Consolidated Business & Enterprise Computing Rant Thread

Who actually writes these things? I feel like these are all just "keeping up with the Joneses" documents, and nobody actually has a real idea of what they want.

I can't even imagine what dollar value that bullshit brings a company.

 

It's good to have a strategy but only if it clearly states what it wants, e.g. "digitally enabled staff" is not a strategy, it's a marketing pitch

 

I love meetings where they wax lyrically about buzzwords, I always ask them how? So funny watching someone try to explain "how" when they don't know "how" anything works.

And always follow up with "how do you measure that?" even funnier, because they have no metrics to base their claim thus no metric to determine if they have indeed actually improved anything.

 

The first several pages of ours was pretty much as you have described.

I was quite pleased that the rest of the document not only stated desired outcomes but actually listed a timeline of the what and the who and (in some cases) the how.
In many instances they were timelines of investigations into technologies and services that will help us get to those outcomes so still not very specific but better than what we had before that.

 

So many of these are "improve outcomes though digital flim flam". Will duh, that's called running a business in the 21st century.

 

I thought it was an OOTB inclusion with the MS ELA?

They are used be executives to make broad motherhood statements that have no real meaning and provide a parachute when it all goes tits up.

Executive: Well, this excessive expenditure on shit aligns perfectly with the strategy document that is vague enough to make anything seem like it meets my bonus payment criteria.

 

Well, a comprehensive data ecosystem is critical to enable high value customer and future use cases. This calls for a fully integrated data technology stack with an enterprise wide data taxonomy and supported by fit for purpose analytical methods and tools.

Translation: if i buy you hookers and blow then money printer goes brrrr, fkin nerds amirite

Nothing enrages me more than this kind of fluff esp. if its purchased from Mckinsey/Deloitte/et al, might as well say 'do smart things with computers'. When someone says to me that their aim is to be agile and nimble, I respond that not a lot of people aim to be clumsy and slow.

 

We had engaged KPMG as our external internal auditors at my last life. That contract was terminated and they magically produced a security audit showing a huge list of problems that they were just about to give us so delivered the report as a good will gesture. Coincidentally it came with a quote to fix it all that was very large.

We busted our arse and fixed it all in one weekend. Fuck those guys.

 

Working for $large_finance mob eons ago, the CEO said all in the same breath that the company should be "innovative, and use best of breed".

When it came to question time, I asked him to clarify innovation, then clarify best of breed, then asked how you can do both when one means "be different to everyone else" and the other means "do the same as everyone else".

I simultaneously got a promotion, and was instructed to never speak to the CEO again. Fascinating how the corporate world works.

 

Promoted out of the meetings you caused a ruckus in hey...

 

Haha I know I became the COO's pet pretty soon after that. I think he appreciated my complete inability to bullshit.

I attempted to quit that job four times over the years, with four pay rises to keep me there. Clearly someone liked me, heh.

 

I'm betting that 'audit' was just the re-formatted output of something generic like nessus with dozens of false positives and other contextless automated tool crap.

 

Big4 offer services to flick around configs now? The end is nigh

 

Yes but they have a crack team of expert re-formatters who make sure that the only company name in the report is yours. Can't have a copy paste leave behind the last people that paid for the same report now.

They have for at least the last three years. I think most of them jumped on the security compliance bandwagon.

 

Oh compliance, I thought you meant like a penetration test or something

Yeah if you want big ol' honkin reports full of needless verbage Big4 is the way to go.

 

Seriously, fuck nebulous concepts of innovation. There is a massive body of knowledge around most technical topics known as 'best practice'.
We're techies not Jackson fucking Pollock or Luke212. The best engineered solution is usually not "innovative" at all in the conventional sense of the word.

The real innovation is to be able to stick clearly to sound technical design in the face of fashion and political pressure.

 

Oh, of course not. To management penetration tests are something you should discuss with HR prior to undertaking them to make sure that there will be no corporate blow back.

 

The flip side to that is you find places still running Exchange 2013 with no plan other than apathy at the idea of moving on.

Which was more or less the place I was working for at the time. They had classic failures, such as timing the start date of their Win2K to WinXP upgrade a week after WinXP went EOL, citing that "it all moved too quickly".

 

I encounter this a lot. Our products integrate with MS Office. We now provide twice a year upgrades in line with the semi-annual channel because the big fish calls the shots. Customers are struggling even after two or three years and the amount of "too fast" I hear on a daily basis would be hilarious if I wasn't sick of hearing it.

 

Office 365 broken this morn?, meanwhile exchange 2k13 hosted in azure continues to go brrr without problems.