I apologise if this is too much off topic and too long as it involves
company politics.
I would be interested to know from other sys admins how much control and
say
they have in the decision making processes of new hardware/systems.
Although I have been in my present position for about 5 years, I do not
have
experience of how other companies support/sys admin departments work.
Recent events at my company have made me seriously question whether I am
in the
correct place and using my skills to their fullest.
Our IT dept is structured as follows:
Head of operations (not an IT man)
| |
support mgr development mgr
| |
2 support/sysadmins 7 developers
I am the sysadmin guy in charge of our linux/unix servers, network,
firewall,
informix database servers.
The company have been talking of setting up a small internal call
centre. The
development mgr has been involved in this and support have been given
little
info on this. I was on holiday today but found out that we got 5 mins
notice of
delivery of 2 NT servers for the call centre and wanted a space in the
server room.
Another example is that the company are looking into remote working for
salesmen.
I only got asked into the project team 'cause I made a fuss about It
implications
but the IT aspect has been put under control of the "telephony/comms
track mgr"
who happens to be the property services mgr. I am increasingly finding
that IT
are not taken seriously enough (ok my boss just agrees to do what is
asked).
Surely this is the wrong way to run a company?
It are very important to remote workers e.g. pgp, access to servers.
How can u bring in a call centre without consulting the people who know
about the network infrastructure etc. How can a development mgr who was
a
mainframe programmer and does not keep up-to-date on technology have
control
of the IT aspect of a call centre project w/o involving sysadmin?
I believe the call centre project will download data from our informix
db each night
onto the NT servers which will run SQL server. Surely me, as dba should
be consulted
and not just expected to look after NT, SQL server which i know nothing
about>
Ok, I can learn, but who is going to look after the 6 unix/linux
servers, firewall,
tune the database engine, set up proper network IDS/monitoring etc.
Is this normal?
Do you have input into projects?
Ok, if our company want a call centre and the NT choice is the best,
then fine,
we cant really complain as we are here to support the companies business
but we
should at least be given a bit more warning that 5 minutes for a server
delivery
and config. I will say that I will not be responsible for the servers,
but I cannot
say that I will have nothing to do with it. I obviously have to supply
IP addresses,
domains etc but is it reasonable for me to insist they do not get
connected to our
network until I know what software will be running and what service
packs have been
applied etc?
Apologies if this was not the place for my rant, but I do not personally
know
any other sys admins to discuss this with.
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