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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.
As a software developer outside of the IT department (I'm under direction of the Engineering group), I get this all the time. I get the run around, exclusion from important meetings, no say in things I have a large stake in, put at the bottom of the priority queue, and sometimes even people working to throw roadblocks in my way.
I've always been a fan of decentralized IT - a core group working to "keep the lights on" and seperate groups providing services embedded in the groups they're providing services to, responsible to the managers of the groups who use the tools. Meetings still happen with the needed staff, but someone is a few cubes down the hall or at least on the same floor to answer questions and get feedback.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I would be 7 kinds of mad if anyone was using gmail and IM in my office.
We work with NATO restricted data. *Everything* requires appropriate handling. E-mail is carefully fenced and the IM service is encrypted.
But even if you aren't a company with such a strong need for data protection... well actually there is no such thing. At the very least you have financial data and client information on your systems. Losing some of that stuff is considerably more harmful than restricting people to company provided communication tools.
Anyone placing data that hasn't been cleared for release (even by the very informal process of being sent out on purpose) onto services run by people with whom you have no contract and no reasonable expectation of integrity is, frankly, no better than the idiots who don't back up their data and are then surprised to find out that MTBF is not a guarantee. After all if your employees are using gmail et al you don't even know what data you *have* let alone what steps you need to take to protect it.
Beep beep.
For a moment I thought you were talking about me....
/.'ers of the dangers of CD's after the Sony rootkit debacle). Of course we've removed all accessible means in - CDROMS/USB slots etc... and have some very harsh rules. But still, it's only a matter of time before I walk in and find some guy with his mp3 player hanging from a machine, or installing something unauthorized... because they thought they knew better.
But seriously. My IT department guys were kind enough to give me admin privileges on my workstation and on my colleagues workstations in my department. I didn't ask for it, but they obviously trust me to some extent and i've built that trust over time. I'm not a sysadmin and have never been one.
It could have something to do with the fact I'm overseeing a highly technical project involving setup of IT systems of sorts. This leads me to the same problem the article mentions. Our system must stay isolated from the world - physically and connectively (no inter-tubes for you!). The problem is its users 'think' they know better and think its ok to put in a CD, or plug in a USB drive to play MP3's or whatever because they can at home. (I don't think I need to tell
I've been a user that is locked into crazy setups. The traveling consultant at client sites who's PC is setup to be managed from the corporate network. At one point, I got tired of the insanity, took a ghost image of the machine they gave me, and installed linux on the machine (and then restored the ghost image in a vmware session).
But here's the thing, I don't ask for support from the IT department because I'm the odd guy. I know they can't support me. What annoys me (as the one who helps other IT departments manage lots of PC's) are the people that install various applications that cause our automated installs to fail. 90% of the machines are managed with little to no effort. It's the 10% that cause days of work while we try to figure out which of the 20 apps you installed is breaking our install tool.
And for all those against IM and email lockdown, I've been to trading companies where that's the law. They get in trouble when they don't have logs of what people said on IM, email, phone calls, etc because that's how they catch insider trading. Of course for every sensible rule, I've seen 10 that make no sense at all. As has been said before, the USB key should force companies to reevaluate their policies.
We should love smart users. If they come up with their own solutions to problems, they're de facto developers. If the business is run well, good workers will succeed and advance while poor workers fail and leave the company. In time, we'll have evolved a class of competent users, even experts, and have application development in the hands of everyone, along with the skillset to actually make decent software. It's a long way off, and maybe a pipe dream, I know, but don't squash the dream. Please.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I'm a fairly knowledgeable computer user with 10 years of Linux experience on top of the standard Windows use since 3.1. When I have an IT problem I play stupid, real stupid. You know why? Because the second they think that I'm self diagnosing a problem it becomes priority 0.
When I called up to tell them that my co-workers computer was denying Groupwise proxy rights via a VBA Access module for a single proxy account and not any others, they ignored me for *four weeks*.
When I call up and say, "my computer doesn't work" they show up in minutes and do whatever it is that they need to do.