Metrics, metrics

Those of us who do work in a service-oriented IT know that adoption of new technologies is how we justify our existence, especially in huge companies. All the groups and business units in our firm pay for our services as if we were a separate entity. Whether the new technology will offer significant improvements in productivity or reduced cost of ownership doesn't seem to influence these decisions. It's the newest technology and they want it and if we can't deliver they will find someone else who will (outsource). We already have pilot groups from each department peforming user acceptance testing on Vista and the plan is to have the whole firm on it in six months.

Maintenance of the existing infrastructure is unfortunately only a small portion of our budget. We keep the network from melting doesn't cut it anymore. Department heads come to us and dictate to us how they want a new product or service added and the timeframe. It is up to us to do all the research and testing and then come up a with a proposal with time and cost.

I miss the days of working in an IT department where we mandated policy.