http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2421509,00.asp One has to wonder who the hell runs their IT department. Or maybe one has to wonder if there's a new vacancy now in their IT department...
I thought it was a funny story of the incompetence of bureaucracies. But I looked it up because I didn't know what the EDA was. The EDA provides grants to economically depressed communities (probably places like Detroit and others that are particularly hard-hit either by the economic downturn or one disaster (natural or otherwise). In other words, like other agencies that are supposed to be doing GOOD, they are probably way underfunded. I don't want to get into Prism or anything else political. This was a human-incompetence-made disaster. A small one, at least by Government standards (if you haven't lost a billion by lunchtime, it's probably a weekend). It's funny until you start to think about the true cost of it.
What I find surprising is that they justify destruction of all the equipment by saying they thought it was a potentially massive problem, but they specifically stopped short of destroying everything they would have to consider equally vulnerable to the problem. They ran out of money, so the exercise was done for the year. In government agencies, if you do not need more money each year, your budget gets cut. Reading between the lines, I say their IT department should get the budget cut by the amount of the damage they intentionally inflicted upon themselves.
You don't cut their budget. What you do is dock their pay, transfer them to Alaska, and replace them with people you train yourself, who actually have a clue. If a government agency is tasked with doing something important, you don't cut their budget unless it's too fat. You don't cut the budget because it's too small as a result of incompetence. Send them to Alaska. If they don't get the hint, then next step is sending them to a war zone. It's hard to fire government employees, so relocation to someplace less pleasant is the obvious solution. Basically, you don't destroy hardware because of a software problem. Worst case scenario, you look at each PC one at a time, or if you don't have the manpower, you hire contractors. But you don't trash the computers unless you were planning on getting rid of them anyway. BTW, if a job looks like it might involve destroying your office, then the VERY first thing you had better do is make absolutely certain that you have the right information. Think of it as getting a second opinion before you do something which might turn out to be dumb. You don't think that demolitionists knock down buildings without first being absolutely certain that they have the right address.
And the problem here is the fact that people who "manage" have to have a clue when it comes to "managing things", but they can't be required to be IT experts just because they are in the general vicinity of computers (as in, there's no law for that; I do acknowledge that it would be nice if they were). What would help instead is ascertaining that someone in a management position cannot dismiss an "expert" in their own field off-handedly but rather have to write a report concerning the warning and their own dismissal of that. Something like this means it would be possible to get them tried if they did something utterly moronic, which would scare other people in similar position to theirs into not being morons as often.
It's true that IT managers aren't always knowledgable about IT. All of the managers that I've had either still had their hands 'in the mix' so to speak at the same time they were managers, or had at least done something resembling my job in the past. Despite that, a few of them were clueless anyway. At least one of them knew he was clueless, because it had been so long since he had been doing actual IT work) so he always asked good questions (which is important). If you are going to have a manager who doesn't know IT that well, that's the kind of manager that you want. The worst thing that anyone can do is not ask questions, and not be open to questions whether they are a manager, or an underling. The easiest way to get into trouble is to pretend that you know everything that's going on (or worse, to THINK you know everything that's going on). If any of those clueless managers that I'd had actually ever asked my opinion on anything, I think I'd have a heart attack. That's kind of why the deadlines we'd get were straight out of fantasy land, because no one ever asked the opinion of someone who actually understood what a job entailed.
As an IT manager myself (yeah, that's my real job, books don't pay near enough to quit! ) I have to wholeheartedly agree with Haldurson. I'm still down in the trenches (I insist on building most of the servers and computers myself, just to stay in practice) but I know several of my colleagues (not at this particular location) who wouldn't know a BIOS from the Biosphere (1 or 2). It's rather annoying and sometimes shocking, but for anybody who's ever read a Dilbert cartoon it's unfortunately a fact of the trade. They give bad names to those of us who actually try.
