Daring Fireball's IT Dystopia

gregh — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 02:58:27 -0500

John Gruber, the iPhone's biggest fanboy, springboards off a WSJ article to launch another attack on corporate IT departments.

The Problem With Duke's iPhone Problem:

Ben Worthen of The Wall Street Journal:

And this is why information-technology departments always worry about employees’ bringing new technologies like the iPhone into the workplace. The conventional wisdom in IT shops is that anything that’s not standard-issue will cause unanticipated problems when it’s introduced into an existing network. The new technology may be perfectly innocent; but the network still goes down, and the IT guys have to fix it.

Translation: A lot of IT infrastructure is fragile rickety crap, and the people responsible for it aren’t smart enough to fix it so they make rules and place blame based on little more than superstition.

No, that isn't the translation. (Gruber is quick with invectives, but I've decided to chop mine out.) I've addressed this before in response to Gruber's last ill-informed rant on the topic, and nothing has changed now.

IT departments have limited resources. Limited resources result in limited staff to devote to tracking down new problems caused by new devices. Often, that staff is also tasked with new projects or tracking down even larger problems. IT departments conserve their scarce resources by standardizing. Because of this standardization, interaction with untested items may have unintended consequences, and it's not surprising that's where the finger would be pointed first.

Was it irresponsible in the case of the Duke yokel to come right out and say that there was no way it was the Cisco gear? Of course. Does that mean it couldn't possibly have been the iPhone at fault? Of course not. Is it possible for users to introduce untested hardware or software and cause networking or systems problems? Absolutely.

Those problems often aren't caused by rickety infrastructure or stupid employees, but rather by unplanned or unpredictable interactions with software or hardware that would normally have been caught in a testing process.

In fact, excluding the Duke public statements, it's not the least bit clear to me that he's given the matter any logical consideration. Duke bought equipment from a reputable vendor. Due to a previously unknown bug in that reputable vendor's software, large portions of the wireless network went down. Was it Duke IT's fault that they fell prey to a bug in the software driving a reputable vendor's product?

Given his wildly superior attitude on this topic, I'd congratulate Gruber on having apparently chosen software and hardware that is completely flawless, or at the very least is entirely self-healing. However, because he uses Macs and OS X, as do I, I know first-hand that he hasn't discovered those products.

Why shouldn't IT bow to every user request?

gregh — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:45:34 -0500

On the Daring Fireball Linked List, John Gruber posits that IT managers are more interested in controlling users than providing services.

Question for anti-iPhone IT managers like those quoted in the Wall Street Journal story yesterday: Do you see your role as serving the employees of your company, or ruling over them?

I'm not an IT manager, through I've played one on a couple of occasions in past years. However, I do work in IT and have worked in IT or IT-ish roles for the bulk of my career. This distinction between ruling over users and serving them is riddled with gray. I take the question as a sure sign that Gruber's never worked in IT.

Here's the problem: You can't offer every possible service under the Sun to the community. Budgets have limits. Budget limits make for staffing limits. Staff places limits on the amount of their time the company may take. Offering up mail to iPhone users (or Blackberry users or Treo users or Mac users) often means spending time with those iPhone users (or Blackberry users or Treo users or Mac users) and it means that staff must learn something they didn't already know, namely the iPhone (or Blackberry or Treo or OS X.) Good IT staff will revel in learning those new technologies.

There's just one problem: they've got other things to do. They've got to support the new web application the CIO demanded or the travel management application demanded by accounting or the new database server demanded by the new application purchased by some random group that decided it wasn't going to be ruled by IT, so it spent millions of dollars and bought whatever it damn well wanted to buy without worrying about what IT actually had the in-house capabilities to support. It happens all the time. It's why IT managers get defensive when users start demanding the cool, new toy.

Let's face it, it's tough to make a business case for an iPhone when users already have a Blackberry, which also makes phone calls and already reads corporate email.

Now, there is an alternative to a powerful central IT role, and it's very similar to my current gig. You let anyone make decisions about what systems they'll buy, what operating systems they'll run, who will manage them, who will patch them for security threats, who will choose the technology for new applications, and who will build those applications. It works great... Until the person who's been tapped for all of that decides to leave, and then the group decides IT should drop everything and help them out, basically for free.

Don't get me wrong. I love new ~~toys~~ technologies. I push for them all the time, inside of IT, using the argument that I just want to give users what they'll want. And even in IT, I'm reminded that we have limits. We have limits in money, staffing, and talent. And every new thing you add, every new device you support, means something else is taking a hit.

If you want an iPhone at work and your IT department can't or won't support it, the solution is simple. Go find a company that has an IT department with infinite resources. I'm sure they'll be happy to help.

Otherwise Occupied - daring_fireball

Daring Fireball's IT Dystopia

Why shouldn't IT bow to every user request?