> All I'm saying is you can build a pretty successful business even with a bad engineering team. Many, many years ago, I was asked to take on a new role as the

> All I'm saying is you can build a pretty successful business even with a bad engineering team. Many, many years ago, I was asked to take on a new role as the system administrator for a group of advanced-degreed engineers, with their Unix workstations and FEA/CFD software. I setup centralized servers to host their software, a user directory, shared home directories, backup systems, and a Citrix server for Office. It was a tremendous success, and everyone loved the new setup. Upgrades to software became a breeze, people could access their files from anyone else's machines, and most got rid of their secondary PC for just doing email. The drafting department, with all of their CAD machines, was a different story. Software and data directories were cross-mounted around all of the machines. It was such a mess that, when we had a power outage, it would take them THREE DAYS to get everything going again. This happened a few times a year. I moved on to another new role to setup a Sun E10K, 3 cabinets of EMC disk, a 384-tape backup machine, and all the stuff that went with this. I was trying to explain the difference in these setups to my (very senior) IT manager, to get a point across about what I was doing. (I might have been arguing about setting up a third, "backup area network," in addition to the second "administrative network," but memory fades.) I got done, and she stared at me like I had a hunchback, and said (in reference to the drafting department), "Yeah, but it WORKS, right?" You're absolutely right. Senior execs look at the fact that business is improving, and think to themselves, hey, we must be doing something right, and move on to other things. However, it is a source of continual disappointment that there is SO MUCH lost opportunity in the decisions that get made about how IT should be done. And, what's more, those bad decisions are being made by people who, by their role and their pay, should really be expected to understand the difference in my 2 examples, and what the extra overhead is costing. I mean, if you had two physical production lines in plant, which were in series with each other, and one of them couldn't do anything for 3 freaking days after a power outage, while one carried on as if nothing had happened, plant managers would immediately fire a line manager who told him, "Yeah, but it WORKS, right?" I think these situations endure because the emperor has no clothes. The people who are calling the shots can't understand the technology that MAKES the difference, and don't want their ignorance exposed.