My company is looking to purchase new laptops for a small number of employees but it’s been hard finding a supplier who will give us the time of day. Working directly with Dell has been a pain and Data3 has “been working on a quote” for the past 4 weeks. I only need like 15 computers a year and I’m having a difficult time finding someone to supply and support them. Any recommendations?
My company (about 3000 people) hired a new CIO about 6 months ago and...it's not going well. He came in doing some things correctly, like identifying that there was a lack of governance and ITIL frameworks, but then completely whiffed on hiring a manager to lead the "digital transformation and infrastructure" department. The manager he hired in the first month is basically his deputy CIO (reports directly to the CIO and everyone who previously reported to the CIO reports to him now), has zero experience in our sector and believes that everything can be fixed with AI and contractors. (It's also a union shop, so this sort of talk is not sitting well with the staff)
I came into the agency to run the infrastructure department 18 months ago, which is in charge of our entire MS stack, virtualization, storage, backup/DR, switching/routing/wireless, firewalls, UC, email and security ops and have been trying to reduce our tech debt, and started putting in strict lifecycle rules as a way to start building a reliable CMDB with intake processes. My team is 5 sysadmins. There's another team of 6 sysadmins who manage all the various server platforms and applications, and a help desk team of 6 people. Allegedly 5 years ago gartner said we needed double the staffing. I've never seen the report, but I believe it. It's also something I told the CIO on his first day and something I told the digital manager on his first day.
Flash forward to the present, digital transformation is it's own IT department with 3 new hires and they're resopnsible for...having claude make dashboards. That's it. They use APIs that my team is responsible for to vibe code. They support nothing and can spend whatever they want. All the other departments had their budgets cut to make room for this team and my tech debt is growing while prices for hardware and software are rising. The new CIO meanwhile has basically ignored anything he said about lack of governance and decided that every new idea or request he hears from other parts of the company become a top priority that the "legacy" IT needs to be responsible for.
Morale is in the gutter, one SA has left (the first to leave the org since I've been here) and in a better economy, we'd probably see 3 more out the door by now. I think we're in an IT death spiral and I want to stop the bleeding. Any advice, short of pack a parachute and a resume?
For anticipated questions:
He reports to the COO, and I'm planning to draft up a presentation with the other 3 "legacy" IT managers to bring to the COO's office outlining the concerns, citing a few examples of how this works and basically bringing all the receipts we can.
The union likely doesn't have much leverage here, because the wording on hiring contractors is a little dicey. I they're hired to do things we don't already do, they can get away with it.