6 ms·

> The IT folks at said multinationals hated our software why?

agentultra 4y ago
I'm sure they had lots of reasons. I got to ghost on a sales call once with one of our customers (I was a lead developer at the time). From what I could tell their IT people didn't like our software because: - They were already in the middle of a multi-year roll-out of SAP, integrating our software was a wrinkle in a plan they'd been working on for a long time - Nobody got fired for choosing SAP, some saw choosing software from a small shop they'd never heard of was risky - Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they! - Support: they knew how to handle issues with SAP, user accounts, authentication, authorization, etc; integrating another piece in the mix across the entire company would be a whole project It was a fun call to sit in on.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  > Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they! Ok, so this one I actually kind of agree with. Too many times I was in a position where a bunch of decisions were made about software or hardware, and then IT was brought in at the last minute to try and get it all to work in an unreasonable time frame. And then IT was asked it integrate it in impossible ways. If another department brings IT in early, different story. I got in to IT to use technology to make people's lives easier, not to play with whatever the latest fad bullshit is or develop an inflated sense of self-worth. If some random nobody's software is going to do that at the cost of a minor annoyance to me, that's fine.
  - count 4y ago
    Having worked both sides of this, it's generally the case that IT is absolutely terrible at their job that ends up with them getting called in late.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      That's fair, 90% of people are shit at their jobs. I'm just saying, if it is me, I'm definitely upset you did that and I think I'm justified in that.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Company: "IT is terrible at their jobs, what are we going to do about this!" IT director: "Give me a budget to hire competent IT people" Company: "On the other hand, we're ok with this IT incompetence"
    - yamazakiwi 4y ago
      Interesting, in my experience generally it's business types that don't know shit from their elbow and don't include IT early enough due to negligence.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      I would guess that completely incompetent IT departments that only degrades everybody's work are very highly correlated to workplaces that use those huge, all in 1, hired consultants based software packages.
    - antod 4y ago
      Sounds like a good reason to bring them in even earlier
    - LorenPechtel 4y ago
      My experience is admittedly limited but every case I've seen of IT being called in late was that IT would have reasons for no. The VP didn't even learn their lesson when circumventing IT ended up with all corporate e-mail down for nearly a week. (As predicted, although it ended up taking longer to fix because I was on the other side of the world, internet access but unreachable by phone.)
- quanticle 4y ago
  Another reason that people often overlook is security. Even if each individual software product has a good security model, differences in the way they interact can lead to security vulnerabilities and opportunities for attackers to move laterally through a network. In the case above, it may be that IT knows how to integrate SAP with their Active Directory system in a manner that ensures that users have access to the data that they need, without giving everyone write access to everything. A brand new product from some small startup, even if it's competently engineered, won't have the same pre-set integration playbooks as SAP. The in-house IT will have to figure it out themselves, which adds time and overhead for every operation. New hire? Before, you'd give them a SAP account, and you'd have a playbook that would automatically or semi-automatically provision everything for them. Now, you have to provision accounts in two systems. Compliance? IT already knows how to validate an SAP install for compliance and generate a report for the appropriate regulators. Now they're going to have to learn to do that with your new system. And so on. I listen to several infosec podcasts, and one recurring theme in those podcasts is managing users who do "shadow IT", i.e. by buying and integrating new products or software that make their day-to-day jobs easier, but do so in a manner that opens up huge gaping security holes that IT doesn't even know about… until the breach happens and the company is all over the news for leaking customer data.
  - agentultra 4y ago
    Security is important. What makes SAP secure? I personally found errors in customer systems. And at the time even Microsoft couldn’t implement OAuth2 correctly with regards to the specifications… which is no surprise given how often it had to be amended. A good deal of “security,” even in the enterprise, is a lot of theatre and show boating. Write a formal specification and throw it at a model checker and you’ll probably start finding holes in most software stacks. But hardly any software developers do that let alone IT managers. The later generation of the stuff I was working on at that company had to also be certified under certain important regulations. The system had to be able to be auditable in the sense that application logs couldn’t be repudiated in court and users couldn’t tamper with data. That was some pretty serious work. But yeah.. there’s a lot of “lol security” out there and as an IT person trying to manage ISV solutions it can be a huge pain trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. But just buying MS or SAP and thinking you’re done with security is also as bad. Don’t overlook security.
ROTMetro 4y ago
At one point I wore a hat in a IT leadership role for factories. We hated third party software because it created silo's where our data became un-usable. There is no point in an MRP/ERP factory system if all the bits aren't talking/working together. People fight and fight you as you try to get there, but once you get there and it all starts to work together and you no longer have jobs travelers looking like daisies with escalations all over they get it and their life gets significantly better.
- ajb 4y ago
  Was that last sentence autocorrected maybe? I'm struggling to parse the last bit about travellers and daisies.
  - lbayes 4y ago
    Not the OP, but just trying to be helpful. "Travelers" are paper packets that move through a manufacturing process with whatever material is being improved. Lots of machine shops have these printed out packets of specs, communications and notes that accompany a given order as it makes it's way through the process. I'm pretty sure the "daisies" comment was related to how many shops escalate a given order by adding bright stickers or other obvious, visual indicators to the traveler, and shops can sometime become so overwhelmed that everything is escalated and all the bright travelers start looking like a field of flowers.
    - ajb 4y ago
      Ah cool, that makes a lot of sense. Interesting peek into the process.

