Slashdot Mirror
Barrier to Web 2.0 — IT Departments
jcatcw writes "Wikis, social networks, and other Web 2.0 technologies are finding resistance inside companies from the very people who should be rolling them out: the IT staff. The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in London had to bypass IT to get Web 2.0 technologies to end users. Both Morgan Stanley and Pfizer are rolling out Web 2.0 projects, but it took some grass roots organizing to get there."
Of course the IT 1.0 staff is causing trouble, companies need to upgrade them to 2.0 first!
Your problem is that you need to kill the BOFH. You will need a silver stake, electrical gloves, KCN pills, a SCBA, 20 oz of deionized water blessed by a geek, and The New Testament. Don't enter at night, and don't expect to catch the BOFH by surprise. They don't sleep, they lurk. If you can sabotage the coffee and soda machines you can drive them out of their lair. Otherwise you may have to defeat their army of PFYs. Good luck! And if they capture you and decide to Megger your balls, use the cyanide pills.
Looks like IDG (ComputerWorld, ITWorld, NetworkWorld...) is really hitting Slashdot HARD, either that or they have a deal with Slashdot. Here's a partial list of the shills that regularly show up and have almost 100% article acceptance rates:
Ian Lamont
Lucas123
coondoggie
inkslinger77
narramissic
jcatcw
Looks like they spread out the work over a few shill user accounts, which is to be expected. If it's all OK and everything with the corporate ownership of Slashdot to be played by IDG, I suppose that's their business, but one would hope that they are actually getting PAID for being part of IDG's advertising program. And of course there should be disclosure so that visitors to Slashdot realize they are reading advertisements and not an article submitted by a "real" user...
Son, we live in a world that has firewalls, and those firewalls have to be maintained by men with root access. Whose gonna do it? You? You, with your blogging buddies? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You whine about port blocking and you curse the administrators. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: That blocking ports, while frustrating, probably saves bandwidth... And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves packets. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at LAN parties, you want me on that firewall, you need me on that firewall. We use words like source address, port 80, destination... We use these words as the backbone of an access control list. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain why I block access to YouTube to a man who points and clicks on the very network that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a whitepaper, and create your own web 2.0 app. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
FWIW seeing IE7 and web 2.0 in the same sentence makes me want to drink Draino. Good luck.