I haven’t posted in a couple days because of work issues that took up most of my time.  We’re trying to implement some improvements and running into some last minute resistance. 

You see, the problem with most Enterprise IT is that it is deployed for one of two reasons: to monitor process or to save money. 

Sure you hear a bunch of nice buzz words and fancy marketing like “bringing people together by making the computing environment collaborative” but in the end that really just means “trying to make more money by getting people to waste less time” 

Where this becomes a problem is when you get to the actual managers in each of the departments you are trying to improve.  Businesses, even non-profit agencies, are about making money (though in the case of non-profits it’s usually “to stay in business” rather than “to make the stock holders happy”).  But managers, unless they are really good ones, are not necessarily focused on making money and in fact are usually more interested in costing the company money if it means they can stay in their insular world and not be monitored in any way. 

This is an important point; IT is nothing but a curse to a manager.  It accents their flaws while taking all credit for improvements it makes.  So unless you have a stellar manager who really does care about the company more than themselves you are going to face resistance when implementing technology.  Computers are the ultimate tattle-tales. 

Anyway, in the future I’ll try to have some pre-canned posts ready for days when the world takes too much of a toll on me (good thing no one’s reading this yet).