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My IT Best Practices
We’ve all heard the term, “Best Practices” but what they entail tends to vary from person to person. Especially in the realm of Information Technology (IT). I’ve been involved in IT for a while now and I’ve decided to share a few of my own, “Best Practices”:
- Non-technical people should never be allowed to make technical decisions.
- Never buy anything from a vendor that doesn’t offer their product documentation for free to the public.
- Before you solicit bids or start looking for an off-the-shelf solution always ask your existing IT staff what it would cost in time and resources to DIY.
- The only ‘investment’ you can make in Information Technology is hiring or training technical workers. All else is just expense.
- Big IT mistake: Taking market market research into consideration when making IT decisions.
Bigger IT mistake: Making decisions and then using market research to justify them.
Market research is nothing more than documented hearsay. - To solve problems with proprietary software you have to spend time and money. To solve problems with free software you only have to spend time.
- Making things easier for management is usually the opposite of making things easier for workers. Management would do well to remember this when they want improved productivity.
- If you use a trouble ticket system as a blame thrower you will get burned.
- Having someone to blame is not an effective IT strategy.
- Migration is always an option.
- Just because something works doesn’t mean it is the best solution.
- Quality of implementation is always more important than quality of software.
I will add more as time goes on.
2 Responses to 'My IT Best Practices'
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on June 26th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Did you just finish a big project?
on June 28th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Hehe, no but I have been running into a lot of classic IT mistakes at my current job (working for a big investment bank). Particularly I see the following quite a bit:
* Non-technical people making technical decisions (many years of this have left much of our IT infrastructure a mess–but it is getting better).
* Proprietary everything everywhere. I ran into the “vendor doesn’t make documentation available to the public” problem just last week. When everything is proprietary even the simplest tasks become a pain in the ass.
* Paying for proprietary junk when they could’ve just used a free tool that is vastly superior.
* ‘One tool to rule them all’ mentality is the driving force behind all IT decisions. It boils down to this: Why use two perfectly capable tools when you can use one tool that does the same thing in an incomplete, half-assed, proprietary manner? If my company’s IT management was in charge of demolishing a house they’d hand everyone hammers and say they got a bulk discount… Then they’d wonder and complain when the project takes 4x longer to complete and attrition goes up.
-Riskable
http://riskable.com
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