Re: If its mission critical
"Beancounters are preprogrammed to ignore articles like this and all “technical” advice. They only take notice of other beancounters opinions."
All too true.
At one point I worked for a major bank (1,600+ branches) doing hardware evaluation and selection. I would look at the alternatives, evaluate the technical requirements and solutions, vet the contracts, negotiate the prices, and report my recommendations to the manager of the hardware section in the Systems Division (about 3,000 employees). He would hand it over to the Director of Technical Services (responsible for the hardware, data centres, operating systems, and system software) who would take the report to the system division financial director (an accountant with no strong technical understanding) who would then take it to the Senior Vice President (Systems) who was also an accountant and would only listen to another accountant.
It was a big mainframe shop, with more than a dozen IBM engineers working full time in each of our data centres maintaining and installing the hardware... with the decisions based on second hand information filtered through an accountant's understanding of the technical issues, conveyed to another accountant.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
