RE: Griping about auditing (not the Oracle Kind)

When I worked for a large Oracle Office install for the state I was the technical ops mgr. (Largest distributed Oracle Office install in the US.)

One of the rules we had in place is every one was given 3 meg of storage for email. If you needed more, you had to ask the Oracle Office Administrator, then the DBA also had to approve the increase before it could be done. This was politics at its best.

One day one of the commissioners ran out of email space. It took two days to get his increase of storage, and I believe they took him to 10 meg. I thought this doesn't seem right for someone who is like the VP of this state agency.

I calculated the disk space in relation to the 2 gig disk drive. Mind you, disks were so expensive back then. I also took into consideration the possible $25-50 per hour for two people to have to be involved to make this decision.

It turned out the "VP" had waited two days to get about $3.45 worth of disk space and his salary was probably in the $55-75,000 range back when he was probably one of the highest paid officers in the agency... The payroll overhead for this $3.45 was probably in the $25-50 range. The lost time for the VP may have been $45-75...

Once this was made "public" among OUR group, the policy was immediately revoked and if you wanted more space, you ask, you got it, period.

When "politics" are involved, often you have to find a kind word and "make the business case". When I had to do the PO's for the state, I usually had about a 97% approval factor because I always made the business case. I included return on investment, cost, hidden costs, break even time, savings on maintenance, the works.

Management thinks money(the 2.3 million budget), and anything that positively affects the bottom line gets their attention.

Michael Kline
ThinkSpark
Richmond, VA
804-744-1545

> -----Original Message-----
> From: root_at_fatcity.com [mailto:root_at_fatcity.com]On Behalf Of Don
> Granaman
> Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 1:20 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> Subject: Re: Griping about auditing (not the Oracle Kind)
>
>
> I can supply the commiseration! You have my sympathies. I just left my
> last job (also at a major online brokerage) because of exactly the same sort
> of nonsense. In the "good old days" things ran fairly smoothly, technical
> people made technical decisions, and the job was great. Then we got very
> big fast, hordes of new clueless managers and executives came in and
> gradually started insisting on micro-managing everything. (e.g. "Check your
> database files into the configuration management system and update them
> whenever they change." After some discussion and determining that they
> REALLY meant the database files, not the model, I explained that this was an
> absurd request. We had 42 production Oracle databases with terabytes of
> datafiles! Another example, someone had come up with an 40+ page list of
> items that should be documented for every database system. Not 40+ pages of
> documentation, a 40+ page list of items to be documented! It included
> everything they had ever heard of, whether even remotely relevant or not.
> Much of it was very specific to IBM mainframes - their previous environment.
> Pages of stuff like "CPU temperature" was to be statically documented in MS
> Word! When I started sending them dynamically generated ASCII reports on
> things like space utilization, datafile lists, and the like, I was told that
> the format was unacceptable - it had to be MS Word in the format that they
> had dictated or Power Point (!) also in a format that they dictated. My
> "failure to comply" and "lack of the teamwork spirit" on this insanity was
> duly noted. It was like Dilbert's worst nightmare.)
(...)

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Author: Michael Kline
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