Slashdot Mirror
Don't Network Administrators Require Privacy?
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Recently their company has decided to move the IT staff out of their offices to make room for the Service Department. The move has placed the IT staff in cubicles that all face inward and lack, obviously, the ability to lock their doors at night. This is, to them, an obvious breach in security and privacy for what may be sensitive network information. Have any other Slashdot readers dealt with this sort of problem before? If so, what specific information was best suited to rectify these security concerns?
I have recently hired on at a large corporation with a powerful IT department. There is a draconian, yet vague, policy forbidding nearly everything, especially "viewing of inappropriate material" and "use for personal gain". People have been known to be summarilly fired for "viewing of inappropriate material". At the bottom of this statement is the sentence: "Reasonable personal use is allowed." Whatever that might mean, it is certain that everything one does at a company computer is being watched by a hidden cadre of judgmental IT folks, who are never seen, and whose identity is unknown (they are at corporate headquarters, I presume). It is true, of course, that all the equipment belongs to the company, so the company can say what we can do with it. Nonetheless, if the "hostile work environment" catch phrase we hear frequently around here means anything, it must include this sort of thing.
Since I'm not an IT dreg, I wouldn't really care either way. However, the best IT groups I've seen in action weren't ivory-towered. They may have an "office" segregated from the rest of the population, but they still worked together. The ones that were the least responsive, productive and prepared were the ones where each member of the IT group had their own separate "office". It just doesn't work.
I can get away with working, separated from my coworkers, because of the nature of my work. It allows for seamless collaboration in other ways. But I've never seen a successful IT department work in the same way, because a good IT department is arranged like a good firehouse. You don't see every fireman in a firehouse sleeping in his own "apartment" at the firehouse, do you?