IT Departments Fear Growing Expertise of Users

flatfilsoc recommends a long article in CIO magazine on users who know too much and the IT leaders who fear them. Dubbing the universe of consumer technology the "shadow IT department," the article highlights the extent to which the boundary between users' workplace and home have broken down. It notes the increasing clash — familiar to anyone who works in a company with an IT department — between users' home-grown productivity boosters and IT's mandate to protect corporate data. The inherent tendency of the IT department to want to crack down and control technology that it doesn't supply should be resisted at all costs, according to CIO. The article outlines strategies for co-existence. It just might persuade some desperate CIO somewhere not to embark on a career-limiting path of decreeing against gmail and IM.

Comments

Sometimes it "has to fit"

[winkydink]

whether you like it or not.

In the US, Sarbanes-Oxley places some strict requirements on data retention for publicly-traded companies. Employees choosing to use IM and gmail, could cause those requirements to be circumvented.

Re:Sometimes it "has to fit"

[LurkerXXX]

This is why the clever IT guy who doesn't want to get blamed for limiting user, as in the blurb, should bring in the corporate lawyers to lay down the law. This way it isn't the good IT director who wants to supply any needed technology, but the lawyer cracking down on things that could get the company in hot soup.

Re:Yeah, what he said....

[yuna49]

One of my clients is a community health center. We're looking into the Linux Terminal Server Project http://www.ltsp.org/ for precisely the reason that meeting HIPAA requirements for privacy and security is nearly impossible unless we can centrally control what's running on the workstations. In the next hardware tranche we're looking to go diskless with no CD writers and no USB support for mass-storage devices.

Having only one, centrally managed, desktop image has a lot of appeal as well!

Re:Yeah, what he said....

[Jhon]

Print Screen -> jpg -> IPOD HD.

Cut/Paste from APP -> text File -> IPOD HD.

Scan

You've obviously never worked with state/federal payors who are cracking down on fraud. Not only from the entity making the claim for service, but forcing the entity making the claim to police their own CLIENTS for fraud. There are volumes of various types of regulations and procedures that CAP/CLIA/Medi require and we are regularly inspected for compliance.

Sucks to be in IT in the medical field sometimes.

Re:It's called "physical security".

[rsborg]

Locking down the PC so that the receptionist cannot move data to his/her iPod would also, logically, prevent the iPod from doing anything that s/he would want it to do.

This is not true. The receptionist should be using his/her PC/Mac at HOME to load the iPod with *her* music. No interaction between the mp3 player and the workstation/laptop is necessary. The iPod still plays songs/video as it should, but without interacting with the work computer.

Re:Yeah, what he said....

[markov_chain]

It would be much easier to use a digital camera.