McKown, John wrote:
...
Ewing, Joel wrote:
A marginal
SysProg has many more opportunities than an application programmer to
make a mistake that could put the entire company out of business.
It therefore behooves all sites to migrate to a platform which does not
need sysprogs. Once the sysprogs are eliminated, we can go to work on
eliminating the application programmers.
Sorry, that is the current logic that I've noticed.
All sites have SysProgs whether they realize it or not. For those who
have no in house SysProgs because they rely on those "user-friendly" MS
platforms: their SysProgs work for MS and work to protect MS interests,
not the interests of their company. "Their" MS SysProgs regularly
download potentially bad fixes to the company MS platforms at times
convenient for MS, and no doubt in the case of many unsophisticated
users, without their knowledge. Every automatic fix, even if it were
bug free, has the potential to break some application that may be
important or critical to the end user. Another interesting aspect about
this is that should a fix with a really "nasty" bug be accidentally
distributed, the world-wide impact and number of affected users and
companies could be incredibly large, just like a massive virus attack -
and I'm sure the fine print in all MS licensing agreements insures that
in such a case that MS has $0 liability.
It's not just an uncritical dependency on MS for technical support that
is dangerous. "Outsourcing" your technical support makes the survival
of your DP systems dependent on people whose primary allegiance is
elsewhere and who are less likely to be aware of or give priority to the
issues that are most important to your company. Outsourcing technical
support may also remove from the company anyone with the expertise to
ask the right questions to insure that reasonable support is being
provided and that reasonable practices are being observed. Similar
arguments against outsourcing application development can be made for
companies that depend on application innovation to maintain a
competitive edge in their industry.
Crawford county (just North of us), decided a year or so ago that they
would save money by eliminating their own technical support position and
outsourcing all the technical support for their network, servers, and
applications. As a result, in December 2005 they had no one on site
with the capability to interpret and act on the warning signs of
creeping hardware failure, no one on site to interpret the failure
messages from backups and understand the serious implications for DR,
and no one on site that understood these issues were serious enough to
demand immediate resolution from their outsourcer. When both primary
and alternate servers went belly up with hardware failures and corrupted
databases, that's when they learned they didn't have any good backups
covering several year's worth of data entry! All their on line systems
were down for at least a month and daily operations adversely impacted
while the damaged hard drives were shipped out-of-state to attempt data
recovery. They were able to recover much data, but at least a month of
all data was totally lost and at least one application area lost all
data from several years of entry. The money they had to spend on data
recovery services and the money they are spending on overtime to
re-enter lost data, is more than they would have been paying for a local
technical support person.
It takes intelligent management to understand those cases where saving a
buck today creates unacceptable risk in the long run. The less
intelligent are forced to learn by hard experience. If DP is critical
to the success of a company, then management needs to treat it like a
critical resource and be willing to pay what it takes to have adequate
in house expertise and in house control, or they could be justly charged
with "lack of due diligence".
...
--
Joel C. Ewing, Fort Smith, AR [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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