From: Strata Rose Chalup (strata@virtual.net)
Date: Tue Oct 03 2000 - 12:13:08 PDT
I agree with the sentiment about decision-making, but it was quite
justified here. There's a difference between autonomy at the edges and
product-group level managers making decisions that could expose all of
engineering to intellectual property risk.
When somebody who is a prima donna and/or who has one or two "corporate
research fellow" folks on their staff, makes a request that would
potentially compromise all of engineering, and is not willing to isolate
their network from the rest of engineering, that person had damn well
better get *somebody* higher up to approve that rather than leaning on a
sysadmin who is an "individual contributor" (ie has no management
clout).
Ya gotta play it as it lays. How about this? The manager for Group D
says "we're tired of having our machines be slow in the morning because
the nightly backups aren't done, but we don't have any budget to get
faster backups, so we want you to turn off the daily backups and switch
to doing only one, on the weekend, instead." Does the manager for Group
D have that authority? Maybe it depends.
If Group D is an internal R&D group, probably. If it's an engineering
group working on a release, maybe so. If it's an engineering group
working on a release which is critical to the company, against a tight
deadline, who might lose 5 business days of work, hmm, that gets a
little more complicated. And if it's the finance department, who runs
payroll and purchase orders for the whole company, hell no, that gets
pushed higher up!
Rule #2 is that there are no hard and fast rules except rule #1 and rule
#2.
_SRC
Jeff Bone wrote:
> [...]
> > "You certainly can do that, but first please put it in email, print it,
> > and give me a signed and dated copy for review by my management." For
> > really good stuff, it's "
>
> That company is a dead company. By far the largest challenge facing
> businesses in the next decades is adapting to the ever increasing rate of
> change. Decision-making has to be decentralized, and autonomy has to be
> pushed out to the edges, in order to cope with it. [...]
-- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Strata Rose Chalup [strata@knownow.com] | strata@virtual.net, KF6NBZ Director of Network Operations | VirtualNet Consulting KnowNow, Inc [http://www.knownow.com] | http://www.virtual.net/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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