I'm not a programmer or technical person, I'm an end user who uses R, LaTeX and processing now and again. I hack an awesome spreadsheet. I have a degree and I do a professional job.
I could be a manager in a public service or an elected representative. Perhaps in a small rural authority.
Given the lack of consensus in this discussion thread, and evidence in the article of a similar lack of consensus between the various offices involved, how am I supposed to reach a decision?
Is there a case for some kind of planning toolkit or requirements estimation software? Is there an opportunity here?
PS: I and other colleagues did once have to help a senior manager spend out a £250k capital grant in 10 days. The idiotic spending deadline was due to delay in award of funds in a competitive funding round. We did ok but could have done better with another month or two to think through detailed requirements.
You use your intelligence. The Cisco person says you can do what you want with $500. Then do you continue to spend $30k instead? Do you think your small town library is going to grow into a college campus (as the other pro-mega-router people are expecting)
OK, I have to admit that looking at the picture in the article, I personally would have tried to vire some of the money for the super-router into a less fancy one and some decent all-in-one lcd desktop pcs for that table. The space saved by the all-in-ones could have provided a 'quiet table' for someone (and the PCs could double as DVD players).
I would have to make a spreadsheet (good at those) of all the sites and then include a rating for current traffic and then expected traffic growth over the life of the project. Yes, a library with 4 PCs is not going to have a lot of growth...
> Given the lack of consensus in this discussion thread, and evidence in the article of a similar lack of consensus between the various offices involved, how am I supposed to reach a decision?
1. You ask people who have already done this, like hotels who deploy thousands of networked sites. 2. You hold a bakeoff at a few dozen sites and see what works.
Yup, in my previous job that is exactly what we did, we found other Colleges who had done similar stuff and asked them how they did it.
I noticed some went for a 5 year sort of rolling provision making assumptions about increased traffic (but certainly no gold plating like in the original article) and others just bought what would work now and dealt with changes as they arose.
I have to say that the former strategy seemed to provide a more uniform system with less 'catches'. People don't share budgets so I have no idea which came in cheaper.
I'm not a programmer or technical person, I'm an end user who uses R, LaTeX and processing now and again. I hack an awesome spreadsheet. I have a degree and I do a professional job.
I could be a manager in a public service or an elected representative. Perhaps in a small rural authority.
Given the lack of consensus in this discussion thread, and evidence in the article of a similar lack of consensus between the various offices involved, how am I supposed to reach a decision?
Is there a case for some kind of planning toolkit or requirements estimation software? Is there an opportunity here?
PS: I and other colleagues did once have to help a senior manager spend out a £250k capital grant in 10 days. The idiotic spending deadline was due to delay in award of funds in a competitive funding round. We did ok but could have done better with another month or two to think through detailed requirements.