I was engaged recently in a project to identify the traffic on a global network to solve slowdowns in the work being performed by engineers on high performance workstations.
The most difficult part of the work was the total lack of tools. The second most difficult thing was the failure of the management to be concerned about that.
The mission was to gather requirements to be submitted to enterprise network plan, build, and run teams so that the slowdown problems could be remediated.
As I began the requests went in for basic information like a global network map, monitoring tools, and access to machines in order to place probes.
Network maps, either physical or logical, were non- existent.
The monitoring tool was a well known more than adequate management and performance monitoring system that I had used for many years. It was not set up properly, it could not retain much information for analysis, and custom reporting access was refused. It was installed in three regions without any joining together of the database backends.
Requests to get access to the machines to place probes was refused.
While this is going on I learn that the purchase of undersized, out of specification, equipment for a remediation of a site that was a decade overdue was being done so that a schedule was met and the money spent before the end of a fiscal cycle. The kind of work to be done on the site had no bearing on the decision.
One other interesting thing was that all datacenters were to be consolidated by collapsing them into fewer and fewer sites all colocated off-site from existing corporate sites.
Everyone in every technical discipline was concerned that the plan was inadequate and that given past practices the future was not going to be good.
The corporation was grown by acquisition. It was not grown by innovation. Decades old talent that had worked at the acquired organizations left in droves. Those that remained were waiting for their retirement.
When asked about why the organization would place their data centers into another organizations hands the reply was “It is not our core competency”.
Given the experience one wonders what is their core competency? I know! Pass the buck.