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."
Perhaps it's because IT departments actually know how complicated, messy, potentially insecure and how awful support of such "projects" are going to be. As a general rule of thumb, tech-types don't usually give into the hype about things like Web 2.0 that columnists, marketers and your usual assortment of weirdos do.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
IT doesn't want Web 2.0 but end users do. Too bad! End users typically don't know what is good for them when it comes to computers and networking.
... opinions are not trolls or flamebait. Please don't mod me down because I'm testy, you don't agree, or you think I am being "stuck up". Reply instead.
Web 2.0 is a bloated, risky, pointless waste of time, money, bandwidth, and electricity.
Or at least that is my opinion.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Of course the IT 1.0 staff is causing trouble, companies need to upgrade them to 2.0 first!
Am I the only one who read this as:
"IT departments are wisely refusing to spend uneeded man hours and money on technological buzzwords that will not help, and will likely hurt, the business. Management foolishly decided to override them instead of listening."
Maybe I'm just jaded.
How did the end-users get to bypass HIPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley, Regulation FD, and general GAAP auditing, management control, and business continuity requirements? If they could teach the "IT Departments" how to do that I am sure there would be great appreciation.
sPh
Executive/marketing people are following the "hip" hype (reminds me of apple people) - just to make more flash and bang on user interface end and creating work equal to actual realization of a non web2.0 site, out of nowhere.
and not even having the vision to realize that all those nitty gritty stuff like ajax with highly exploitable activex, javascript, xml components are going to be summarily blocked by security software in near future. (some already creating problems)and the it peoplew will have to redo the thing all over to suit the security software producers' tastes this time.
no sir, it doesnt matter if a decent menu opens when you click a webpage, or it opens by turning and flashing and banging in some corner of the webpage whilst you were doing some other flashing and banging in another corner. data is the same, service is the same, exploitable security potential and work involved in realizing them are NOT.
Read radical news here
A company I work for has started to offer next-gen video hosting services (w/ one-to-one tracking, etc.) to customers who heretofore thought they simply could not have due to the intransigence of their own IT departments. So far, it's been interesting to hear the stories of the people who feel trapped by the people they hired to make this sort of thing possible.
Let me get this straight. You want to make the IT department pick up the slack for all the half-assed projects that some newb MBA deploys because he's a big fan of Kevin Rose and thinks it's cool? And that's a problem? The "resistance" mentioned in the lead-in exists because responsible parties within the organization don't want to follow behind the puppy cleaning up the dog poop.
If the MBA doggies had to clean up their own poop, the IT staff would be all in favor of the new projects. It's easy to be cavalier when you aren't paying the bills with YOUR time and effort.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
The same Pfizer that just announced yet another loss of identity data and has been fingered as having compromised hosts that are sending out Viagra spam? (I am not making this up!)
Something tells me that these guys need to be working more closely with their IT department, not less.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The company I work for is a VERY large tech company. We are JUST NOW starting to roll out things like Wiki and forum based support for applications, social networking software, etc. It's quite sad. I am sure this is the case in most IT departments in most large corporations. I have some theories as to why:
1) the obvious, resistance from upper management. Upper management is afraid of being "bleeding edge". New stuff, and especially open source stuff, is scary. PHBs fail to realize that the F/OSS community operates on a different set of values than corporations. Corporations only offer free stuff if it gets them good PR or creates a bunch of indentured customers. There is much FOSS that is quite viable, but it usually gets turned down in favor of proprietary crap.
2) complacent IT staff. In many large companies, the people who make decisions have promoted to their level of incompetence. In turn, they just phone it in, just do the minimum they need to do to get by. This precludes their actually learning anything new. When the decision makers are victims of FUD, what do you want?
3) red tape. Where I work, if you want to use non-standard software you have submit an exception, which then has to get approved by the people in bullet point number 2 above. It also has to get sent to upper management. Some supervisors are afraid of that and so strongly discourage you from submitting these exceptions. So people just use the same old software in the same old ways and nobody actually keeps up with the industry.
