Though there are certainly some *ir*rational reasons for IT
departments' behavior, there are also many rational reasons that IT
departments try to control the software running in their
organizations.
Condescendingly assuming that the IT department is run by idiots whose
decisions are ruled by emotional attachments (as one correspondent
suggested), or that they are irrationally prejudiced against free/open
source, and that it is obvious and irrefutable that you know better
than them (as was implied by some correspondents), may make you feel
better, but probably won't help much.
It also won't help much if you don't explain clearly and calmly *why*
exactly you need to use R for your work. You can use many kinds of
arguments, including technical (functionality, efficiency, capacity),
economic (no license fees), scientific-community (widely used in the
statistics community), and so on.
It *will* help to think a bit about some of the concerns that the IT
department may have. Many of these concerns apply both to free/open
software and to commercial software:
1) Security. They probably don't want you to install software which
risks exposing company data to the outside world either intentionally
or unintentionally. For example, they probably don't want you to run
code that mirrors your disk drive on an external server, even if it
claims to be secured cryptographically etc. Some companies will be
more careful, wanting to vet any software that can open a TCP
connection (which most non-trivial software systems, including both
Excel and R, can).
2) Protection against malware (also a security issue). Some software
which appears innocuous may contain a variety of malware. I'm pretty
sure that R+CRAN is free of malware, but I don't know what measures
are taken to ensure that.
3) Support and maintenance. Not only do they not want to be in a
situation where they're asked to support software they don't know,
they certainly don't want to be responsible for bad *interactions*
between your add-on software and the standard software.
4) Licensing. Besides the question of proper use of commercial
licenses, some licenses (notably GPL) have "contagion" clauses which
affect other software which is linked to them. Though this doesn't
affect the vast majority of users of R (because they neither modify R
nor redistribute it), your company's legal department will probably
want to know what's going on.
5) Interoperability, maintainability, and continuity. What happens
when the user of a particular non-supported software package leaves
the company or takes a vacation? Who is going to take over the work
he was doing? If s/he's developed programs/scripts on a non-standard
infrastructure to solve business problems, do the solutions leave as
soon as he's out of the building?
Even if the IT department *is* behaving irrationally, responding
irrationally yourself probably won't help your cause.
-s
How do I get my IT department to "bless" R?
9 messages · Stavros Macrakis, Murray Cooper, Rolf Turner +2 more
I was about to post a similar reply. Stavros's reply was very eloquent and should be taken to heart! Murray M Cooper, Ph.D. Richland Statistics 9800 N 24th St Richland, MI, USA 49083 Mail: richstat at earthlink.net ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stavros Macrakis" <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> To: <r-help at r-project.org> Sent: Sunday, February 01, 2009 6:11 PM Subject: Re: [R] How do I get my IT department to "bless" R?
Though there are certainly some *ir*rational reasons for IT
departments' behavior, there are also many rational reasons that IT
departments try to control the software running in their
organizations.
Condescendingly assuming that the IT department is run by idiots whose
decisions are ruled by emotional attachments (as one correspondent
suggested), or that they are irrationally prejudiced against free/open
source, and that it is obvious and irrefutable that you know better
than them (as was implied by some correspondents), may make you feel
better, but probably won't help much.
It also won't help much if you don't explain clearly and calmly *why*
exactly you need to use R for your work. You can use many kinds of
arguments, including technical (functionality, efficiency, capacity),
economic (no license fees), scientific-community (widely used in the
statistics community), and so on.
It *will* help to think a bit about some of the concerns that the IT
department may have. Many of these concerns apply both to free/open
software and to commercial software:
1) Security. They probably don't want you to install software which
risks exposing company data to the outside world either intentionally
or unintentionally. For example, they probably don't want you to run
code that mirrors your disk drive on an external server, even if it
claims to be secured cryptographically etc. Some companies will be
more careful, wanting to vet any software that can open a TCP
connection (which most non-trivial software systems, including both
Excel and R, can).
