Burger barn put cloud on IT menu, burned out its developers In Australia fast-food history played out differently to the rest of the world and the nation no longer has Burger King. So when you want a Whopper down under you head to a chain called “Hungry Jack's” that is pretty much a BK clone. We mention the burger barn because Vulture South today encountered its CIO Bruce Nolte, who …
Getting rid of bespoke IT and using cloud for anything other than an auxiliary customer facing web site (not the backend database and Co-Lo makes more sense) or temporary collaboration tools across sites is madness.
The Cloud providers are in it to make profit (or in some cases mine your data).
Security, resilience, privacy, backups, disaster recovery, bespoke applications etc? Ultimately you have no clue how the Cloud provider is REALLY (if at all) doing these.
I fear the "Cloud" failure apocalypse when too much has moved to it more than WWIII
Hungry Jack's CIO is correct - most developers or IT folks who are even slightly hands on wouldn't accept a vendor management role unless forced. That, and IT project management is usually where burnt-out techies who don't want to keep going on the learning treadmill go. I know and work with lots of IT PMs -- they make lots of money but who would want that job? As a PM you're a glorified secretary who has to get 500 people they don't control to do their jobs or lose theirs. As a vendor manager you're a service ticket passthrough and "free lunch collector." The second thing is nice (and if your vendor is Oracle you'll get showered in free stuff) but I'm a big fan of actually doing work and solving problems.
I think right now, the SaaS vendors are cleaning up by selling the dream of firing (or neutering) the IT department to companies who don't really see IT as useful and want to be rid of it. I think in some cases it can be done simply, but the second you want anything custom, prepare to pay. That's definitely how Oracle operates - they'll sell you their HR or ERP suite but it only works out-of-box for a tiny fraction of organizations. I know someone working for a large state university using PeopleSoft, and they pay through the nose to get Oracle or their "preferred consultants" to customize the system for changes in state law, union contracts and rules, etc. What I wish CIOs would be taught in their MBA classes is that the level of complexity doesn't change - it just gets pushed to different areas and that's the point of SaaS, but it doesn't disappear and if your vendor has a bad day, so do you!
(By the way, does Burger King know about these guys? I'm reminded of the "McDowell's" restaurant from "Coming to America." If I'm ever in Australia I'll have to try them out and see how they compare -- if their Oracle SaaS stuff is working. Those burgers on their website look an awful lot like the Whopper!)
The name Burger King was already taken. Burger King bought out Hungry Jacks, which served its own menu, and made it the exclusive franchise owner of Burger King in Oz. Since then, they've served the BK menu. So yes BK have certainly heard of them..
"The cauliflower was quite nice. IMHO it is better when cut, roasted until quite brown, the pureed with salt, butter and a splash of milk. Like mash, only nuttier and better"
I think it's the salt, butter and milk you are tasting. Cauliflower is bland and tastes of vegetable.
How to neuter the IT dept, the nocturnal fantasy of PHBs everywhere, for fear of being found out, cause they see IT people as as a personal threat, cause they actually know something. I wonder who's going to maintain IT services 'in the cloud'. Oh, wait, the PHB can always outsource that to India.
"Let's pay an expensive middle-man to do almost exactly what our IT guys were doing, with less responsibility and care, for more money, representing a tinier portion of importance to their careers, and being more out-of-reach than ever."
I honestly do not understand this strategy.
I mean, I sort-of get outsourcing if you're going to save money but... ORACLE?! I mean, you might as well just stamp "Will sign any contract for a free lunch!" on your head. It's the stupidest move I've ever heard of and it WILL come back to bite you like... well, just about every other Oracle customer there is.
But ignoring that, you only had a team of 20 in the first place. That's good for running what must be hundreds(?) of outlets if they're all using your systems.
I honestly can't wait for the fireworks when you next want to make a change to that system. It's going to get expensive fast and you'll either need to bury that cost under your denial, or pay up and backtrack on every reason you did it.
I had a guy on the phone the other day who was trying to convince me to put him through to my boss so he could discuss outsourcing the IT department. Needless to say the phone call never went through, I considered that the height of rudeness, personally, but that there's also a reason that I'm on-site. Because EVERY time they've outsourced the IT, in any place I've worked, it's been a disaster.
I spent the first half of my career exclusively running around those places who had outsourced - or been forced to by local councils - but "needed extra help" to maintain their usual levels of service, and I've spent the second half exclusively fixing up the messes caused by outsourcing IT carelessly (I'm sure you CAN do it, if you're careful, but you shouldn't do it for cost factor alone).
Well said. When I retired, they replaced me with a contractor. They've been going through contractors and outsourcing companies about every 3 months. I can tell when they're switching by the phone call in late afternoon about "meeting for lunch and discussing my doing some part-time work". Lunch is usually good. It's nice to see my old boss and talk about everything other than work. But she knows that I'll say "No thanks". I'm retired, off the corporate hamster wheel and don't need or want to deal with all the corporate bullshit. Lord knows what kind of clustertruck I'd walk into if I ever took them up on the offers.
interviewed recently with a UK FTSE100 org for a senior architect level position. they've outsourced their datacentre to a cloud from a well known, apps to a big4, and network & security to well known telco. "so as a subject matter expert on those, you want me to check whether the least-bad-they-can-find folk at these providers are doing it right, rip them to pieces when they present their crappy designs / screw up implementations, and then try to persuade them to do it better without infringing however many terms in the contracts? instead of leading an internal team to do it right in the first place?"
No thanks.
good luck finding someone with the skillset to do that work properly, who is prepared to commit the one way career decision of walking away from the tech....
An architect who wants to actually work with tech, rather than writing up ideal-world vapourware that no-one can afford & with no explanation of how to transform to get there? Yeah right. I thought architect for cloud would be right up their street - lots of telling people how to do things then washing your hands of the reality when they don't match your cloud cuckoo-land visioneering.
Basically when Burger King went to launch in Australia, someone else already had the trademark locally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_Jack%27s
There were legal shenaningans, and for a period there were BK branded restaurants, but they never took off to the same extent, and subsequently if you want BK in Australia, you go to HJs.
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