I may be many things, but I am not a product cheerleader.
Even my interviewers acknowledge this. They tell me it is refreshing to find that I am not biased towards certain technology.
The truth is that many kinds of technologies can work for companies. It is a matter of their values as a company, the money they wish to spend and many other factors that are outside of IT decision making sphere. The tone is set by management, and then you work inside of those limitations.
What I have seen is that for many companies they do what is easy rather than what is helpful. What do I mean? They stick with vendors because they don’t want to have to learn new things, and pile up technical debt until it becomes unmanageable.
I have seen as a consultant that many companies say they are a vendor shop. Which is interesting when that vendor has failed them and continues to fail them. No technology is perfect, but if your vendors are becoming less reliable, it seems like having a discussion about options is a reasonable conversation. Rarely this is done.
Part of the reluctance to change vendors is when IT says that its hard to make changes in their organization. This is a failure of leadership. If leadership says we need to make these changes to be competitive or people will start losing their jobs, people cooperate. You have to give a reason for people to see that changing is in their best interests and it doesn’t have to be threatening them with their jobs. Everyone wants a win/win situation in life unless they are crazy.
Why am I sharing this? I just went through my website and deleted all references to a company and product that I used to love. I did this because when I called them yesterday to ask where the product was, they didn’t have any timeframes when it would be shipped. That is unacceptable. If I have paid for the product and they can’t tell me a rough time frame it will ship, then I question many things about them. It also didn’t make me feel good when I made the order on their website that the email that was generated to me contained IT programming errors that were obvious in the copy. That isn’t a good sign either. When a company doesn’t do quality control, they have over automated and not enough people are watching the boat.
Every company is suffering from this. Companies that had good reputations have bad products now because they tried to save money on labor and cut too many corners and caused problems for their customers and employees. There is a balance between intelligent labor savings, and stupid adoption of unproven technologies. Companies have not learned this and continue to push untested vendor solutions that are not in their best interests.
You can support a vendor all you want, but they will lead you to ruin if you don’t challenge what they produce.