2) Protection against malware (also a security issue). Some software
which appears innocuous may contain a variety of malware. I'm pretty
sure that R+CRAN is free of malware, but I don't know what measures
are taken to ensure that.
3) Support and maintenance. Not only do they not want to be in a
situation where they're asked to support software they don't know,
they certainly don't want to be responsible for bad *interactions*
between your add-on software and the standard software.
4) Licensing. Besides the question of proper use of commercial
licenses, some licenses (notably GPL) have "contagion" clauses which
affect other software which is linked to them. Though this doesn't
affect the vast majority of users of R (because they neither modify R
nor redistribute it), your company's legal department will probably
want to know what's going on.
5) Interoperability, maintainability, and continuity. What happens
when the user of a particular non-supported software package leaves
the company or takes a vacation? Who is going to take over the work
he was doing? If s/he's developed programs/scripts on a non-standard
infrastructure to solve business problems, do the solutions leave as
soon as he's out of the building?
Even if the IT department *is* behaving irrationally, responding
irrationally yourself probably won't help your cause.
-s
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
On 2/02/2009, at 4:29 PM, Murray Cooper wrote:
I was about to post a similar reply. Stavros's reply was very eloquent and should be taken to heart!
I would just like to say that in my very humble opinion Stavros's
reply was utter nonsense. It was the sort of excuse-making favoured
by tyrants since time immemorial.
cheers,
Rolf Turner
######################################################################
Attention:\ This e-mail message is privileged and confid...{{dropped:9}}
Perhaps rather than globally saying it is "utter nonsense" you would
care to refute what you think is wrong about it?
-s
PS "Tyrants"? Wow, we are really dramatizing life at work now....
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Rolf Turner <r.turner at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
On 2/02/2009, at 4:29 PM, Murray Cooper wrote:
I was about to post a similar reply. Stavros's reply was very eloquent and should be taken to heart!
I would just like to say that in my very humble opinion Stavros's
reply was utter nonsense. It was the sort of excuse-making favoured
by tyrants since time immemorial.
cheers,
Rolf Turner
Rolf Turner wrote:
On 2/02/2009, at 4:29 PM, Murray Cooper wrote:
I was about to post a similar reply. Stavros's reply was very eloquent and should be taken to heart!
I would just like to say that in my very humble opinion Stavros's reply was utter nonsense. It was the sort of excuse-making favoured by tyrants since time immemorial.
the troll has been fed. imho, your responses are more often than not patronizing puffery from a narcissistic self-admirer. following your posts, virtually anyone who's not on the r team is an idiot. sigh. vQ
On 3/02/2009, at 9:59 AM, Wacek Kusnierczyk wrote:
Rolf Turner wrote:
On 2/02/2009, at 4:29 PM, Murray Cooper wrote:
I was about to post a similar reply. Stavros's reply was very eloquent and should be taken to heart!
I would just like to say that in my very humble opinion Stavros's reply was utter nonsense. It was the sort of excuse-making favoured by tyrants since time immemorial.
the troll has been fed. imho, your responses are more often than not patronizing puffery from a narcissistic self-admirer. following your posts, virtually anyone who's not on the r team is an idiot. sigh.
I shall not feed the troll any further.
cheers,
Rolf Turner
######################################################################
Attention:\ This e-mail message is privileged and confid...{{dropped:9}}
Rolf Turner wrote:
On 3/02/2009, at 9:59 AM, Wacek Kusnierczyk wrote:
Rolf Turner wrote:
On 2/02/2009, at 4:29 PM, Murray Cooper wrote:
I was about to post a similar reply. Stavros's reply was very eloquent and should be taken to heart!
I would just like to say that in my very humble opinion Stavros's reply was utter nonsense. It was the sort of excuse-making favoured by tyrants since time immemorial.
the troll has been fed. imho, your responses are more often than not patronizing puffery from a narcissistic self-admirer. following your posts, virtually anyone who's not on the r team is an idiot. sigh.