Case in point: on my intranet, AJAX use is still pretty small scale. Maybe for certain internet sites, AJAX isn't always appropriate, but on the intranet, where you can ensure that everyone is using a somewhat modern browser, it's an obvious choice for certain things. Yet, you still have people developing sites the same way sites have been developed for ten years. I use AJAX heavily, and you'd be surprised how people are still amazed by it. But now there is a push to call libraries like prototype "software" and thus make them subject to regulation and corporate standards. Standards committees cannot keep up with the industry, so you have a situation where you cannot, by decree, use anything *too* new. I can see disallowing joe service rep from installing webshots on his PC, but disallowing a developer from using his software of choice is pretty shortsighted.
blah blah blah
Not that many days ago it was an article about how our equivalent of the NSA had found sensitive information in plain sight on Facebook. The IT department don't want everyone and their mother blogging on the net because they'll also be the one getting the blame when shit hits the fan. And they'll also be the ones tasked with the impossible mission to create a magical filter that'll only let good things through and bad things not. Among several groups, the general opinion is that if they say nothing at all, they can't say anything wrong. It's not that terrible as it sounds, I'm not talking about whistleblowers here. I'm just talking about people that so desperately want to tell everyone else what they're doing. For the most part internal business is internal business and has no place in the public domain.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Unfortunately, most companies see IT as a "cost" that should be minimized. Any extra expenditure for any extra features needs a champion, a proposal, a business case, documentation of ROI, prototypes, roll-out plans, risk reduction documents, etc. etc. IT departments live under this constant cost-avoidance mandate and become quite averse to anything that might create more work (= more costs) because they know they'll have jump through hoops to justify the extra cost.
If the IT department in your company is an obstacle for your job, realize that it's because the people that control the purse strings for IT (e.g., the CEO, COO, CFO, et al) don't understand that IT can provide a huge opportunity to boost productivity, revenues, and profits. But until someone goes to them with a solid business case and demonstrable ROI for whatever tech du jour, the C-level suits and the IT dept will stay in cost-avoidance (vs. opportunity-seeking) mode of management.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Wow. I know this is Slashdot, but this is getting ridiculous. IT departments have one job and one job only:
Support the elements of the company that make money.
That's it. That's our job. If the elements of whatever company we're working for wants a "Web 2.0" app, instead of immediately jumping on our pedestals and saying, "Whoa there, mister! That's insecure and NEW! Put that thing away," we should instead be asking ourselves, "Hey, what problem are they trying to solve with this, and can we find a better solution?" When the employees are using Gmail or Facebook for inter-office communication, it means we're not doing our jobs, not because we're not locking down outside communication paths but because the communication paths we're providing are inadequate. When our customers start firing up MSN Messenger without our permission, we should be asking ourselves what we can use that's better, more secure, and easier to manage in an enterprise. When our customers come up to us and say, "We're tired of chasing Word docs everywhere - we're getting a wiki to manage our information", we should be looking at their problems and figuring out if a wiki is the best solution, or if they really just need a document management system.
Get it? WE are at the disposal and discretion of our coworkers, NOT the other way around.
Perhaps IT staff aren't keen on implementing it because they don't buy into The Silliness. Call it "Capitalism Meets Social Engineering 2.0" and perhaps the guys in suits with MacBooks and artistic mohawks might have takers in IT.
As Mark Pilgrim so eloquently put it: For those of you wanting to make a proverbial killing of this 'phenomenon' I refer you to a vital dictionary of terms.
I work for a government organization, and I would have to say the biggest barrier to using many of these features is accessibility. There are huge challenges in making Web 2.0 accessible, which we are required to do.
There is definitely some complacency there as well, as well as a lack of 'customer service' attitude, but in the case of Web 2.0, why bother if it takes so much effort or is almost impossible to make it WCAG and Section 508 compliant.
"The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right." - Henrik Ibsen
He added that he began his Web 2.0 quest by working closely with the company's 10,000-member IT department. "Nothing gets done without the IT department," he noted.
Wow! 10,000 member IT department!! That's a bloody legion of IT workers!
No wonder they had resistance to change, their bureaucracy is simply huge. Are the 10,000 geeks serving 10 million workers? A huge company that must be!
--
P.S. It looks like this web page changed its text when I loaded it a 2nd time. What's up with that? It think someone edited it.
The article didn't really give an examples other than 1000 people signed up for LinkedIn to prove a point.
I work in IT and we occasionally get requests from the business to do something in PHP, MySql and AJAX and they have no idea what they are even talking about other than they see it mentioned in a magazine article or a blog somewhere so they think they need everything done in PHP and MySql. These are the same people who think that if an icon isn't on their desktop the application isn't on their computer.
'Same speed C but faster'
One of several recent hacks at Pfizer
IT departments have learned caution the hard way.
