How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs
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@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
If you would like a good example of how charge backs can mess things up but have a slight potential of working, give "Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology" by Bob Lewis a read.
I think his premise is fundamentally flawed... he thinks that treating departments as customers isolates IT from the organization. But that's backwards, it is in doing so that internal IT can attempt to approach the extreme functionality of the MSP model (but never match it) while making IT part of the business rather than at odds with departments. He's missed how it works entirely.
Remember that the C suite, the CEO, the financial department.... they are the most core of the business and they always see departments in this way. If you want IT to be part of the organization, this is really the only logical model. By the author's logic, CEOs aren't working and/or we should simply eliminate departments conceptually.
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@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
I agree that in Dustin's situation, it may not be so dire. Just in general, that is the possible dysfunction of charge backs.
Anything will be dysfunctional if not implemented properly or the organization is fundamentally dysfunctional. But there is a difference between having a good model and doing it wrong, and having a bad model.
It's like saying that driving can be slower than walking if you don't drive to the right place. Sure, while true, it misses the point.
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@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
I also want to find a way to work in Dustin's - the departments don't cleanup their old shit - so storage just keeps growing - into this as well, but I'm not sure how.
I have yet to find a way to do it here and will be watching this post for others who come up with an idea. FU*&#%@ PDF's for Credentialing bloat my file server. Worse than email attachments (grrhhhh).
Charge backs fix this in the real world every day. We've done it and the success is amazing. The people causing the bloat are...
- The ones who pay for it.
- Identified by management.
- Able to be dealt with if deemed necessary.
No other model is logically functional. Aligning cost to use is literally the only possible way for things to make sense. If the people responsible for cost aren't the ones responsible for paying for it, you've literally encouraged people to do terrible things. Why would someone clean up storage if you are financially incentivizing them not to?
Think about it... if bad IT decisions get to be made by a departmental manager, but IT is punished for them and/or other departments are punished for them... then you actually benefit by pushing through bad decisions either because it makes your department look better by internal comparison, or in a case like the storage, it is cheaper to not clean it up since cleaning it up costs your department time, but the cost of the storage is paid by someone else.
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@Dashrender said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@Dashrender said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@DustinB3403 said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@Dashrender said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@scottalanmiller said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@DustinB3403 said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
Looking for some general advice on how you might address this so you can formulate a real business plan
Bill backs.... if a department pays for what they request, you don't care if they use it or not.
How is this not done on the norm anyway to verify that departments are in fact getting value for their purchases?
Because of dysfunction? I'm not the CFO and thus can't possibly answer that.
@DustinB3403 said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@Dashrender said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@scottalanmiller said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@DustinB3403 said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
Looking for some general advice on how you might address this so you can formulate a real business plan
Bill backs.... if a department pays for what they request, you don't care if they use it or not.
How is this not done on the norm anyway to verify that departments are in fact getting value for their purchases?
Because of dysfunction? I'm not the CFO and thus can't possibly answer that.
Dysfunction may come about because the company only has so much money and if the charge back is a fixed cost, you can bet all departments will work VERY hard to be first in line to use up all of their fee first.
Add to that, you now have all department heads stating, "Hey, I paid my monthly fee, now give me what I want NOW! My department is more important than any other department" Thus more dysfunction within the company.
If you would like a good example of how charge backs can mess things up but have a slight potential of working, give "Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology" by Bob Lewis a read.
I don't think it needs to be super hard and fast to live and die by charge backs, that could be a CFO/exec level only thing... but then the CFO could look at a department who's asking for 750 TB of storage, and look at the history of that department and might come back and say - uh, yeah.. ya know.. we're going to get you that 750, but it will be staged over years - etc...
I agree that in Dustin's situation, it may not be so dire. Just in general, that is the possible dysfunction of charge backs. I've only been in a SMB area but I have seen CIO/CFO/CEO's (and their SMB equivalents) fight over money constantly. Yes, the C-levels will make the choice but only to the determent of the overall business.
If the CIO/CFO is the one making the final OK - then there should be no determent to the business
Right, there is a central point of decision making. A CIO, for example, can't argue with the CEO more than the CEO allows because the CIO is still providing valuable arguments.
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@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@Dashrender said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@Dashrender said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
I also want to find a way to work in Dustin's - the departments don't cleanup their old shit - so storage just keeps growing - into this as well, but I'm not sure how.
I have yet to find a way to do it here and will be watching this post for others who come up with an idea.FU*&#%@ PDF's for Credentialing bloat my file server. Worse than email attachments (grrhhhh).
Better than being in email in my mind. are you in medical?
Yeah a Medical SMB. The issue is they come in email, the email is then forwarded (with attachement) to a few other internal individuals and then save to the file server. Then they make one change to the document and the process starts over and no one bothers to remove the previous PDF's that no longer matter.
This is simple departmental management. Whoever is managing that department doesn't care, and whoever is over that department doesn't care. So bottom line, IT shouldn't care as the business thinks that this is what they want.
