New
#10
they cant figure out how to install a browser?
UK: Too Complicated to Upgrade from IE6
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New #11
Usually government computers have a standard account for most users and an Admin account only the IT people know the password for. Since the standard account can't be used for downloading and installing software, the plan you propose (which makes the most sense) would be vary hard to accomplish.
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New #12
Not if they are running Tivoli or Altiris or similar Push Client.
Oh yeah, that takes people actually knowing what the hell they are doing. Back to reality, bummer.
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New #14
If they have a push client, it should ease the deployment but the big problem I don't think is so much the deployment. The problem is many of these companies including the British government I'm sure had custom apps made that were hand-coded specifically for IE 6 and when upgrading, they break. And to have it either made compliant or recoded from scratch costs money. In a sense, it's developers being lazy and ensuring their own jobs. I'm not a developer but that's how it's seen from the IT side of the fence.
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New #15
Correct - people forget that back in 2000/2001, there were no good options for writing web APPS other than using IE+ActiveX, and coding for IE5/IE6. Move forward 10 years and all browsers can pretty much run web apps without custom controls, but upgrading those old IE6-specific apps can cost millions, sometimes many tens of millions, to rewrite, retest, and revalidate on a current version of IE (at the least). In a sense, it *is* cheaper to stick with IE6. It's a short-sighted approach based on what it costs today versus how much more it's going to cost tomorrow, but when you're a voting member of the government and you don't have funds to pay for something, you take the short approach that saves you money today and gets you re-elected. You worry about tomorrow, tomorrow - all elected government bodies seem to do this, with pretty much everything. It's the downside to an electorate - those people will do what it takes to get elected, even when doing so is not necessarily the smart thing
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New #16
I work for my local government here in the UK and only last month they updated from IE6 to IE7 but that was only because we had new computers. When I say new they are not really new but just refurbished. They have a contract with a company that replaces the desktops every three years. Our IT department are still in the dark ages as far as I am concerned. They don't seem to know much about anything...there have been numerous times I have had to explain to them how to do things which they swore blind could not be done.
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New #17
Unfortunately it is very easy for IT departments to become "institutionalised" and "myopic" in their attitude to "their system". Although there are some that do this in a selfish way to protect themselves and thir "power" this is not the case with all.
With the pressure from the " bean counters" to provide users with a working system at as low a cost as possible, the status-quo is often the route followed.
Eventually this will cause more expense to maintain than to scrap and re-design - only at this time will the changes take place.
This is an unfortunate and unavoidable fact of life in enterprise computing, the art of enterprise system management is to gauge correctly when the break point happens.
There are a lot who get this wrong, especially due to the overly long time that XP remained in the ecosystem.
A lot of people in the industry have little or no experience of change management. something that I expect they will all be obtaining in the relatively near future
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New #18
Yep, dealing with the "bean counters", which in many instances will include a bunch of management and the CIO is dealing with people who are not privy to what reality is. All they sit there and do is crunch the numbers and read reports, numbers, and statistics but yet have no clue what reality is. You can sit there and explain what the reality of a situation is but they will continue pointing at a number whining and moaning and crying even though it may have no real bearing to an actual situation.
As a poster I have seen says "Do you want to speak to someone in charge or someone who actually know what's going on around here?" The problem is very often that these management types up to the CIO have never really worked as technicians at any level, they're simply people who got their Business Administration degree and happened to know just a bit more about computers than the average user. What makes this so clear is the fact that every time we get an e-mail from the CIO, it's for simple issues that really any technician should be able to figure out but yet the CIO can't.
And yes, this will make the IT Department very institutionalized to the point that they simply don't care anymore and just do what it takes to skirt by and make the management happy. I used to work at a company where Internet Explorer 7 was the standard browser to use and technically, everything else was not allowed. They did it for security reasons because IE 8 according to someone in management, broke everything. I don't know exactly what that everything was as when I used it, everything worked fine but I guess change must have scared him. And heaven forbid you use Opera or another alternative browser, that would give them a heart attack. Then again, this same company upgraded us from Windows 2000 to Windows XP in April of 2009 so that makes a mark of how slow they are. And they locked everything down and had us on air-gapped internet. Working in a West Coast branch, to use the internet, first the request had to go to their East Coast HQ to retrieve the page then come back to the West Coast to load. And what's more, a lot was blocked such as IGN, some sections of Reddit, and a lot of other popular yet fun sites to read.
Management has this idea that by locking the user down more and more, they will make them more productive and ensure they can only focus on work. But it has the opposite effect, it actually makes the user less productive and more likely to not care and simply do the minimum allowed to skirt by and actually makes them more likely to attempt to circumvent Corporate Policy to do what they want. I now work at a company where none of these restrictions exist, internet is direct and nothing is blocked. We use Windows 7 with Office 2010 and they let us run our computers as local administrators to our machines. We can do what we need without restrictions and browse the way we want. With no restrictions in place, we're more productive because there's nothing holding us back, nothing making us hate the environment or place we work for and yet we don't suffer from a bunch of virus infections as the previous company would have believed.
I guess this somehow turned into a rant about bad management. Oh well, good to get it off my chest.
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New #19
Don't equate private sector bean-counters, management, IT, etc. with those who work within a massive bureaucracy. Something the size of the UK Government is nothing but a disgusting behemoth that can't get anything done properly.
I used to work for a larger, disgusting behemoth - the United States federal government - and would get chewed out for connecting to the Internet for too long. This was 13 years ago, not necessarily the dark ages, but I could never explain to my boss (a member of Congress) that I could help people more efficiently when I could look things up online. No one in that office had a clue what the Internet was capable of. "You were on for 2 hours Wednesday?!" Pathetic.
It would be nice if governments could plan ahead for new browsers or OSs, etc., but then they wouldn't be the corpulent, worthless, enslaving beasts we've grown to love.
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