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Making the Most of IT support?
wetfeetl33t asks: "On Slashdot, we've seen quite a few stories about employees who are unhappy with their company's IT department, or are seeking advice on how they can whip their company's IT department into shape. So, enough of the complaints about the supposed stupidity of technicians, the incompetence of sysadmins, or the excessive network down time. A better question is: how can users work peacefully and effectively with their IT department and make the interaction between the IT people and other employees as productive as possible?"
There is a truism involved in all IT affairs: if you ask someone you'll be told "no".
Try it. Ask through the proper channels if you can have Firefox on your PC at work (for instance). You will be told "no, that would be too much extra work for our technicians; we need to have everything be the same on all the machines." They said this because if they tell you yes this one time, it will "set a precedent" that could cause the whole house of cards to come tumbling down. They install Firefox for you, now they have to take application installation requests from the 15 people you mentioned that to, etc., etc.
Now on the other hand, make friends with your systems administrator and ask for the same thing in a non-official manner. More than likely you will get what you asked for as a personal favor, because in this case it really wasn't much work to do.
This type of thing comes up CONSTANTLY in the IT field. As in about every five minutes. It applies equally well to much larger scale issues as well. Lets say you need some network ports from the central IT division in this one room. Oh well thats going to be $25,000. Or we could use these unused ports in the room next door by routing long (optical cables, no worry about exceeding the length limit) cables around in a crazy fashion, total price $300. This is a violation of the central IT division's terms, but it not only saved that $24,700 it also made the task possible at all -- if left at $25k it would have been a complete failure.
There is a definite need to circumvent the power structure and bend the rules in most corporate environments if you are focused on getting the results you need. Some people would just shrug and say thats the way it goes; other people come up with ways around it to get what they need. The real point is that there are a lot of worthless rules that clog up people's work, and a lot of inflexible bureaucratic people (particularly in the upper echelons of most IT divisions) who you have to bypass to get any work done. The downfall is that if you're bending rules, you may come to one that really shouldn't have been bent for real.