Happy new year

Ok so I'm late but so have all my thoughts of new posts. All that is ok because right now I'm rocking out to the new Foo Fighters album called Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace which I must say is quite cool when played at about 20db louder than you should listen to it. (Hmmmm. Wonder where the neighbours are because they aren't complaining)

As promised here is the post about "Management's spin on bad ideas".

I found out though some accidental cyber stalking that one of my previous managers listed quite a number of interesting achievements from the company he left. The most interesting of them is the fact that he managed to "Lead initives to outsource email management". This on it's own seems like a great idea. A medium sized company now allowing a third party to offload some of the IT processes and freeing up staff to do more worthy things.

Let us look under the covers just a little first shall we? The company in question had a well established e-mail system in place prior to his arrival. The processes in place to be able to manage the previous mail system were well defined. The Linux administrators made sure that everything was up to snuff and working on a shoe string budget was more than possible for them. They had the mail server working with over 300 users on a small little P2-400, I believe, with a paltry 64 megs of ram for the longest time without causing any issues.

So what happened? Why did such a good system get thrown out and replaced with a Microsoft Exchange system? The answer is simple. After a select removal of staff, me, the rest of the staff saw little to no reason to say and starting looking for new places of employ. The two Linux administrators that were there left with little time between them. With no administrators for the mail system something had to be done to keep the world turning?

The solution was outsourcing the mail services to someone who could handle the problem and do it quickly. It was done with I'm guessing with some issues but a mostly transparent transition from one system to the next. The manager was undoubtedly hailed as a hero for another successful project.

The real problem. After successfully destroying a great IT group for selfish and misguided gains the manager managed to incur an on going expense to the company because of his inability to lead.

As a footnote it seems that said manager has yet to hold a job for more than a year and a half anywhere he goes.

In a way I think I may continue the quiet cyber stalking. Should I ever be in a position where I can hire someone it would be good to use the Internet to find out how some of the IT community works. There are good people out there that shouldn't have to deal with people like him.