How do we manage?

One of the readings this week, Mark Keil's "Pulling the plug: Software project management and the problem of project escalation," reminded me of the lecture that included the cautionary tale of a library system that hired a company, and several years after the project was supposed to be complete, they still didn't have anything operational. Yikes.

I've been thinking about how IT professionals track all the different machines and software at their organizations this week. Last week, one of the groups presented the idea of having a tag on each machine that held a record of its history, to help make the IT workers' jobs more efficient. We've talked about how more academic sites with a strong feeling of intellectual freedom and privacy rights might feel that Big Brother is trespassing on their space if IT were to dictate every computing detail. Yet, in a big corporation, everyone might be forced to have the same computer with the same set up, with very tight security to monitor it.

What is the best way to track all the different computers and the different set ups in a given organization? In our department, we have about 20 PCs for customer use. They all have special software that is not available on any other computers in the library system, and even those 20 are not all alike. Sometimes we feel frustrated in our office when IT re-images our computers, and we realize--too late--that some of the user information for some of the special programs has disappeared. We feel irritated that they can't keep the different computers straight, even though we have provided them with list after list...yet, I know that when those projects are automated, they're not going to think to dig back through email or through a file for the special computers.

Today, I had to struggle to find one of those lists, to help me with an estimate I needed for a grant report. I knew before, but today it really hit home what a pain it was to look at each computer separately, and try to figure out which software would be where. I can't imagine trying to manage an IT department that is responsible for hundreds of computers, and with their unique users and software.