1.Puh-leeze, Shel, I hear the storage lament all the time. Have they looked at the size of their freakin' PowerPoint presentations?

2.It's even cheaper than that now. One terabyte is AU$298 in my local store (so that's about US$297 ;-))

I imagine if you're buying business hardware it would be far less too. What a load of drivel from that IT person.

3.I'm not saying I agree with those IT folks, but remember, they can't just go down to Best Buy and pickup something off the shelf. The disk arrays built for servers are not the same price as a 'cheap' consumer disk. The IT guy is probably also taking into account the labor costs to rack the drives and configure the raid options. If the particular server is maxed out, it could cost a lot more if he has to order a new rack. There may also be additional backup costs if all of the drive's contents are backed up to tape on a regular basis.

Again, not saying it's a great excuse, but there are a lot more things to consider when dealing with enterprise storage.

4.All that's absolutely true, Shannon, but a terabyte today is still orders of magnitude cheaper than it was just five years ago. From my perspective, arguing that "we don't have the storage capacity" for intranet content is like saying "We don't have enough paper to print the employee newsletter." If it's important to communicate, then you make the investment in the paper -- or the storage.

5.My immediate thought was not only BUNK but why is a decision like this made by the IT department? It has nothing to do with IT except that IT wants nothing to do with it (social media). A Social Media decision is a strategic leadership decision and not the decision of someone sitting inside the walls of a company NOC. Sounds to me like the leadership of the company needs to determine who's in charge.

6.Wat a great point, Mark, and one I intended to make when I was writing but forgot by the time I finished. I'm a huge fan of a Harvard Business Review article, "Six IT Decisions Your IT People Shouldn't Make:"
http://tinyurl.com/2oyh4f

They're all business, not IT, decisions.

7.Write a business case and submit it to the CFO. It's not that hard to get what you want from IT. Provide them with the funds to support your needs.

I'm on the applications development side, so I don't have first-hand knowledge of network and storage issues. However, I'm going to be interviewing some IT managers to get their perspective on this ongoing discussion.

8.Shel, can you provide an overview or brief synopsis of the "Six IT Decisions..." article; the link sends you to a purchase page and I'm not likely to buy the article, but I'm interested in what they are.

That said, you'd have to also factor into this discussion that IT might well be focused on other bigger priorities and spending any time and resources on pursuing what they consider "bright shiny object" might not rise to the level of justification for support from their end, and yet to get it installed in your corporation you have to have them do it. Arguing up to the CFO on the issue will sometimes get the same reaction: "You need to spend your time thinking about what serves the company today, not what might be cool for the future. And why are you wasting my time for approval for a $400 expense anyway."

Just a little bit of unfortunate realism...

9.Michael, I'm on the road and don't have the article with me. I'll try to dig it up when I get back to the office, but basically it covers six business decisions that require IT investment/decision over which IT has actually assumed responsibility. It's kinda like the printer telling you what you can print.

That's also an appropriate metaphor for IT dismissing a communication need as just a shiny toy. I don't tell IT professionals how to install a server or a router. It's absurd that they should tell me what is appropriate and inappropriate as a communication vehicle. I remember my jaw hitting the floor when a communications VP told me that the CIO had to approve any all-employee emails. I asked if her printer had to approve anything she distributed in print. Utterly absurd.

Just to be clear, though, I know and appreciate that only some IT departments behave this way. Most of the ones with which I interact are professional and classy, real delights to work with.