Re: Oh where has my disk space gone?

>  I learned the 80/20 rule the hard way, by working in Retail most of my IT
>  career.  In Retail, it's more like the 50/50 rule, because everything seems
>  to be done half-a'd.  It's an experimental approach, as opposed to
>  Manufacturing companies where the tendency (probably due to corporate
>  culture) is to spec out IT projects to a lot more detail.

I have worked about 45% of my career in Retail, about 45% in Manufacturing &
about 10% in other industries.  It seems to me that corporate culture is more
industry wide than individual companies & due to the proliferation of what
specialities rise in the management structure.

In manufacturing you have a lot of engineering types who understand how
things work, how things can be made, and that experiments need to be measured
very carefully, to figure out the most cost effective way to get the job
done.  This means that top management invariably has someone in production
methods, personnel theories, high up in the structure, and very concerned
about measuring costs.  This means that the corporate culture dictates that
the computer department conduct itself in a rather scientific manner compared
to other industries.

In retail, we are overwhelmed with the sales & marketing people who have wild
ideas they want us to try out.  They don't want analysis.  They want a small
budget to try this or that idea ... the limit of analysis is to measure how
successful this or that scheme is for bringing us new customers or new
business from old customers.  This leads to a totally different corporate
culture.

Since I have worked in more than one employer in each of manufacturing &
retail, and seen that patterns are somewhat consistent across each industry &
the only other variable is the size of the enterprise & the type of ownership
(stock market or private) ... jt is right about the patterns but corporate
culture is misnamed ... I think of it as industry society.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)