is about how less people are managing more and more servers, and the other is about how outsourcing hurts innovation...both applies to my company
first link is nothing new...IT is usually one of the first departments to get cut during bad times...mainly because of a combination of high salaries (except me) and poor understanding of what IT really does by the people who make head count decisions...most people just think you push a button and everything works magically...they think any "IT person" can do anything IT related...basically, if it has electrons flowing through it, they ask the nearest IT person regardless of what that person actually does...so they cut a bunch of people without any consideration of the true impact it may have, thinking that any IT person can do the job of another
the second link is about outsourcing...outsourcing is like communism...sounds good in theory, but sucks in reality...outsourcing promises all these great services by "leveraging" their pool of thousands and thousands of IT support staff...what really happens is that based on your contract, you'll get 1 or 2 people assigned to your account per system...for example, 1 person for wintel servers, 1 for unix, 1 for network, 1 for exchange, 1 for voip, etc...they'll also probably lie to you and tell you that these people are on your account full-time, but in order to make more money, the outsourcing company will really have them split with other clients...the helpdesk is another feature that they'll tout, saying that they can provide 24/7 support...what this really translates to is someone who works for 10 bucks an hour with limited skills creating tickets without any real first call resolution...not only are they incapable of helping people, but usually their performance is based on how quickly they can hang up the call and move on to the next one than resolving the issue...this means that people calling in will not get helped and will probably end up going back to the few remaining IT people with the company and not the outsourced vendor...no efficiency or cost savings realized here...an even worse scenario is that you have non-skilled workers outsourced to places like india where language is a problem...all this because some finance idiot wants to do some accounting trickery to reduce headcount and "realize cost savings" when it really is just categorizing cost differently...they should really get rid of all finance and accounting people...why make it so difficult...money made minus money spent equals what you take home...they should also get rid of all lawyers and politicians too but that is another group of idiots who i have no respect for
what all this amounts to is that you have the few remaining IT people on the client side still doing most of the day to day operations by having to manage the outsourcing company when they should be doing a lot of the strategy/innovation stuff...therefore, there is no innovation, and IT gets farther and farther behind...spending more time "keeping the lights on" than coming up with real ways to help the company
some dilbert comics that reflect my job...dilbert is so very true
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