Trying to find an optimal solution for a client with various problems!
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@Ambarishrh said:
Dont know how well to put this, but i can see that they are willing, but could also see that as a small-mid business they already allocated budgets for this year and for IT thats not even enough for what they need. Now that they are learning from the experiences, that is changing which is why they are willing to add more budget to improve things, but that happens only next year allocation
You keep stating that they have used their budget but I don't think that it means what you think that it means. Businesses aren't bound by budgets, that might be the impression that they give IT but it certainly it not a real thing. If they saw value in their data, they would allocate funds. And the budget you are talking about is much bigger than the budget needed.
I'm just not seeing how any of this adds up.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Ambarishrh said:
And now wanted to invest a bit more to improve.
So pop in a second hard drive and put RAID on the desktop that they have. I'm unclear why they are so against the most clear path with the least money?
The issue last time happened was the servers in built network adaptor had some issues and the whole network was down, as in no one was able to access the files, which is why i was looking for adding another server to avoid such issues. Adding a second hard drive/configuring RAID will add redundancy on that machine but if things like the network/power supply of that servers goes bad. they have to wait for someone to come in and replace
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@Ambarishrh said:
Now that they are learning from the experiences....
I'm unsure that I agree here. They learned that they needed to listen? It does not appear so. They learned that they overspent in the wrong places? That does not appear to be true. They learned that they were not taking their business seriously? Again, that doesn't match what they are saying, right?
What is it that they have learned and how has their behaviour changed? They were willing to spend way too much in the past, budget was never an issue it seems. Just being reckless, not listening to the most basic professional advice, not seeing IT as a business need, ignoring best practices and the most basic guidance, spending where they wanted and not where they needed.... that's what it sounds like they did, and it seems to be where they remain.
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@Ambarishrh said:
The issue last time happened was the servers in built network adaptor had some issues and the whole network was down, as in no one was able to access the files, which is why i was looking for adding another server to avoid such issues.
But having a second NIC would have solved that one particular issue. The lesson should have been that a minimal investment in good hardware would have protected them. Both from equipment dying and would have failed over as well. That is a very simple thing to fix that would not have happened had they had a server (real one) instead of a desktop.
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@Ambarishrh said:
Adding a second hard drive/configuring RAID will add redundancy on that machine but if things like the network/power supply of that servers goes bad. they have to wait for someone to come in and replace
Which is more important, protecting the data or having some downtime? Two different issues tackled in two different ways.
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I am not sure how things work with the companies there, but I myself in my company works with our CFO and CEO on IT budgets. The main goal is to keep the expenses minimal to make sure the data is protected and available. Now to achieve this, it can be done the expensive way, the cheap way or a moderate way. And its always the cheap and best way that the management wants, so they can push the rest of the money on something else. A business person looking at value on IT is very rare as far as I've seen unless that guy himself is techie and knows about the value and usage of IT. I am sure a lot of companies have such budgeting, when it comes to IT. Our role is to make sure that to play within that budget and get data safe and give higher availability
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@Ambarishrh said:
they have to wait for someone to come in and replace
Sure. But how long does that take? How much can they be losing during that down time? If they can't afford a hard drive, they CAN afford downtime. You can't have budget issues and have downtime be expensive. The two are mutually exclusive.
That's the handy thing about companies that can't afford to "do things right", they can always afford to be down for a long time.
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@Ambarishrh said:
I am not sure how things work with the companies there, but I myself in my company works with our CFO and CEO on IT budgets. The main goal is to keep the expenses minimal to make sure the data is protected and available.
Sure, make a budget. But the CEO and CFO would have to be blithering idiots to see an opportunity to make more money, save money or protect money and refuse to do it because they are locked into an artificial budget that they made. Budgets are just for them to do planning, there is nothing rigid about them if they don't make it so.
I'm sure they are not so lacking in intelligence to intentionally throw money away just to stick to their own budget that they made for themselves.
Budgets don't help you save money, they have you plan spending.
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@Ambarishrh said:
Now to achieve this, it can be done the expensive way, the cheap way or a moderate way. And its always the cheap and best way that the management wants, so they can push the rest of the money on something else.
That doesn't appear to be what they are doing though, is it? They are willing to do things that don't work and spend a lot of money on it. They are not being cheap nor are they getting lots of feature. They appear to be the opposite. They are only doing things the expensive way, but only in a way that doesn't work, right? They know that they have overspent AND that they are not meeting their needs yet are not adjusting how they work?
