"I could never justify to management more than 40 hours to manually provision and support one employee." --Robert W. Frei, William A. Kibbe & Associates
Numbers Up
Your Cover Story on employee provisioning is based on patently absurd numbers, which negates most of the article's value. As an IT professional, I assure you I could never justify to management more than 40 hours to manually provision and support one employee. Yet this is the bottom line on page 38 of the article! I would be told to fire the staff and bring in people who earn their $26-per-hour employee cost. Can you suggest a way for me, as an IT manager, to explain a cost of more than $1,100 to provision and support the access of one employee? I guess if I send that employee to 40 locations to make changes to 40 devices or services all over town, have that person trained in a different procedure for each of them, let him or her spend mornings at Tim Horton's over a gallon of cappuccino, provide a two-hour paid lunch break, allot time for the employee to flirt with people at the business-services pool, let him or her maintain a few dozen online chat threads and max out cell phone minutes on company time, then I could probably stretch it to an entire work week. Is this what we call productivity improvement?
Robert W. Frei Systems Designer
William A. Kibbe & Associates bfrei@kibbe.com
Lori MacVittie responds: For our RFI scenario in the article, with the number of systems and typical lag time of IT to provision an employee, 40 hours is about right. For your organization, the figure may be much lower. It all depends on an organization's size, business processes and provisioning-process complexity. We provided figures and worksheets as a guideline to help you determine your organization's particular costs, savings and so forth. Also, you can use other factors, such as efficiencies gained in terms of employee ramp-up time and compliance with federal regulations, to justify investing in an employee-provisioning system.
Falken Falsity
Mike Lee's editorial point in "Warning: Spoilers Ahead!" is well made and justified, but in the interest of accuracy, I want to point out that Matthew Broderick's character in the movie War Games hacked into the NORAD computer using a back door. The genius programmer Falken hadn't died--he'd just provided himself with a back-door entry and a "superuser password."
GPL Power
Regarding the "viral" nature of open source or GPL'd software (as mentioned in Don MacVittie's "SAP DB: The Other Open-Source Database?"), Microsoft is planting much FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] to scare people off. Most people are not aware of the specifics of the GPL and why it is beneficial to all in some cases. The GPL lets the software owners or copyright holders release a GPL version of the product while maintaining a proprietary version. Since they are the copyright holders, they can do what they want with the proprietary code (I'm not sure about incorporating changes to the GPL version that others made to the proprietary version). See the link at "Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU GPL." An example is the Quanta Plus free Web editing program and Quanta Gold by theKompany. TheKompany got permission from the authors of Quanta Gold to do this (there was a split by the authors). This feature, in combination with the LPGL nature of some libraries that allow a proprietary program to use open-source libraries and link to them to make a proprietary product, give vendors many avenues to use open source to their benefit. SAP will benefit by getting more users familiar with its product and possibly incorporating ideas from the GPL version into its product line. Microsoft could actually release the source code to Windows as GPL and continue developing Windows as proprietary. To maintain market share, however, the company would need to ensure that its version, as opposed to the free version being developed by volunteers worldwide, is the best. I think we know who would win.
By the way, I am all for proprietary licenses as well. It all depends on the author, the software and the business model being used.
John R. Violette President
VincuSys
Les Instruments de Musique Twigg jrv@sympatico.ca
Making Sense
If Don and Lori MacVittie keep writing, I might actually learn some of the network stuff they've both clearly mastered! I truly appreciate their articles in Network Computing. It is one of the only technology magazines I really enjoy reading.
David O. Saalfeld Manager, Application Services
VincuSys
Les Instruments de Musique Twigg
Company name withheld on request
Corrections
In our Sept. 2 Sneak Preview "Gomez GPN: Web Monitoring With a Smile" (page 24), we should have said that Gomez GPN has 50 points of presence (35 domestic and 15 international).
In our July 8 Sneak Preview "Luminous E200: Enlightened Transport for Ethernet" (page 18), we should have said that Luminous E200 supports autodiscovery except in networks using Luminous' LMS management system. Also, we should have indicated that Sonet systems have a failover rate of less than 50 milliseconds.
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