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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.
Employees choosing to use IM and gmail, could cause those requirements to be circumvented.
Same with employees using the copier, printer, fax machine, or *drum roll* a pencil and piece of paper. If someone wants to circumvent some security measure they will.
At some point you have to trust your employees. If you can't trust them, then why hire them in the first place?
True story, I called up Microsoft, they wanted to register my xbox, I said, no. They said but we have to, I said no. Long story short they finally said ok, but still took a little information. They didn't solve my problem, at the end of the call I was annoyed but I wanted to check on this. I ask the supervisor "I want to make sure my xbox was not registered" "oh well, it was I can't help you with that" After bitching and screaming I got the following facts out of them.
No one is able to delete my entry.
The IT department does not accept calls.
The legal department doesn't have a phone number and apparently doesn't respond to email (found out after two attempts at corrospondance with them)
The database doesn't have a way for them to delete my entry at all.
I'm wrong for thinking it does
There's no one above her, she's the highest level of support I can reach.
This is coming from someone who has a thick indian accent, the first service representative has one too so we got the stink of outsourcing as well. The moral of this story is the intellegent user is just a boob you can lie to and tell them that the business doesn't allow you access to what they want access to as long as everyone is on the same page. Unfortunatly I work at a company that does business with microsoft (and the games department in particular) and I'm not willing to risk my employement and future employment by taking them to court, however even if I was who knows if I'd win.