The Thirteen Scariest Things in IT

Written by Michael Vizard, Illustrated by Brian Moore

Thanks to the wonders of technology, now anybody in the world can e-mail you about their IT problem any time of the day or night.

Talk about the trip down the proverbial rabbit hole. Mostly you get to deal with people who prefer machines to people and can’t understand why people don’t behave like machines. What’s amazing is that the line to get into the rabbit hole gets longer every

There is nothing quite as exhilarating as having a well-honed IT strategy destroyed by the business executive who signed a contract during a vendor’s golfing boondoggle.

Having the people in place and the money to pay them is the key to any successful project. So when you lose key people or suddenly have to pay them 20 percent more to keep them, it’s little wonder that most projects are late and over budget.

There is nothing like a major upgrade of a ubiquitous operating system to cause all kinds of downstream havoc ranging from broken applications to obsolescence of existing infrastructure because it can no longer handle the load.

There is nothing scarier than business executives armed with buzzwords such as ‘re-engineering’ or ‘the agile enterprise.’ That have been adopted by careful skimming of the latest business book mentioned in the Wall Street Journal or the Harvard Business

Most IT departments report to CFOs who have little or no knowledge of the real cost of enterprise computing. As a result, they still think of IT as a cost center rather than a tool to drive revenue and maximize profit.

Nothing exposes the flawed inner workings of a company more than a business process integration project and, of course when it fails, it’s always IT’s fault.

There is no piece of paper more arcane and more lethal to your career than a poorly written software license contract that can lead to years and years of litigation.

There is nothing quite as troubling as waking up in the morning to discover that one of your primary IT suppliers has been acquired by a rival that plans to obsolete the products your company relies on.

CFOs may think low-cost contract labor is great, but managing cultural divides across multiple timelines on projects with hard deadlines is a guaranteed recipe for stress.

While there are lots of good deals to be had at the end of any quarter, it’s also the time when salespeople promise that their product can fly with the pigs so long as you sign on the dotted line by the end of the fiscal quarter.

Any time your company merges with another company of any size, the first place companies look to gain ‘efficiencies of scale’ is by reducing the redundant IT staff.