Multiple overpayments in IT and where they arise. Part 2

Caution: article detector. One of the side effects of reading this article is the so-called butthurt. Everyone who is eager to downvote and prove that even multiple optimization is “saving on matches” – are responsible for the described overpayments!

I continue to describe the places where multiple hidden overpayments in IT arise. The previous article was about infrastructure, but someone may consider the expenses on it not to be a very significant part of the overall IT budget. Let's move on to the budget items so that there are no “blank spots” in it, in which the most monstrous ones are hidden ~~creatures~~ waste.

Payroll, outsourcing, contractor services, projects

IBD: updates for the sake of updates, development for the sake of development – lack of a product approach. It is necessary to skip all projects (and generally to implement impulses at home ~~vicious circle~~ CI/CD pipeline) through a strict ~~firewall~~ product approach filter: invest money only in what will bring in more income than investment. Much more. Can't we calculate how much profit this firing of versions like a machine gun and rewriting code every other time will bring? Can't we calculate how much profit an upgrade of Windows Server versions, various commercial software will bring? We don't. The imitation of vigorous activity is nipped in the bud – payroll, project costs are reduced several times! Violations of business processes, downtime due to the continuous risk of breaking something with continuous rework disappear.
Frequent incidents, insufficient information security. Just by persistently neglecting the OS settings, it would be possible to prevent if not 100, then 99% of malware infections, including ransomware with all the losses that such infections lead to. I'm not even talking about the fact that some employees even work with admin rights. It's convenient for people – and for viruses too. The ability to launch and install any crapware and frequent changes – admins are constantly fussing and putting out fires, and in the remaining working hours they deal with IBD in the form of upgrades and alterations, creating those very changes. A vicious circle closes. It is clear that in such a turbulent environment more people are needed. The policy of a sealed computer, with which nothing happens for years except for the fast operation of office applications, magically reduces the payroll for admins by several times.
The IT director's ego, paid for by the company. The desire to hire as many people as the higher-ups will allow. The bigger the department, the better for the resume and the feeling of self-importance.
The IT department is like a theater: people are needed to play roles in some methodology. And like Hollywood: the more expensive the actor, the better. Formalism is robbing: purely for the sake of the idea of portraying (again, like an actor) “the maturity of the company” – real money is given for a highly paid overhead from abstract, duplicating and imitating stormy activity positions. For example, “change management manager”. No extra changes – no extra managers needed!
overpayment 3 times
Underutilization of remote management capabilities. To solve a user's problem, the admin comes in person, waits for a chair at the workplace to become free, stops for a chat on the way there/back… Although, the infrastructure should have such a property as manageability. And then a checklist is appropriate: is it possible to solve the problem through a remote command / snap-in? yes/no – by connecting to a graphical session? (here you already need to agree with the user – and this takes time) yes/no – and only in the case of the latter “no” go on foot to the workplace! All this about manageability and competent use of the console and msc snap-ins also applies to remote branches, where you can not have your own admins at all, having only a contract with piecework payment in case of eliminating physical failures in the infrastructure.
Unprofitable contractor, dependence on the contractor. The latter occurs when only the one who wrote the code can understand the heap of code and crutches. If you didn't want to figure it out and delve into it yourself, you wanted a turnkey solution – the contractor will try to make himself indispensable.
“Turnkey” – 2-3 times overpayment.
As a rule, a company has its own IT department, there are competent people there and they are not getting paid for nothing, they are able to prepare the infrastructure, just install the implemented software – sometimes this is the level of enikei. So why, when implementing a project, pay a contractor for such services? In addition, when doing something turnkey, the contractor throws in more of everything, necessary and not necessary, sells what the company already has. It is profitable to delegate to the contractor only that part of the work for which our own competencies and resources are not enough. And in general, to actively interact with him, and not pay and wait until everything is done for us.

IT has a difference from other departments of companies: expenses on them are poorly verified for adequacy. Worse, at all levels – from the system administrator to the business owner – there is no culture at all, no concept of optimizationhow to build and develop IT economically, there is no thought at all about cunning, hacker thinking. How companies successfully use tricks (lateral, aka hacker thinking) in tax optimization! How sometimes, to the detriment of reputation, they rush to reduce the cost of the composition of products! But at the same time, in IT expenses – everyone is so, on the contrary, simple-minded, conformists and philanthropists that it seems that the world has gone mad! Split thinking. There is no culture, no concept of cunning in IT even at the everyday level, when you all pay several times more than necessary for a personal computer or communication tariffs. Therefore, not only “the future is in AI”, but also in the collapse of the bubble of unnecessary costs, with the same purposefulness with which businesses optimize taxes.