When you greedily consume nine other financial institutions, you end up with nine other sets of data centers, some of which are on the same physical block with each other. Your first order of business, not only to eventually “cut costs,” but simply to maintain sanity, is to start consolidating data centers. Sounds simple when you say it out loud, but it requires a lot of outside contractors and a lot of rented/newly purchased equipment — assuming you don’t have to build a shiny new location with enough room to hold everything from all of the other locations. It was this set of realities which caused a tripling of the IT budget under Kent’s predecessor.

In a year’s time, Kent’s predecessor went from ten sets of data centers to four sets. He had cut the number of data center staff needed by a third. He had even put together the plans for consolidating the last three sets into the primary set of data centers. Given everything else his predecessor had successfully completed, Kent assumed the plan was a good one. There was no indication if the plan was actually complete, though, and given Kent’s IT skill level, he had no way to know.

The cost savings which would be realized this year from his predecessor’s work allowed Kent to bring in Big Four Consulting to put together a beautiful looking PowerPoint presentation on how they recommended completing the consolidation and still have a lower budget than his predecessor. Kent assumed they would just verify his predecessor’s plan and he would have to find price whores to do the work.

Assumptions can kill you. Someone should have told Kent that.

 

 
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You are reading a special promotional version of “Infinite Exposure” containing only the first 18 chapters. This is the first book of the “Earth That Was” trilogy. You can obtain the entire trilogy in EPUB form from here:


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