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@Ambarishrh said:
Our role is to make sure that to play within that budget and get data safe and give higher availability
No, IT's job is not about playing in a budget. It's about advising the business people what to do. If we advise well, the management would have to be idiots to stick to a budget that was hurting the company. In many cases, good management won't even have a budget, because budgets encourage wasting money while not meeting goals.
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@Ambarishrh said:
I am sure a lot of companies have such budgeting, when it comes to IT.
Thankfully no, many use IT to push the business forward. Budgets fundamentally undermine that. Sadly many businesses don't understand financial systems and do budgets anyway to attempt to make things easier for the financial people to the detriment of the company.
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Things like QB and there is another painful system they have used for their internal operation, which i can see that their employees has to manually go to each machine to update the software, these are their past mistakes and now they cant afford to have the time to get an alternate solution,and get their employees to learn the new system. So there are things which i can't change.
So whats done is done, and they had invested money in quite a lot of things wrongly which now cant be changed at least not in the near future. This is the answer i got when i asked for looking at better alternatives to change these systems to an efficient one.
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@Ambarishrh said:
A business person looking at value on IT is very rare as far as I've seen unless that guy himself is techie and knows about the value and usage of IT.
I know of no successful or serious company that does not do this. Small or large, healthy companies don't think of any department (IT, HR, legal, finance, operations, etc.) as an enemy or useless. Why would they have them at all if that were the case? Sure, many tiny companies going nowhere and destined to fail have this opinion, but I never see one actually make money or last for long.
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@Ambarishrh said:
So whats done is done, and they had invested money in quite a lot of things wrongly which now cant be changed at least not in the near future. This is the answer i got when i asked for looking at better alternatives to change these systems to an efficient one.
But.... you are talking about making huge investments into technical debt, right? Spending many times that they have already spent to create more mess? How much money are they now willing to throw after systems that they know have failed? This is called throwing good money after bad. If they have any concern for money, they have to stop doing this. It sounds like they are using money as an excuse, but their actions state that they have more than enough, they just refuse to use it wisely for some reason.
They need to bear the cost of moving off of QB at some point, the sooner they do it the less that they spend. Spending tons of money to protect QB is going to add up quickly.
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Let's take a quick look at some costs:
- Second Windows license: $750
- Second Desktop: $800
- Drobo B800i: $2,000
That's $3,500 just right there, not including any cost from you to do all of this work. That is so much more money that just putting in an entry level server which will likely protect them far more. I'd rather spend $1,500 to do things right and have serious protection than $3,500 to do things poorly and possibly make things worse.
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Do you see now why I feel that they have no concern for the cost? There are well established patterns for how to do IT well for a reason - because you can't work around them and do something cheaper. If you don't follow good IT practices, you start overspending like crazy in nearly all cases.
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Take the case of the company where i work. Out of the past 7 years that ive worked with them, 5 years IT was run with little or no additional budget. Break the system, then you get something new. There was an investment in the beginning when the company started and thats it. No improvements on infrastructure, new services etc. We used to run file servers with FTP between offices, even thought there were better solutions which will really help them to improve IT performance, thus improving overall employee productivity. Instead they invested that on the business, within 5 years became the top in that industry, sold out to a very large company. So they became successful with this format.
Only after the company acquired by a bigger group, we started having devices like netapp, more servers etc, where as it was run previously with multiple LACIE drives, just to give you an example.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Do you see now why I feel that they have no concern for the cost? There are well established patterns for how to do IT well for a reason - because you can't work around them and do something cheaper. If you don't follow good IT practices, you start overspending like crazy in nearly all cases.
I get the picture, with the new costs that they could have, they can get a good server and spend less get more value out of it
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@Ambarishrh said:
Instead they invested that on the business, within 5 years became the top in that industry....
This is a mistake in thinking. All investment in IT is an investment in the business. Had they business skills they could have gotten loans to invest in both, if anyone had faith in their business skills (and the numbers been real.)
Good IT should rarely cost a lot of money. Maybe people were recommending overspending. Good IT often costs far less than people think, which is why budgets are dangerous. Once you have a budget, IT is incentivized to waste money to meet budget, even when there isn't strong value to what they are spending.
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@Ambarishrh said:
I get the picture, with the new costs that they could have, they can get a good server and spend less get more value out of it
Right. They can either spend a ton and keep going down a bad path, or they can start fixing things and saving money at the same time!
