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by gte910h
4929 days ago
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The idea there is something wrong with the resourceful workers instead of the lagging IT is perposterous. IT right now in many companies is living in 2004 still. SO MUCH has changed in the intervening 8 years, it's no surprise that people are going with consumer grade products when corporate IT doesn't deliver modern resources. |
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Indeed not. IT lags because it's hellaciously expensive to have it any other way. They're more than aware of what's happened over the last 8 years. At my day job, a profitable software shop doing some fairly cutting-edge stuff, we run everything on Lotus Notes. My desktop PC has 2GB RAM and runs Windows XP: a decade-old operating system. We just migrated our source control system from Visual SourceSafe to - wait for it - SVN. It's a gigantic leap forward!
IT recognize that they're not in a position to dictate radical, wholesale tool-and-process change. So they turn a blind eye to private initiatives which help employees stay productive, while gradually and systematically replacing broken pieces of infrastructure.
I use my own personal MacBook Pro for most of my work, relegating the XP clunker to a Notes terminal (a job at which it struggles.) I use Dropbox for syncing my own work and for sharing gigantic virtual machine images with my staff. I run three agile development teams using various cloud-based apps to manage workflow, dropping back to Lotus for necessary book-keeping tasks and ticket assignment. I run a backlog database in Evernote, and we have an internal wiki for mockups and collaborative story editing. In other words, my own personal mix of bleeding-edge and relatively mature.
That's what most businesses are like: a compromise, a heterogenous mix of solutions and processes which evolve over time. There's no shining uplands where every employee exclusively uses the latest tools, while very few workplaces are stuck with uniformly last-era tech.
Even if IT suddenly decided to spend millions of dollars in a company-wide orgy of upgrading, the resulting chaos would bring our business down quicker than the spend would ruin us.