What, the same people who put Windoze on desktops and increasingly into the server room don't like Wikis and other very cool free programs? Shocker. There are plenty of exceptions, like the CIA, but Windows inertia is a good part of this problem and established IT departments are something that have to be circumvented to get things done. The solution is radical removal of the problem. Doing that removes all sorts of networking problems and frees up staff for productive use. It's sad that users have to push this kind of change onto the IT departments instead of the other way around.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
So the company I am at just blocked a large online free web mail application, because of 'ActiveX', which is used by IE for AJAX.
They also block, youtube, myspace, flicker, and several other site, and anything that comtains music or video. It is beginning to suck working here.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
When Adam Carson, an associate at Morgan Stanley, first began pushing the use of Web 2.0 tools, he faced a major obstacle in the New York-based investment bank's 10,000-member IT department. "Most of our IT department didn't get it," he said. "This was all new to them. They had just been stuck in the world of enterprise IT."
... people liked using them."
So, the IT department would have prefered to do their job (enterprise IT) instead of building something just to use the tools.
However, he said he worked closely with IT team members to convince them of the merits of Web 2.0, which led them to implement Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) technologies, a key requirement for building and supporting Web 2.0 tools
He didn't stop nagging until they told an intern to cobble something together and paint the relevant acronyms in two feet letters on it.
Once IT was convinced of the value of Web 2.0, he said, the organization was "really good at making sure that [systems] worked really well and didn't break, but they weren't really good at making sure
So, people don't use the new-fangled stuff. Obviously this is the fault of IT, and not because they don't see the need.
Carson noted that the company now has about 80 Web 2.0 projects under way, including an effort to create social networks for its clients.
Now we have 80 unused projects. Even our customers refuse to use theirs so far.
During the education process, Carson said he also had to find a manager that would require the use of a Web 2.0 tool for a specific project.
He had an hammer and was looking for a nail. A screw would probably work as well.
That would help spur employees to use the new tools, he noted. The effort also faced cultural resistance from some users clinging to the use of e-mail and other traditional tools rather than switch to new Web 2.0 collaboration tools, he added.
So, with hard work he managed to have something implemented that nobody else thought necessary. Now he is looking for a way to make the users use it.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
The article isn't really about web 2.0 it's more just along the lines of any web based technologies for communication and interaction.
As an IT guy I am rolling out web based stuff. I have found:
- A lot of canned stuff (even some OSS apps) just aren't a fit for what we do (most businesses aren't a one size fits all business).
- Many of the hottest things to do are not all that flexible when it comes to integrating with other apps or data conversion, web 2.0 integration is cool as long as you keep with one co.'s products (assuming you can find one that can offer it all).
- I'm very leery of the SAAS companies - if the service company takes a dive all my work and data goes with it and then I'm really screwed (so most stuff will be hosted in-house).
- Those I can't I am reworking what we do (part from modified code other parts from scratch). A lot of this is truly very flexible and powerful, but compared to what tools I used before it is surely more complex (in a good sense) and takes time to get it right.
- Nothing is stopping you from rolling out a web app tomorrow but until you have your business (more importantly your data) on it it just will be a struggle in the transition. I find it takes a lot of work (or just time) to get to the tipping point where it becomes commonplace. When it does, it's great - but it surely doesn't happen overnight (unless that's the same time you start your business).
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Haha, that's so true.
What happens is these people think that there's some new miracle computer technology that magically solves their problems. When they find out that behind the shiny new Flash/JavaScript/ActiveX user interface they've really just got yet another information storage and retrieval system like their old one and making it useful requires real work by real people, they stop being interested because, heck, they could have done real work with the LAST system.
Where it gets really fun is when just enough work goes into the new thingy that the low-level office droids end up using it regularly and can't live without it BUT upgrading and maintaining it to sane levels doesn't get funded because the shiny exciting part that appeals to management is long gone.
It's *all* just another symptom of management's love of short-term/free-ride thinking. I'm surprised we don't hear more about these same people losing money to perpetual motion machines.
Web 2.0? Social networking??? Right, just as soon as we roll out the ping pong tables and arcade cabinets.
Listen, this isn't 1996 anymore, thank God. Unless you can make the case that we will recoup the implementation, training, and operating costs in productivity gains, it isn't going to happen. This is what is known as a BUSINESS CASE. Businesses exist to make money, not to coddle and pamper you. Did you mistake your cube farm for the Hilton?
You should be thankful you have Web 1.0. Because if it weren't for the fact that Java is most cost effective to maintain and operate, you would still be doing data entry and form processing on COBOL terminal screens.
And talk about insane, if you have so much free time at work that you think we should deploy a social networking system for you, you have got another thing coming. Which would you prefer? We can either cut you down to 20 hours and drop your benefits, or we can just reassign your job to an existing employee who is interested in working in exchange for monetary compensation?
