[TW]Fox;12886683 said:
Straight out of a 'How to use pointless jargon to make yourself look more important than you are' textbook, a book most IT guys seem to have proudly positioned on their desk.
I mean seriously, read that back to yourself. How many more silly buzzwords can you cram into one sentance?
It's a simple graphics card for 2d work. It's never going to require support, it's going to just work.
Beside the point. Sure it's a textbook answer, but it's the correct one - not necessarily the best, cheapest or whatever.
Change the card by yourself and you may invalidate any support contract in place for that particular machine. Remember: the out-sourcing company is there to make money out of providing a service, not provide a service and potentially make money on the side.
As such, they will use any excuse they can to get out of supporting a particular machine (if they're clever). If they're not so clever, or just being helpful IT guys, they may well support the box on the sly without informing 'management'.
On the flip side, the chances that a CMD exists for that particular asset are probably quite slim and the asset in question may just be a number on an asset register, meaning the IT department may well have no idea what that particular box is, other than to whom it is assigned.
You all may be (or probably not) surprised at how many companies (very, very large ones) do not have asset registers or anything resembling them.
Change the card yourself if you want. You may find, however that - if the purchase order system has been set up correctly - you will not get reimbursed for the card because all IT-related stuff must go through the out-sourced department, or at least in consultation with them. If some office worker decides they want to do it themselves, why should your department pay for it?
Again, if you do decide to install the card, you may well have to play with the drivers, too. If you don't have local admin on that machine, how much fun is that going to be?
Also, if you do 'fix' somebody's computer for them, be prepared for every man, woman and their dog to call you in the event of their cup holder breaking, their computer crawl to a halt because they've been surfing for free Ipods, etc. It's cool being in demand for the first two hours, then it just gets irritating.
On the flip side, if I were working in the IT department and noticed somebody had mucked with the configuration and then they came running to me for help, I'd tell them to go forth and multiply... Your problem: you fix it.
I've never worked for a company that's had proper Configuration Management applied to hardware across the whole company (that's not to say it doesn't happen in some places where hardware is more focal to the business). That said, I certainly don't think an outsourcing company would be happy with people just swapping hardware out willy-nilly (an internal support desk would likely just get told to fix any issues and then give someone a slap on the wrist, whereas an external company could brand it out of scope or charge a fortune to rectify the issue).![[TW]Fox](/data/man-of-honor/2009.png){kind=avatar}
