IT horror stories (hey, save ‘em for Halloween)

It is “a dreaded possession, loathed by IT executives who pass on tales of regrettable purchases to help newcomers avoid making similar mistakes. It eats up precious budget dollars and mocks remorseful owners from its perch on closeted shelves.” It “comes in all shapes and sizes.

What is “it,” as so heinously portrayed in a Denise Dubie piece for Network World?

Shelfware. (Cue crescendo.)

One of the great phobias of IT guys, shelfware is simply programs that sit on the shelves after purchase due to one problem or another for the firm. In “Net execs struggle to rid their shops of shelfware,” Dubie presents five cases of business had by (typically) CRM product that was too much, not enough, or just plain didn’t work. And “in the worst-case scenarios,” opines Dubie, “shelfware is that hastily purchased product that completely failed to address a major IT or business pain when executed — leaving its owners stuck with long-term contracts and still coping with the original problem they tried to address with the purchase.”

The stories that the Network Worlders use as examples include:

Kenexa and Mercury Interactive

Kenexa is a provider of software, proprietary content, services and process outsourcing. The firm chose a service-level monitoring console from Mercury Interactive that “looked fantastic on paper” but the firm “never got it up and running … and just threw it away.” When the best thing you can say about a would-be implementation is that the ASP director ultimately saved approximately $100,000 in capital spending “because of his savvy pre-purchase negotiations,” that’s some serious shelfware.

White Electronics Designs Corp. and Microsoft Dynamics CRM (!)Phoenix, Ariz.-based White Electronic Designs Corp. acquired another firm which used Microsoft Dynamics CRM. White decided to implement Microsoft’s product for itself to gain visibility into the other firm’s activity. No dice. In the end, the firm “pulled the plug and sat on quite a few CRM licenses for a couple of years and paid maintenance fees in anticipation of ultimately using them.” After two years, Dynamics is now being used.

State of Indiana and Cisco’s VPN/Security Management Solution

Dubie reports on senior network engineer Jeff Duke’s bad call for the state of Indiana. Duke is a big Cisco fan – “We use CiscoWorks for everything in our network,” he says in the piece – but found Cisco’s VPN/Security Management Solution to be “major vaporware. No one on my team ever used it.” Duke found the interface on this particular Cisco product counter-intuitive and adapted CiscoWorks to perform some security functions the VPN/Security Management Solution otherwise might.

Bowdoin College and an unnamed product

Back in 2003, the new CIO at Bowdoin College figured the network needed a security upgrade. The purchase of a $150,000 core switch first “sat in the rack for about three months,” then resulted in fruitless renegotiations with the unnamed firm, and was finally replaced by Cisco product. The original switch provider offered to do the system-wide upgrade, but "The [switch] company didn’t even have the technology to make this happen, much less the skills, even though they promised it could be done.”

Mary Kay and HP Open View

Today, Mary Kay technology leader Steve Moore blames it on “immediate needs eclips[ing] long-term goals.” On HP OpenView network management software, Moore comments that “Some products were implemented… as temporary solutions that typically did not add much long-term value or were not satisfying the original requirements.”

Moore settled the hash of Mary Kay’s IT soon enough and even offers a helpful tip for those with lots of disparate programs and subscription fees: “With all the acquisitions these days, it is wise to check to see if you are already a client with licenses, as many companies are now branches of others and/or use the same code.”

The most excellent and highly recommended “Net execs struggle to rid their shops of shelfware” and the five horror stories on failed product can be read at the Network World website.