I work in IT, and I am here to tell you, there is NO SUCH THING as "One Size Fits All."
You would think they would have learned that by now. The problem is not necessarily the IT Guys though (although in some cases it is). It tends to be the SALES guys. The Sales Guys talk to the business Guys and sell them a bill of goods. Of course the business guys ask "Will it do X?" and of course the response is always a resounding "Why Yes it does. That's what we do best" (I cannot help to think of Tigger here!)
So they buy the product. Then IT Guys have to install, enable, configure the product. When it doesn't do X like it was requested, the inevitable response is... "Oh... You have to purchase the 'X Module' to enable THAT feature. It will only 'Double' your costs" (or something similar). Jump in the Bean Counters,
and they never have any more money in the budget for that, so then we have to "Customize" our selves with some half baked solution to attempt to get it to work the way they would like.
Where I work, several years ago, they wanted to get off of Microsoft 100%. So the plan was to migrate everything to Unix/Linux. One of their (Huge) projects was a network monitoring solution. When in discussions with the company, they asked, very matter-of-factly "Is your product Linux Capable" (as many products are available on multiple platforms), and they were told. "YES!". So they invested a LOT in this system. As we were working on the overall design (after purchase) when provided the "Specs" of the types of servers and systems required, we needed a majority of "Windows" servers. Wait.... What?
I thought we were going with Linux? Oh yeah.... Only the data capture servers (less then a quarter of the required servers) are Linux, the processing and reporting servers are all 100% Windows ONLY!
If only they (Business folks) would include more of US (IT folks - the "Technical" ones too, not just IT Managers as many have not a clue about IT) in their purchasing discussions, many of these issues could be vetted out in advance.
So long story short, I get what you are saying Ed, but the blame is not always where it should be.
ETA: Hope this post didn't come off as yelling at you Ed... I know IT can do odd things too. (As many IT folks, self included are a bit odd themselves.
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