IT spending

IT spending can be disastrous if the technician has a one-track mind.

Not meaning to harp on MCSEs again, but what is, is.

MCSEs are mostly trained in one track of computer technology. Period.

Imagine a house builder that only knew how to build houses out of straw. Don’t get me wrong. There are many instances where a straw house would be preferable, but ask that fellow to build you a four-story house…

I am willing to bet that there is not one single “Fortune 500″ business running one single computer technology or operating system. Smart IT spending money is put on whatever computer technology that works, no one-track minds need apply.

Yet it’s amazing to me how many times we run into this situation in SMBs. (Small-Medium Business) Such as the 30-workstation business that has two full-time technicians or the 40-workstation business branch that has a server for files, a server for web-content filtering, 4 different firewall/router combinations, 3 T1 lines, a VPN into their main office, and their main office is more complicated by a factor of 3 — yet their main office has been so infected that in order to protect the remote branch from the main (which we have no control of) we had to put a firewall in front of the file server in order to protect it.

I’d guess that beginner MCSE’s who get hired by enterprise-level businesses never get to do top level IT spending for a reason… (They’ve never heard of the K.I.S.S. method for one.)