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@scottalanmiller said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@Dashrender said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@Dashrender said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
I also want to find a way to work in Dustin's - the departments don't cleanup their old shit - so storage just keeps growing - into this as well, but I'm not sure how.
I have yet to find a way to do it here and will be watching this post for others who come up with an idea.FU*&#%@ PDF's for Credentialing bloat my file server. Worse than email attachments (grrhhhh).
Better than being in email in my mind. are you in medical?
Yeah a Medical SMB. The issue is they come in email, the email is then forwarded (with attachement) to a few other internal individuals and then save to the file server. Then they make one change to the document and the process starts over and no one bothers to remove the previous PDF's that no longer matter.
This is simple departmental management. Whoever is managing that department doesn't care, and whoever is over that department doesn't care. So bottom line, IT shouldn't care as the business thinks that this is what they want.
I know Scott's black/white view on this is accurate from a 20,000 ft view, but the reality is that management doesn't have the numbers of the cost of managing this extra data (IT expenses mostly) compared to the cost of employee time to cleanup these files - or even better - create a policy that fixes the problem in the first place going forward, then cleanup the old shit.
Lack of numbers is the whole reason these types of issues exist, and that is a management issue - because they aren't demanding them.
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@scottalanmiller said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
If you would like a good example of how charge backs can mess things up but have a slight potential of working, give "Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology" by Bob Lewis a read.
I think his premise is fundamentally flawed... he thinks that treating departments as customers isolates IT from the organization. But that's backwards, it is in doing so that internal IT can attempt to approach the extreme functionality of the MSP model (but never match it) while making IT part of the business rather than at odds with departments. He's missed how it works entirely.
Remember that the C suite, the CEO, the financial department.... they are the most core of the business and they always see departments in this way. If you want IT to be part of the organization, this is really the only logical model. By the author's logic, CEOs aren't working and/or we should simply eliminate departments conceptually.
There is a big problem with seeing internal IT as external IT or MSP. First problem is that vendors don't care about customers. Their primary concern is themselves - the ultimate reason for all business. That would not be a problem because that would naturally be controlled by market forces, competition. Those that didn't provide customer value would die. However internal IT doesn't have other internal IT departments to compete with. So having internal IT as a department where the other departments are their "customers" is an unnatural environment. A non-self regulating environment, a monopoly. It's however the defacto standard for larger companies.
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@Pete-S said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@scottalanmiller said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
If you would like a good example of how charge backs can mess things up but have a slight potential of working, give "Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology" by Bob Lewis a read.
I think his premise is fundamentally flawed... he thinks that treating departments as customers isolates IT from the organization. But that's backwards, it is in doing so that internal IT can attempt to approach the extreme functionality of the MSP model (but never match it) while making IT part of the business rather than at odds with departments. He's missed how it works entirely.
Remember that the C suite, the CEO, the financial department.... they are the most core of the business and they always see departments in this way. If you want IT to be part of the organization, this is really the only logical model. By the author's logic, CEOs aren't working and/or we should simply eliminate departments conceptually.
There is a big problem with seeing internal IT as external IT or MSP. First problem is that vendors don't care about customers. Their primary concern is themselves - the ultimate reason for all business. That would not be a problem because that would naturally be controlled by market forces, competition. Those that didn't provide customer value would die. However internal IT doesn't have other internal IT departments to compete with. So having internal IT as a department where the other departments are their "customers" is an unnatural environment. A non-self regulating environment, a monopoly. It's however the defacto standard for larger companies.
And that is why Scott said they could never be as good as a real MSP/ITSP.
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@Dashrender said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@Pete-S said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@scottalanmiller said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
If you would like a good example of how charge backs can mess things up but have a slight potential of working, give "Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology" by Bob Lewis a read.
I think his premise is fundamentally flawed... he thinks that treating departments as customers isolates IT from the organization. But that's backwards, it is in doing so that internal IT can attempt to approach the extreme functionality of the MSP model (but never match it) while making IT part of the business rather than at odds with departments. He's missed how it works entirely.
Remember that the C suite, the CEO, the financial department.... they are the most core of the business and they always see departments in this way. If you want IT to be part of the organization, this is really the only logical model. By the author's logic, CEOs aren't working and/or we should simply eliminate departments conceptually.
There is a big problem with seeing internal IT as external IT or MSP. First problem is that vendors don't care about customers. Their primary concern is themselves - the ultimate reason for all business. That would not be a problem because that would naturally be controlled by market forces, competition. Those that didn't provide customer value would die. However internal IT doesn't have other internal IT departments to compete with. So having internal IT as a department where the other departments are their "customers" is an unnatural environment. A non-self regulating environment, a monopoly. It's however the defacto standard for larger companies.
And that is why Scott said they could never be as good as a real MSP/ITSP.
I thought he meant scale. Because that is another reason.
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@Pete-S said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@Dashrender said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@Pete-S said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@scottalanmiller said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
If you would like a good example of how charge backs can mess things up but have a slight potential of working, give "Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology" by Bob Lewis a read.