I'm sure they had lots of reasons. I got to ghost on a sales call once with one of our customers (I was a lead developer at the time). From what I could tell their IT people didn't like our software because: - They were already in the middle of a multi-year roll-out of SAP, integrating our software was a wrinkle in a plan they'd been working on for a long time - Nobody got fired for choosing SAP, some saw choosing software from a small shop they'd never heard of was risky - Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they! - Support: they knew how to handle issues with SAP, user accounts, authentication, authorization, etc; integrating another piece in the mix across the entire company would be a whole project It was a fun call to sit in on.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
> Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they! Ok, so this one I actually kind of agree with. Too many times I was in a position where a bunch of decisions were made about software or hardware, and then IT was brought in at the last minute to try and get it all to work in an unreasonable time frame. And then IT was asked it integrate it in impossible ways. If another department brings IT in early, different story. I got in to IT to use technology to make people's lives easier, not to play with whatever the latest fad bullshit is or develop an inflated sense of self-worth. If some random nobody's software is going to do that at the cost of a minor annoyance to me, that's fine.
- count 4y ago
  Having worked both sides of this, it's generally the case that IT is absolutely terrible at their job that ends up with them getting called in late.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    That's fair, 90% of people are shit at their jobs. I'm just saying, if it is me, I'm definitely upset you did that and I think I'm justified in that.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Company: "IT is terrible at their jobs, what are we going to do about this!" IT director: "Give me a budget to hire competent IT people" Company: "On the other hand, we're ok with this IT incompetence"
  - yamazakiwi 4y ago
    Interesting, in my experience generally it's business types that don't know shit from their elbow and don't include IT early enough due to negligence.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    I would guess that completely incompetent IT departments that only degrades everybody's work are very highly correlated to workplaces that use those huge, all in 1, hired consultants based software packages.
  - antod 4y ago
    Sounds like a good reason to bring them in even earlier
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    My experience is admittedly limited but every case I've seen of IT being called in late was that IT would have reasons for no. The VP didn't even learn their lesson when circumventing IT ended up with all corporate e-mail down for nearly a week. (As predicted, although it ended up taking longer to fix because I was on the other side of the world, internet access but unreachable by phone.)
quanticle 4y ago
Another reason that people often overlook is security. Even if each individual software product has a good security model, differences in the way they interact can lead to security vulnerabilities and opportunities for attackers to move laterally through a network. In the case above, it may be that IT knows how to integrate SAP with their Active Directory system in a manner that ensures that users have access to the data that they need, without giving everyone write access to everything. A brand new product from some small startup, even if it's competently engineered, won't have the same pre-set integration playbooks as SAP. The in-house IT will have to figure it out themselves, which adds time and overhead for every operation. New hire? Before, you'd give them a SAP account, and you'd have a playbook that would automatically or semi-automatically provision everything for them. Now, you have to provision accounts in two systems. Compliance? IT already knows how to validate an SAP install for compliance and generate a report for the appropriate regulators. Now they're going to have to learn to do that with your new system. And so on. I listen to several infosec podcasts, and one recurring theme in those podcasts is managing users who do "shadow IT", i.e. by buying and integrating new products or software that make their day-to-day jobs easier, but do so in a manner that opens up huge gaping security holes that IT doesn't even know about… until the breach happens and the company is all over the news for leaking customer data.
- agentultra 4y ago
  Security is important. What makes SAP secure? I personally found errors in customer systems. And at the time even Microsoft couldn’t implement OAuth2 correctly with regards to the specifications… which is no surprise given how often it had to be amended. A good deal of “security,” even in the enterprise, is a lot of theatre and show boating. Write a formal specification and throw it at a model checker and you’ll probably start finding holes in most software stacks. But hardly any software developers do that let alone IT managers. The later generation of the stuff I was working on at that company had to also be certified under certain important regulations. The system had to be able to be auditable in the sense that application logs couldn’t be repudiated in court and users couldn’t tamper with data. That was some pretty serious work. But yeah.. there’s a lot of “lol security” out there and as an IT person trying to manage ISV solutions it can be a huge pain trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. But just buying MS or SAP and thinking you’re done with security is also as bad. Don’t overlook security.

ROTMetro 4y ago

At one point I wore a hat in a IT leadership role for factories. We hated third party software because it created silo's where our data became un-usable. There is no point in an MRP/ERP factory system if all the bits aren't talking/working together. People fight and fight you as you try to get there, but once you get there and it all starts to work together and you no longer have jobs travelers looking like daisies with escalations all over they get it and their life gets significantly better.

ajb 4y ago
Was that last sentence autocorrected maybe? I'm struggling to parse the last bit about travellers and daisies.
- lbayes 4y ago
  Not the OP, but just trying to be helpful. "Travelers" are paper packets that move through a manufacturing process with whatever material is being improved. Lots of machine shops have these printed out packets of specs, communications and notes that accompany a given order as it makes it's way through the process. I'm pretty sure the "daisies" comment was related to how many shops escalate a given order by adding bright stickers or other obvious, visual indicators to the traveler, and shops can sometime become so overwhelmed that everything is escalated and all the bright travelers start looking like a field of flowers.
  - ajb 4y ago
    Ah cool, that makes a lot of sense. Interesting peek into the process.