On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 23:35, James Hatridge wrote:
Why does your IT department need any support contracts? If they will not use any software (or write it) without support why are they needed? If they have contracts for everything, then get rid of everyone but one guy to call the support suppliers.
I've lost track of the number of companies I've dealt with that had a policy that ALL software in use, had to have a support contract (which often cost thousands or tens of thousands per year) which they never used once in the entire lifecycle of the application. These same companies would blacklist all open source applications regardless of merit or OS they ran on... simply because they did not have to pay for them, and could not purchase a service contract they never used. One company I worked for would sell service contracts to these companies... on any and all software that the customer wanted... didn’t' matter what it was... they would support it... gambling (and winning) on the fact that 99.9999% of all contracts would never ever be used. While I worked there we had exactly one software service call.... and it was a no-brainer to resolve... the rest... well it was a license to print money. The best one we sold was similar to the Microsoft support contract...a fixed yearly fee, and then a $50 per service call rate. Since the service call cost $50, the techs would never call it even if they were in a situation where it would have helped them resolve the problem quickly. If they did call they'd have to expense the $50... so instead they'd spend a week researching and fixing the problem on their own. When you question the IT guys why they must have support contracts, it almost always ends up with some pointy haired boss somewhere in the chain that inherited the policy from his predecessor who inherited it etc etc... no one questions it, they just mindlessly enforce it because it's policy. http://doh-san.blogspot.com/2005/10/five-monkeys.html pretty much explains it. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org