In my job, it’s really easy to accumulate clutter and junk.

In fact, pound-for-pound I think my job function accounts for more dumpster mass than any other at Godfrey. An entire corner of my server room is typically stacked with boxes and packaging contents from the miscellaneous hardware acquired to keep an agency of our size going. A Maxtor USB drive box here, a few Acer notebook boxes there. It adds up.  Hey, I can’t toss it all right away – what if that new DVD burner I purchased for the AV Studio craps out and I need to return it to CDW? I’ll be glad I saved the original packaging!

Then there’s the stack of semi-retired Dell Dimensions which are too slow to put into play, but just fast enough to keep around as spares. And the shelf full of older monitors in our storage area, which honestly are easier to keep around than to recycle properly. You can’t just throw those things in the dumpster.  Truth be told, I might be quicker to get rid of them if I actually knew which ones worked and which didn’t. The sticky notes pasted onto their screens with useful data such as “Works mostly, but emits high-pitched squeal when playing Unreal 2003” have gotten all jumbled and mixed up. I keep telling myself I’ll take a spare computer over there and plug ‘em all in, and see which ones are worth keeping as backups. But for some reason I just keep finding better things to do. I need an intern. I say that so often, I think I’ll invent my own acronym right here and now to save time in later posts. How about “iNANi”? That lower case “I” makes it kinda Apple-ish, no?

On top of all this are the accounting considerations – each item is tagged, and we can’t just toss it or give it away without a proper financial accounting.

Then there’s a third category of stuff that tends to take over a “spare” room like evil B-movie kudzu creatures. I’ll call it the nickel-and-dime stuff, because honestly too much of it over the years really can nickel-and-dime you to death. I have shelves and Rubbermaid bins full of expensive high-density SCSI cables, Jaz drives and cartridges, VGA extension cables and splitter boxes,  20-foot long serial printer cables, weird adapters, trackballs, 4- and 8- gig SCSI server drives, and software ‘suites’ that have long since been forgotten and discarded. Remember Mtropolis, anyone? In one box is a practically unopened video conferencing kit that supposedly worked over dialup. It’s like an archaeological dig for computer nerds.


To be fair, before moving downtown we needed 100 power strips because the wiring and outlet locations were terrible. But there’s an awful lot that ends up being expensive flotsam-and-jetsam, and much of it is the result of short-term thinking. These are all things that at one point, somebody just HAD to have, right now. I can just hear some of the sales pitches that had to be made for somebody to approve the purchase.
 
All this junk pre-dates my time as IT director, so of course it’s easy for me to be critical. But I don’t think I would ever consider purchasing 30 $400 Jaz drives that use $100 cartridges so that people could engage in sneaker-net transactions. I might buy one or two, and centrally locate them. Most likely, I’d purchase a server and a tape drive, and network everything together. In fact, that’s how we do things now. Yes it would require some investment up-front, but it would be neater and cleaner and offer a clear upgrade path. The technology just 5 or 10 years ago wasn’t as simple and seamless as it is now, but it was there.

All of this makes me wonder – what about the decisions I’m making with my budget? What am I doing today which, after I’m gone as the IT guy, some energized young IT whiz is going to see and ask “MAN, what was HE thinking?”  

For starters, I know I’ve reached my limit on corporate data storage. Adding servers or adding more drives to existing servers isn’t going to cut it anymore. Backups are becoming a nightmare already.  Fortunately, we’ve gotten a lot of life from the system we have, so it won’t hurt quite as much when the time comes to replace it with a beefy SAN. And we stopped buying $100 desktop printers a few years ago and replaced them with ink-efficient networked laser printers.

How about your organization?  Are you nickel-and-diming away your budget, or thinking longer-term? Years from now, will a modern-day Indiana Jones (think PDA instead of bullwhip) find lots of relics at your dig location?