I’ve spent the better part of the last 27 years working for one large corporation or another. I did spend a few years as a freelance developer, but didn’t like the uncertainty of short-term work. So, after five years of living contract-to-contract, I took the easy route and cozied back into the corporate rocking chair. Well, it’s been ten years and I’ve taken the leap back into the uncertain world of self-employment. Why, you ask? I guess I’m just not built to march “lock step” to the cadence of corporate drums.

For the past seven years I ran an I/T department at a medium-sized site for a Fortune 500 company. For the first six, I managed my group with relative autonomy and the blessings of the site’s management. In short, they listed the functionality they required, I prepared a budget and they provided the funding. The corporation had little or no input and only required results. Without the normal litany of corporate regulations, approval schedules and various and sundry bureaucratic red tape, we set out to build a very high-performing I/T infrastructure. We were the first site in the corporation with gigabit ethernet, SAN technology, a VPN and a host of other services still being “studied” by the corporate paper shufflers. Our server uptime was greater than 99.9% while the rest of the company struggled to maintain 98. Our users were happy also. In five years we reduced the number of I/T service requests by 80%! It was the best of both worlds for an IT manager. I was free to do what worked best and the company was happy with the results. As with most ideallic situations in corporate America, it was destined to be short-lived.

About a year ago, we began seeing a stream of new “security” policies flowing from the offices of the pure oxygen breathers at corporate headquarters. Suddenly, our VPN and internet gateway were “not allowed” even though we had a perfect security record. In fact, we implemented ours a full 22 months before headquarters did and used the same equipment and security protocols. We were forced to literally “pull the plug” on ours and begin sharing the corporate portal. Doing so also meant we had no administrative rights, so adding or modifying users meant submitting requests to the corporate office and waiting for their approval. What we used to do in an hour now took two weeks. One might argue that a single, centralized administration is more efficient, but our costs went up over 20%. Go figure. Next came more security directives. With the stroke of a corporate pen, our antivirus, anti-spyware and patching schema instantly became “non-compliant”. Never mind our perfect malware record. We had zero occurrences of virus or spyware infection since 2002 when three Windows 98 machines were infected by MS Blaster. The infection wasn’t a result of a firewall failure, one of our users brought an infected document from home on a floppy disk. In all, less than 5% of our network was affected. The corporate headquarters network experienced over 30% infection and large portions of their facility remained in quarantine for multiple days. They’ve also had multiple virus incidents since then. But they know what’s best for us. So next they required us to install “security monitoring & enforcement” software on every workstation and laptop PC. This software phones home to the corporate mother ship, reports on the computer’s security and waits for approval before allowing our users to log in. Nope, can’t foresee any problems with that. Oh yes, we also had to pay for that privilege.

After about nine months of that type of corporate nirvana, I’d had all I could take. After spending six years building something it’s painful to watch it being torn down. It is especially difficult knowing it is being replaced with something that doesn’t work as well and costs more. Our once fast, reliable services were waning and my users were getting very unhappy. That’s a convenient truth for corporate types. They turn up the burners but the local staff feels the heat. This may not be true for all large corporations, but it certainly is for the three I’ve worked for. The information/technology field moves too fast for these large, plodding organizations. All too often they wind up mandating last year’s solution to the previous year’s problem. I guess I didn’t have the patience to comply. Because the determinant of my future performance was out of my control and I felt there was ample opportunity elsewhere in this wonderful field, I formed another S-Corp and struck out on my own, again.

Witness the birth of Kelley Data, Incorporated.

Joseph Kelley

Tags: Technology, Bureaucracy