NO WONDER the economy is in a slump. Do you think your counterparts over in India have the time to whine about lack of social networking software on the job? No, that's why they're taking your jobs.
It's really not that difficult a concept. Has anyone tried saying "please" and "thank you" to any of these folks? Or tried to find out what they do with their time? I'd bet you a paycheck that they're so busy putting out fires that idiot users or executives (but I repeat myself) are setting that they don't have TIME to do anything else. If you treat IT half as badly as it sounds, I think you're lucky they haven't dragged you from your car yet.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
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.
The "cool digital media lady" went down the IT section and asked:
- Hey, could you install some MediaWikis with capacity to five thousands access per minute by friday? I read it's super simple and light, just as Web 2.0 is supposed to be, so it should be very easy to do!
And the "boring IT guys" replied:
- You know we can't, we need to deal with all other emergency priorities you set last week about mail and the new Vista boxes. Besides, it's simple to install in one single machine for amateur use, it's complicated to prepare it for the security and load we'll need.
- You IT guys can't deal with changes. You complicate everything. I'll have a smart consultant friend to come over, install it for a few thousand bucks and hand the maintenance over to you.
- Gahhh...
Weeks later, she gave an interview boasting her boldness in "bypassing IT to get Web 2.0 technologies to the group's end users":
- IT started to realize it was happening without them anyway. They weren't interested until they started to get multiple requests from around the business. Eventually, they came on board.
The "boring IT guys" couldn't be interviewed. They were overwhelmed by client's support requests of system configurations, security alarms, the same old email problems and configuring tens of new servers with load balancing.
Next on "The Daily Buzzword Bugle", the folksonomy is being slowed down by the users.
^[:wq!
I don't know... without being able to resort to broad generalizations to have a ready scapegoat to complain about for all of my problems how will I be able to function?
So earlier this year we had a conference call with the various remote site operations and networking and help desk We had a bunch of customers saying "Why doesn't the company use Web 2.0? Why is Instant Messaging discouraged? Why is there no Wiki on the Intranet?"
While this wasn't a priority, we had a small server sitting idle from a failed project. So we built a MediaWiki server, gave it a catchy DNS name, and configured it so anybody who can authenticate to the company LDAP server has an auto-created Wiki account. Even preloaded the server with the Help: namespace and some documents from IT's old file share. I also contacted the biggest site's help desk and inquired whether they would be interested in importing their "how to" documents, but only got a snarky "I know what a Wiki is, and we don't want any" reply.
After some testing internally, about two weeks ago we send out a preliminary announcement about the new Wiki to 100 "power users", including the specific individuals who were complaining about the lack of a Wiki. The response?
Deafening silence.
Perhaps fifty users bother to click on the link, a dozen of those logged in, and four go so far as to create a personal "User" page or make a test edit to one of the existing pages. You can lead users to a wiki, but you can't make them contribute.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I've been trying for the past year to get Skype/EBay to talk to us at all, to even begin to have a conversation about how to securely enable internal clients to make and receive Skype phone calls without also enabling any and all other encrypted peer-to-peer applications.
Because that is what Skype really is, on the wire -- an obfuscated, encrypted peer-to-peer tunnel in which anything can be exchanged between the internal PC running Skype and a random workstation in some former soviet block nation which it appears to be using as a supernode. Any network where you can reliably use Skype, you can use the same network and host security holes to run P2P filesharing, botnets, or anything else your dark little twisted heart desires.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Hey, corporate suit - remember when you were rolling out metrics so you could determine which IT staff you'd keep and which you'd fire (for questionable reasons - no layoffs, don't want to pay unemployment). Now you think you need to make some significant changes - but the remaining IT staff is already overworked doing their jobs, plus the jobs of all the people you got rid of (and got a nice bonus for reducing IT payroll).
The chickens have come home to roost - time to pay the piper...
Found the book to be an interesting take, especially when he talks about an experience at an O'Reiley event with folks talking about "Web 2.0" and how it was going to change everything.
At any rate, I hear a lot about "We want a web 2.0 website" without people having a clue what that means. Some get damned irate when I say, "That's just a buzz word, what do you want it to do?" Most of the time their idea of web 2.0 is going from an HTML static site to one based around Joomla or some other CMS or they need some type of support ticket solution installed.
I don't tend to get into buzz words, my question is always straight forward: "What the hell are you trying to accomplish?" Then, "Okay. Here is Option A, B, C. My recommendation is A because:..."
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.