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Infoworld

From 2001 to 2003, I worked as the local IT admin and jack-of-all-trades for a branch of a collection services company in California. It was fun in that I got to do a lot of stuff that a larger organization would have compartmentalized, but it was also difficult in that I had no one to back me up when I needed to make an argument. The boss happened to not only behave like the “pointy-haired boss” in Dilbert, but he actually had pointy hair — a coincidence that often manifested itself when he showed both his lack of IT knowledge and his poor management decisions.

When I first took the job, the network consisted of a hodgepodge of equipment run on cat3 and coax. By “hodgepodge,” I mean we had ancient reel-to-reel tape drives and an old mainframe running data “platters” that I had never heard of until then, and the user environment was old orange-screen terminals.

An interesting read, do check it out, it shows how even simple things like inventory can easily result in the difference between having a solution that works, and one that doesn’t. This kind of thing happens all the time, last week I was having a chat with an IT Manager who’d got involved in an argument between application teams over a £1500 server, one team having ‘borrowed it’ for about two years, when suddenly the purchaser said “Where’s my server?????”.

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