How I Accidentally Bankrupted my Company: A Cautionary Tale of Cutting Costs

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...time that an IT employees’ name was removed from the payroll. However it soon became apparent these weren’t unrelated or isolated occurrences. The website was continuously defaced — with a special emphasis on the director’s biographies, especially Charles’s. Large orders appeared in the sales ledger and invoices were marked paid when they hadn’t. The production line was even being ‘interfered with’ as cars were randomly sprayed pink. The real clue was emails being sent, purportedly from Charles, that he knew he hadn’t! Someone who knew his way round the network was accessing the system.

Unfortunately the new Romanian...

...IT support team were at a loss as to what, or who, was doing it. They removed all the IT team’s user accounts, which incidentally caused another black out, but didn’t stop the intruder. Just how they were getting in was a mystery.

This inadequacy was just for starters. There was mutiny in the ranks as people complained that every problem took longer to solve. Calls to support were often left unanswered leaving people unable to work. The contract might have seemed lucrative but in hindsight the money it was actually costing the business each quarter would have paid an onsite IT department’s wage bill for a decade!

Customer service and confidence was suffering.

There was another problem with the changes Charles had implemented. The report from the new IT auditors read like a geek’s wish list with miscellaneous items not on the original schedules. Rather than the projected savings, it actually quintupled the old auditor’s fee.

And the IT cuts were a gift that just kept on giving. The luxuries that Charles’s IT spending freeze promised, such as upgrading the security software, were not realised. It wasn’t long before malware infections increased and data breaches occurred. For goodness sake, why couldn’t managers insist their... continued on page four >

 

 

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