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"As far as I know, there is no company that says - We are ok. We could be better, but thats not our priority." This author needs to get out more. Many corporat

by synnik 17y ago

"As far as I know, there is no company that says - We are ok. We could be better, but thats not our priority." This author needs to get out more. Many corporate IT shops have this attitude. You can argue whether it is good or bad all you want, but it definitely exists. Note: Technology companies should not have this attitude. But how many companies out there truly are about technology. Is a grocery store a technology company? Your lawn service? Your local pizza shop? Being startups geeks, we all tend to get tunnel vision. Most companies are not about technology. Even mine, a large energy company -- Our customers don't give a crap about our technology. They care about what we pull out of the ground and how we pipe it across the country. Our IT work has nothing to do with our actual business. IT work measures it, does accounting, handles "office work", etc. It affects our internal costs and efficiencies. But that isn't our actual business, and our customers don't know and don't care about our IT shop.

toadpipe 17y ago
It's an excellent point that many businesses are not really technology businesses at all. However, one could make the argument that it is still in the company's best interest to promote IT quality because that is the best way to keep the IT department from bloating into something that consumes far more resources than necessary. Good technology should be reliable, cheap, and invisible, but those things take a certain amount of quality. I would argue that most non-technology companies would be best served by employing a single very good software engineer, maybe two or three if the company is very large. If the company is small then the one engineer doesn't even have to be all that brilliant. You can't do this if you have to administrate a typical IT ecosystem, but if your company is not a technology company, why do you need a typical IT ecosystem in the first place? (Because no one knows how to do anything outside of one, and even if you can find someone you can't find a replacement. Therefore every company must support a relatively large and complex ecosystem whether they want to or not.)

by synnik 17y ago

toadpipe 17y ago

It's an excellent point that many businesses are not really technology businesses at all. However, one could make the argument that it is still in the company's best interest to promote IT quality because that is the best way to keep the IT department from bloating into something that consumes far more resources than necessary. Good technology should be reliable, cheap, and invisible, but those things take a certain amount of quality. I would argue that most non-technology companies would be best served by employing a single very good software engineer, maybe two or three if the company is very large. If the company is small then the one engineer doesn't even have to be all that brilliant. You can't do this if you have to administrate a typical IT ecosystem, but if your company is not a technology company, why do you need a typical IT ecosystem in the first place? (Because no one knows how to do anything outside of one, and even if you can find someone you can't find a replacement. Therefore every company must support a relatively large and complex ecosystem whether they want to or not.)