At 01:12 13/09/01 +0100, David Irvine wrote:
>Tam McLaughlin wrote:
>
>>I apologise if this is too much off topic and too long as it involves
>>company politics.
<snip>
>>I am the sysadmin guy in charge of our linux/unix servers, network,
>>firewall, informix database servers.
<snip>
>>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.
Oh dear. A*%$hole syndrome. Your obviously expected to go and start pulling
cables until you've made enough space (I'd have been tempted).
>>Surely this is the wrong way to run a company?
Yes, but unfortunately its the way that most companies _are_ run. It's also
why systems such as ISO9001 were set up. Where I work is _far_ from perfect
but at least we're legal now (from an IT perspective).
Apologies if all this is obvious......
I think it would be important to not attack the individual responsible
directly. It looks like sour grapes / whistle blowing. Rather collate as
much information as you can and propose a structured procurement
methodology. That way you can cite all the cock-ups as reasons for adopting
your new procedures, get your message across but not in a way that reflects
badly on yourself.
Meanwhile, you should try to make your position defendable by _writing_ to
the person responsible (and a copy to your personnel dept) stating that you
cannot assume responsibility for the system with your current workload,
point out that even without taking on this system, that its presence has
increased your workload (as an ongoing security threat to the systems you
ARE responsible for) and that you have had no training for the new system.
(The Data Protection Act (1998) and requirements for listing on the London
Stock Exchange mean that the directors of a company can go to prison for
failing to provide proper controls.)
Regards procedures for procurement, the only stuff I've seen prepared is
the DoD stuff which is very detailled and seems to be intended for
multi-million $ contracts. There is some stuff coming out regarding the UK
gov's procurement practices. When I'm looking at bringing in something new
I look at:
0) define WRITTEN objectives for the package, in terms of functionality,
down-time, administration time, cost savings and time to resolve issues.
You should also define HERE under what circumstances you will back out /
abandon the project.
1) total cost of ownership - a bit of an old chestnut, but still valid.
Look at the costs of acquiring the skills to use and manage it properly,
the cost of evaluation testing and acceptance testing, and the revenue
costs over 5 years in terms of support contracts, disaster recovery etc.
Also cost implications of adapting / extending / customizing, re-licensing.
2) references from existing customers - make sure you are talking to IT people.
3) agree a test period with the suppliers and your own business before
adopting (evaluation) at the end of this you should be able to commit to
the capital purchase.
4) agree a test period with the suppliers for acceptance testing at the end
of which you should be able to commit to support costs.
There may be other more specific objectives added to the project depending
on context - a key one is access for the suppliers support staff, both in
terms of technology (bit of a poser there for NT) and practices
(administration of accounts, access to information).
Obviously this is scaled down somewhat when I go out to buy a replacement
NIC, but I'dd certainly apply ALL of it to a system of the scale you've
described.
...and I apply this to most open source systems as well as bought software.
My biggest problem is that the rest of the business wants everything NOW!
The words brewery, organise and piss-up spring to mind (and as most of you
know I CAN). On the other hand I can now point out the projects where we
did go by the numbers compared to those where we didn't.
>>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>
(IMHO it's not to bad to admin, and works quite well - just pray you never
have to restore a system from backups).
Colin
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