In Favor of Homegrown IT Solutions

snydeq writes "Today's IT organizations turn too readily to vendors, eschewing homegrown solutions to their detriment, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'Back when IT was "simple," several good programmers and support staff could run the whole show. Nowadays, [companies] buy hefty support contracts and shift the burden of maintaining and troubleshooting large parts of their IT infrastructure on to the vendors who may know their own product well, but have a hard time dealing with issues that may crop up during integration with other vendors' gear. ... Relying solely on support contracts and generic solutions is a good way to self-limit the agility and performance of any business. In short, more gurus equals less hand-wringing and stress all around.'"

IT shops are run by MBAs those days

[Anonymous Coward]

I was trained to be an IT manager, where most people move on to an MBA. All the classes taught were BS outsource this, best of breed that, vendor support another. The technical skills were deemphasized to the point that they are "complementary skills" rather than primary ones. You don't need to know how to manage a server, or configure Active Directory, or run an Exchange mail server. All that you know is to write business requirements for vendors to come in and set everything up.

My company decided to go with a vendor for their accounting platform, Great Plains. And now whenever we want to do any shit in that application, the vendor would take eons to come back with a workable solution and bill a fortune -- a great pain! Fortunately, the IT director, who is a highly technical guy, saw the problem and sent a few folks for Great Plains training.

Re:Loaded cost of a software developer

[Anonymous Coward]

Salary is probably in the neighborhood of 80-90k. There are a *LOT* of other costs. For example the computer, the desk, the chair, the lighting, AC/Heat, internet, 401k, SS, health insurance, etc...

Re:Loaded cost of a software developer

[salesgeek]

Loaded cost for an employee is typically 18% of salary + $320/month for real estate overhead. So a $90 K employee ends up costing about $120,000 with benefits.

Shortsighted

[wiedzmin]

While I would love to wave this article at my management and say "hire more gurus", I find it somewhat disconnected from reality. This concept would only work if you had a department dedicated to in-house development, with unlimited permanent headcounts all of whom would be flawless in developing, documenting and supporting their respective applications in a uniform, regulatory-compliance friendly manner and who would never, ever move on to the greener pastures. In reality, you have self-proclaimed "developers" from various departments, writing spaghetti code designed to address their specific problems, then eventually quitting and leaving IT to struggle with supporting the uncommented, undocumented application that now cannot be replaced because it contains "all customer data". And when your friendly neighborhood ISO 27001 auditor comes along, you end up hiring 3 more people to fix every missing data validation, credential management and change control problem in this irreplaceable creation, and then, maybe, it becomes that wonderful application the author is hoping to push for.

On the other hand, if you get a third party vendor to provide you with a solution - your upfront costs will seem higher, but chances are - unlike your departed headcount, that vendor exists for the sole purpose of supporting their solution. Their features, functionality, security and regulatory requirements have either already been hashed out by other customers, or will be hashed out for your if you ask for them. And unless they're a small enough vendor to go out of business without selling their assets to someone else who will take over, they will be there to support that application and provide feature updates while your in-house developers come and go...

Re:yes and no

[BitZtream]

Because there isn't any alternative that integrates with as many other products and provides as many features in as easy to use package as Sharepoint + Office?

If you don't understand why people use sharepoint you don't need to be discussing IT related topics as you're clueless.

Sharepoint, much like Outlook is a steaming pile of shit, but its still better than the alternatives ... which there aren't any.

Re:Loaded cost of a software developer

[garyebickford]

When I worked at an F500 high-tech company, they accounted the total cost of each software and hardware engineer as 2.5 times salary. This included the buildings, computers, training, and all the other stuff necessary to keep the engineer productive. For big companies that's probably still pretty reasonable.

Re:Undisciplined nerds and ivory towers...

[Todd Knarr]

My response is:

• A: How many projects actually budget time and resources to developing documentation? Most of the time management insists on trimming that time off the project because it doesn't deliver any business features and will take longer than the actual development will (documentation is a time-consuming project in itself).
• B: How often does management not want to allocate additional staff to essentially do nothing but learn someone else's job? The usual line I hear from management is that there's no return there, the additional person won't be doing anything that isn't already being done and they could be more useful doing something that isn't already being handled. And see A about documentation.
• C: A good point, developers often aren't good at hand-off. But they aren't entirely to blame, see B and A for management's unwillingness to invest time and resources in the things you need to do a successful handoff. I also see a certain unwillingness to hold a BAU team responsible when the developers are right there and can just help with any problems that come up.

As with many things in IT, it comes down to the fact that the developers are not the ones with the authority to do these things. The authority and the responsibility rests with the managers and executives who make the decisions and set policy. As an "IT nerd" (read "techie, guy who's paid to make the little boxes with the blinkenlights do their thing") I'm often caught between the desire for good project discipline and the reality that management doesn't want good project discipline because it interferes with delivering the most features in the least amount of time (notice that I said "features", not "bug-free working software"). And I can't tell the CIO "No, you're not shaving 4 weeks off the project schedule. No, you're not assigning Joe to another project. No, you're not adding those 5 new requirements to the list without adding additional time to the schedule.". I'd love to, but I'm not his boss so I'm not the one giving him orders. And if he ignores what all the people under him are telling him, there's only one person responsible for the resulting trains-wreck. But his bosses won't hold him accountable for it, so it's no skin off his nose.

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Re:So contracted labor isn't all it's cracked up t

[roman_mir]

Why do people think that contractor = second rate citizen? I don't know any contractors (including myself,) that want to go full time. I don't understand the mentality that choosing to be paid a rate per hour and have no other connection to the employer is somehow a bad thing.