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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.
and there are always groups of individuals in every company that DO NOT fit the one-size-fits-all software/security model.
Some people/groups really need a sandbox to work in, without interference from good intentioned IT departments.
A virus spread wildly throughout my company recently because IT had thought to conveniently map some not so useful drives for everyone... guess how that virus spread?
IT needs to learn to provide and protect without being so intrusive as to hinder real work being done.
Sighhh
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Has always been the user who *thinks* he knows too much, and is out to prove it - usually causing problems, havoc, and destruction in so doing. You know, the kind of guy who gets pissed when you won't give them root/Administrator priveliges because he thinks he's a real big-shot. I've heard arguments as silly as "Well, I'm learning Linux on my own at home, so sooner or later, I'm going to know how to use it whether you give me root or not." Yeah, good for you.
It seems that every company I've worked for has had one. Maybe it's a small part of my personal castigation for the things I've done wrong. Who can say...
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I've met uncountable numbers of idiots when it comes to understanding technology. Guess what... many of them were peers in IT. In retrospect, it makes sense. I'd anticipated my move from college to a "real" job as a release from the world of idiots in the CS curricula. Finally, I'd get a chance to work shoulder to shoulder with people who knew.
Not so much.
I'd never considered where the rest of my university peers had to go -- into the same work force I entered -- duh.
In the non-IT universe I discovered many were also clueless around technology, as I'd expected. What I hadn't expected was there were many non-IT people who got it, who understood technology, and worked with it adeptly. Many "got it" more than my peers. Some of the most profound ideas and innovation I've seen in IT have come from nontraditional non-IT people.
I agree (without reading the entire article) with the summary and gist of the article -- IT does itself no favors ruling by fiat and instead should collaborate with users.
This doesn't dismiss bad things happening and messes created by users left behind for IT to clean up. People who mess up should help clean up, but my experience has been many IT people are equally inept and likely to make messes.
A degree and title in IT and CS means only that one has a degree in IT and CS, nothing more. It doesn't mean they're anointed and it doesn't mean they know more about technology than users.
I'm sick and tired of IT departments that try to control everything I do when I know perfectly well that WeatherBug and WinFixer are the right tools for the job. I am a smart and knowledgeable IT consumer, and I've been using these fine products at home for some time now. Why not at work too?
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.
Lock down usb ports.
Besides, no matter what they do, they can't stop me from creating a knoppix cluster from my coworkers pc's after they all leave for the day.
They can fire you.
See, not so hard.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Reading your email and your slashdot posts IS our actual work.
Signed,
Your IT Department
P.S. You're fired.
What?
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.
1. "My hard drive is howling like a panther passing a kidney stone. Every time I run chkdsk I lose a few more sectors. I've backed up all my work to the network drive. When you get a chance can you come and fix my computer?"
2. "My computer won't start. It's been making this squealy noise for about two weeks and then all of a sudden it just died. You have to come right now and fix it because all the annual budget files are on my desktop."
Which call would you rather get?
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.