IT BS thread

LOL that was my first thought too.

Took us more than a couple of years to get SN CMDB working with TFS. Which of course now we have to redo given the direction of TFS. Honestly I do not know of anyone that says SN is the greatest thing ever. We've had it in production for 4 or 5 years now and the common thought by those of us that have to actually use it is more like Service Now really sucks. We use it pretty much stem to stern. Help desk and level 2 and 3 incident management, inventory, KB, Change Management, etc.

 

More people need to think this way!

 

You'll all be happy to know that I work on the only thing worse than the Cloud.

IoT

 

Regarding

What, no standards? You can do whatever you want! It doesn't matter that mixing and matching from various vendors is impossible.

We have struggles with both poor implementation and political issues, along with just massive size (I work for a Fortune 1 company). We have people internally that have a very narrow view of what ServiceNow can provide and believe we should just build it all ourselves. Because "we're different," of course. And then other jackasses that have never worked anywhere else and have no other frame of reference ignorantly driving bad configuration decisions. I would recommend getting a good crew of people that understand the overall data model before jumping in, as well as having a good plan and realistic expectations -- it is complex and takes time, but if you do a LOT of things right up front it can make a big difference. Part of what we are doing now is cleaning up the poor decisions made earlier on.

Get this: A couple of years ago when I was relatively new they made me the "owner" of a couple of plotters that just happened to need service. "Put in a ServiceNow ticket," they said. So, I tried. Apparently, unless there is a KB article on the "thing" you are looking for, there was no way to submit a ticket -- everything was driven off of KB articles, and nobody had written one for the plotters, not like it would have helped anyway. WITAF? I've never seen anything like it. They had no real CI's, just "groups." Thankfully they put together a program to clean up that mess, but the same people are still in place.

 

MQTT all the things!

I'm more in the industrial world of things, so I'm not doing smart lightbulbs.


Security is where it gets fun though.

 

OMG, the fucking security issues we have with network connected medical equipment. Separate WiFi networked, sandboxed in its own special domain behind a firewall and internal DMZ.

Then the vendor comes back and says “oh, we need a direct connection through the TIC to push firmware updates.

 

I'm pushing to use RFC 1149 for all of our updates. Should get over those issues no problem.

 

We have some really old stuff. And some really new stuff. That all needs to work together.

Praise Cheesus that I’m at the data center and that’s an end-user operations problem.

 

Oh, you guys. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck this next-gen electronic health record bullshit.

Sorry, that slipped out. I’m sure you’re kind to children and animals and love your mom...but lately I’ve questioned y’all’s motives behind OEHRM. The people y’all hired to help on this Cerner shit are fucking idiots. Specifically GCIO. For two months they’d ask us for certain evidence and we’d give it to them...only hear “what’s this?” So far I’ve found two people that are partially intelligent, so I limit my interaction to them.



Then again, we are able to use y’all as the excuse to pressure 140 hospital administrators into admitting that they have unscanned and unaccredited systems all over creation that they’ve been using for patient care. I’ve been trying to get all kinds of adjacent systems documented (at least Nessus scanned and pen tested) and now we have 140 execs going “not-it.” So...you have value as a boogeyman. “Become compliant or DHA is gonna get ya!”

I’ve been trying to change executive attitudes toward total security, but I swear it’s like I’m talking Greek to Mongols.

 

I'm the technical specialist for the Electronic Content Management Systems at the #1 ranked hospital in the US. If not the world judging by the flags on the tailfins on the planes at the International Airport South of town.

We had GE for EMR which due to our size had to be customized. The satellite clinics and hospitals outside of Foundation around the Country standardized on Cerner. It sucked. We did due diligence and included them in our RFP when standardizing across the board. They came to the dog and pony show thinking they were a shoe in. They really didn't stand a chance. Of course the VA picked them LOL.

Biometric devices are often vendor owned and maintained. With an OS that is decades old. They don't want anyone else to touch them and we don't want them on the network so aren't. Catch 22 but they are getting better about it, at least compared to how it used to be.

 

I’m certain Cerner was picked because certain people bought into it before the decision was made...and that’s all I can say about that. A neighbor is a nurse practitioner and she told me how great the GE system was...and was curious why we at the VA weren’t using it.

Me too.

 

GE was good, but it could only scale so far. I doubt it would handle the VA system without a lot of work on the backend. Then again for something the size of us or the VA there is going to be work on the backend and customization. We are running Epic across the board now.

The health systems used to run every EHR under the sun at different sites. McKesson, Dairyland, Meditech, etc. When the Health Systems decided to standardize on Cerner we moved one of the sites from Epic to Cerner. They were pissed, still are and never failed to mention how poor Cerner was. Once we got all the data in one bucket we moved everyone to Epic and they are happy again. As happy as end users anywhere can be anyhow. They don't understand why they had to go through Cerner to get back to Epic. It was a pretty big bucket and took us most of a decade to do it all. With HIPAA everyone thinks security (accountability) and fails to even remember the portability part, and it pretty much does not exist to this day. But finally everyone is singing on the same sheet of music throughout our organization.

Just remembered that we changed the biometric devices team name to something like Medical Devices Support or something along those lines. As of last quarter they are now part of IT. Biometric means a lot of different things to different people. Bringing them into IT is a step in the right direction IMO, now they hopefully will better understand the big picture.

 

Anyone on here who works in software engineering / tech companies / startups?

 

I hate HTML.



And yet, here I am at midnight, mocking up a website for work...

 

What is it that you are looking for?


OK, serious question for everyone. You may answer in any way you wish -- using what you know, using the Google, whatever.

Question: What is Enterprise Architecture?

 

What is it that you are looking for?

 

Flowcharts and diagrams, obviously.

 

I used to enjoy it. Just give me a simple text editor and i'm happy. I don't think I could do it for a company these days though.