On Sun, 12 Jul 2009, Chris Craddock wrote: <snip> > > Unfortunately for many of us who have made our careers in this business, the > economics just aren't there anymore. Nobody does phones in house anymore > because there are companies only too willing to do it and hand you a bill.
Interestingly, we still have our own telecommunications department because we have __NOT__ found a 3rd party who will guarantee our current service levels at even our current expense, let alone for less. > Hardly anybody does their own payroll anymore. Same reason. Pick just about > any piece of non-core business processing (i.e. stuff other than what your > company does to make a living) and you will find the same thing. A whole > slew of outsiders willing to solve the problem for a buck and a half less > than you can do it yourself. "Building your own" is pretty much guaranteed > to take longer, cost more and be less reliable than buying it from somebody > else who does it for a living. The outside providers get to leverage their > work across multiple customers so their costs are lower, their quality and > profits higher. That's why everyone and their third cousin uses packaged > software now. That trend is only ever going to accelerate. > This is supposedly where we are going. But the cost to convert is an obstacle for us. So, we are basically doing it as we try to convert from "legacy" systems to new systems. I don't know exactly why, but it is not going very smoothly. <snip> > Folks hate to hear me say it, but just about everything we "know" about IT > today is wrong. We're never going back to the home grown development cottage > industry and sooner or later the in-house IT function is going to go the way > of the dodo too. Our kids and grandkids are almost certainly NOT going to be > doing IT as we know it. Pretty scary thought for some, but going to happen > nevertheless. I agree, long term. I still have concerns about what is going to happen to a business in any give country if they are offshored and the communications goes through hostile territory. Or gets taken out by some insane group. Or the comm goes through a "friendly" area which later becomes "unfriendly". One problem that I've noticed is that we don't place as much emphasis on redundancy as we used to. So we have more single points of failure. I remember in the past having two separate leased lines going through different circuits to a given critical location. The Internet is supposed to be "self healing". But as it is commercialized, that is not as important. Having multiple circuits to a single location is simply expensive. And short term "bottom line" managers today don't seem to have the old mindset. But then, perhaps the problem is with me and not them. Maybe the risk is worth the reward (greater profit). That's why Intel machines are now "good enough" even though the reliability of the z makes them look sick. Just cluster the systems & applications so that a failure just doesn't much matter. > -- Trying to write with a pencil that is dull is pointless. Maranatha! John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