I shall not feed the troll any further.
you'll become extinct, then. good choice. vQ
Stavros Macrakis wrote:
Perhaps rather than globally saying it is "utter nonsense" you would
care to refute what you think is wrong about it?
-s
PS "Tyrants"? Wow, we are really dramatizing life at work now....
that was so much in the style of '/Windoze Sucks!!!' /[1] wants to show off, but no courage to be concrete. vQ [1] http://www.math.unb.ca/~rolf/
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Rolf Turner <r.turner at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
On 2/02/2009, at 4:29 PM, Murray Cooper wrote:
I was about to post a similar reply.
Stavros's reply was very eloquent and should be taken to heart!
I would just like to say that in my very humble opinion Stavros's
reply was utter nonsense. It was the sort of excuse-making favoured
by tyrants since time immemorial.
cheers,
Rolf Turner
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Stavros Macrakis wrote:
Condescendingly assuming that the IT department is run by idiots whose decisions are ruled by emotional attachments (as one correspondent suggested), or that they are irrationally prejudiced against free/open source, and that it is obvious and irrefutable that you know better than them (as was implied by some correspondents), may make you feel better, but probably won't help much.
I assume that I am that "one correspondent." My longer post above was one-sided to drive a point. I suspect everyone here is a logically-leaning sort, who has more than once fallen into the trap of thinking that if you just present a logical argument, your interlocutor will have no choice but to come over to your side of the issue. This can work, but it's not all that common. A likelier path to success includes an element of emotional jujutsu. Something I neglected to touch on above is that we should also be aware of our own emotional tie-ups. Most of those of us here *like* R, and not entirely for rational reasons. Perhaps you enjoy the aesthetics of the language; maybe you think the default graph types look especially nice; maybe you think free software is the only ethical sort; maybe some of the people here are friends of yours. If someone tells us R is no good, those emotions can turn on us, and you get a typical ugly advocacy battle. On the other hand, our feelings about R and its community can give us a reason to develop and pursue an emotionally forceful argument, which can win the day where a purely rational one wouldn't. It takes a certain amount of charisma or backing force for this to work; emotion again.
It also won't help much if you don't explain clearly and calmly *why* exactly you need to use R for your work.
Certainly. Just don't rely wholly on rational reasons. Don't forget that you are trying to change a human organization, and that this is much harder than swapping two columns in an R matrix.
Some companies will be more careful, wanting to vet any software that can open a TCP connection (which most non-trivial software systems, including both Excel and R, can).
Well, yes, I suppose I can't argue that there are probably some companies that do actually do this. I can't prove otherwise. What is obvious from just with a quick look-around, though, is that the vast majority of organizations don't. If they did, it wouldn't have taken a decade to get from ActiveX to UAC.
Even if the IT department *is* behaving irrationally, responding irrationally yourself probably won't help your cause.
I never said you should pursue the cause irrationally. I just said you should never forget that those you're trying to convince are never wholly rational. (A wholly rational human being is actually a pretty scary thing, so thankfully rare.) If you pursue your campaign thinking your audience will respond to your questions with T's and F's, the only way you can succeed is if they were inclined to support you regardless. Otherwise, you are lost. By the way, another reading suggestion I kicked myself for leaving out: http://www.issurvivor.com/ http://weblog.infoworld.com/lewis/ Want to know how IT management thinks and how to work with them to effect change? Read Bob's blog and InfoWorld column. Some selections that are particularly on-point here: http://www.weblog.keepthejointrunning.com/wordpress/?p=1594 http://www.weblog.keepthejointrunning.com/wordpress/?p=1603 http://www.weblog.keepthejointrunning.com/wordpress/?p=1623 http://www.weblog.keepthejointrunning.com/wordpress/?p=2552 http://www.weblog.keepthejointrunning.com/wordpress/?p=2691