help!

[bustamove]

Hi

There is a department in our company running multiple large projects. There is one person ALWAYS suggests free/open-source solutions to replace existing corporate solutions which is Microsoft based and of course, we invested a lot of money and resource on.

For example, he suggested GMail because he doesn't like our email filtering policy, and Google Calendar over Exchange calendar, MSN messenger, SKYPE (but we just invested 6 digits on Cisco VoIP infrastrutre) and so on...

The executives are not very supportative on IT because they think we spent too much and these free solutions will save money! He not only bypass IT running his own projects on free platform but also try to convince other project to move away from IT as well.

What's the best way to stop this! He is the most technical person in the department and others would listen to him rather than IT because "Free" is an attrative word. But we can not allow this to happen to every project...

 

[buitenhek]

In order for his suggestions to be taken seriously he should present his recommendations along with cost justification.

Free is not always free. Example: I use Mozilla Thunderbird for email but it had many problems with a Linksys router. What would be the downtime cost if these people could not communicate online?

Also, his going his own way rather than company IT can give rise to major virus problems, if not careful.

Besides, if some suggestions are good, guess who will need to implement these products (you) which requires budget for your people.

Leap and a net will appear.

Regards
Peter Buitenhek
ProfitDeveloper.com

 

[bustamove]

i totally understand and agree with you, but this is already a problem with us. i.e. people going their own way and mess things up, we end up cleaning their @ss.

WHAT'S THE BEST WAY TO STOP HIM?

Company executives are not on our side: their problem is that they don't like to pay for anything they can not see. i.e. hardware/software are OK for them, but they like to cut cost on budget for hidden cost like disaster recovery and management.

This person has a PhD degree and thinks he can do better than IT with smaller budget. God forbid! nothing fails yet.
and you are absolutely right Peter, he didn't budget anything for system management, after each project is done, he always left a few buggy linux systems on $1000 whitebox server for us to manage. Without additional budget, IT has a nightmare ...

Right now, we are propose a service level agreement with projects that if they are on their own, IT is not responsible. but i know their system will fail, eventually, these project managers will go away and it will be IT's problem...

 

[johnherman]

Free isn't Free. Free also involves support. Support can be more expensive. In addition, freeware can result in alot of finger pointing. If you use a free database and an off the shelf statistical package (there are no free stat packages as far as I know), problems can result in the vendor accusing the database and no one on the database side to push back on the vendor. Free also involves risk. Risk of not being able to get support when and how you need it.

Free isn't free. What if the people who advocate the free software decide to switch to another (free, presumably) product. This might be happening now with Sun's Solaris and Linux.

Free is OK sometimes. Sometimes it's better to spend the money because you need the reliability and supportability of the known product. It's a Risk Analysis as much as a Cost Benefit Analysis.



-------------------------
The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was - Steven Wright

 

[A0C61ZZ]

The BEST WAY TO STOP THIS GUY is to Build your case
a. by preparing metrics about failures with freewares.
b. You (as in IT) perform risk analysis of the freeware. (this would include some of the ones mentioned above by Buitenhek & johnherman).
c. Collect industrywide benchmarks to justify your case.
d. At the same time suggest a portfolio of softwares for your company with an acceptable limit of freewares (e.g. 10% of the total portfolio would be softwares)
e. Build long-term (like 5-10yr) projections for the money your executive team is willing to invest.

Don't get overwhelmed by this guy's Phd, after all Mckinsey Associates recruits fresh MBAs from leading college/universities and these guys work on business processes for people (and teach them) with 20 yrs of experience in their fields.

 

[bustamove]

Thank you all.
I'll add these to our risk assessment process.

I have nothing against open source solutions, but feel there is too much management overhead, and can be very painful sometimes....