I think his premise is fundamentally flawed... he thinks that treating departments as customers isolates IT from the organization. But that's backwards, it is in doing so that internal IT can attempt to approach the extreme functionality of the MSP model (but never match it) while making IT part of the business rather than at odds with departments. He's missed how it works entirely.
Remember that the C suite, the CEO, the financial department.... they are the most core of the business and they always see departments in this way. If you want IT to be part of the organization, this is really the only logical model. By the author's logic, CEOs aren't working and/or we should simply eliminate departments conceptually.
There is a big problem with seeing internal IT as external IT or MSP. First problem is that vendors don't care about customers. Their primary concern is themselves - the ultimate reason for all business. That would not be a problem because that would naturally be controlled by market forces, competition. Those that didn't provide customer value would die. However internal IT doesn't have other internal IT departments to compete with. So having internal IT as a department where the other departments are their "customers" is an unnatural environment. A non-self regulating environment, a monopoly. It's however the defacto standard for larger companies.
And that is why Scott said they could never be as good as a real MSP/ITSP.
I thought he meant scale. Because that is another reason.
I should have said - that's one of the reasons.
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@scottalanmiller said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
If you would like a good example of how charge backs can mess things up but have a slight potential of working, give "Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology" by Bob Lewis a read.
I think his premise is fundamentally flawed... he thinks that treating departments as customers isolates IT from the organization. But that's backwards, it is in doing so that internal IT can attempt to approach the extreme functionality of the MSP model (but never match it) while making IT part of the business rather than at odds with departments. He's missed how it works entirely.
Remember that the C suite, the CEO, the financial department.... they are the most core of the business and they always see departments in this way. If you want IT to be part of the organization, this is really the only logical model. By the author's logic, CEOs aren't working and/or we should simply eliminate departments conceptually.
I understand how both you and Bob Lewis arrive at your own logical conclusions. I don't doubt both of you have evidence that each one works depending on the company and situation. In the end, both actually have issues as you and Bob point out. Different strokes for different folks.
As we all know, there are numerous business using different models, yet are healthy and profitable. That is what matters in the end.
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@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
In the end, both actually have issues as you and Bob point out. Different strokes for different folks.
But are the issues he's pointing out WITH the system, or from failing to implement it?
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@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
As we all know, there are numerous business using different models, yet are healthy and profitable. That is what matters in the end.
That's not quite true. Healthy and profitable aren't always the same. In fact, rarely are. Many doctors make profits, while losing their shirts. Why? Because of things that have nothing to do with business, they have an ability to make money regardless of the unhealthiness of the business.
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@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
both actually have issues as you and Bob point out.
What issues does he point out? I point mine out publicly for peer review. Where are his listed without needing to pay to find out what they are?
Given that the basis he works from is incorrect, I'm not sure what his points would even relate to.
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@Dashrender said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
I know Scott's black/white view on this is accurate from a 20,000 ft view, but the reality is that management doesn't have the numbers of the cost of managing this extra data (IT expenses mostly) compared to the cost of employee time to cleanup these files - or even better - create a policy that fixes the problem in the first place going forward, then cleanup the old shit.
They would if we followed proper billing strategies
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@scottalanmiller said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
both actually have issues as you and Bob point out.
What issues does he point out? I point mine out publicly for peer review. Where are his listed without needing to pay to find out what they are?
Given that the basis he works from is incorrect, I'm not sure what his points would even relate to.
I found one that is wrong...
He thinks that this promotes SLAs. But it does not. He's conflating the model with "common mistakes". He's not addressing that the model isn't right, he's just pointing out the insanely obvious fact that having the right model doesn't magically fix other mistakes in a business.
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@Dashrender said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
I know Scott's black/white view on this is accurate from a 20,000 ft view,
And if you believe that to be true, then you know it is accurate all the way down. Because that's how that works.
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@Pete-S said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
There is a big problem with seeing internal IT as external IT or MSP. First problem is that vendors don't care about customers.
Actually, that's VERY wrong. Let me tell you, as an MSP we care WAY more about our customers than any internal IT staff that we find. I've spoken and written about this a lot. As an MSP we are incentived to want to do the right thing for our customers way more than internal staff is. We have a longer, more ingrained relationship than internal staff are. Internal staff have so much less incentive to make the company successful. The MSP model is vastly superior here.
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@Pete-S said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
Their primary concern is themselves - the ultimate reason for all business.
True, BUT...
- All employees fall into the same boat. So while this is a negative to the MSP, it is equally negative to the employee. So it's moot.
- MSPs as long term partners of the business have vastly more ability to align their goals and values in ways employees cannot. So specifically because of this point, an MSP has way more reason to want a business to succeed.
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@Pete-S said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:
However internal IT doesn't have other internal IT departments to compete with. So having internal IT as a department where the other departments are their "customers" is an unnatural environment.
It's not unnatural. It's actually very natural. I can't think of any other natural way for it to work. It's how all service departments work. Janitorial, finance, HR. It would be unnatural for IT to work differently.
