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Should IT Shops Let Users Manage Their Own PCs?
An anonymous reader writes "Is letting users manage their own PCs an IT time-saver or time bomb waiting to happen? 'In this Web 2.0 self-service approach, IT knights employees with the responsibility for their own PC's life cycle. That's right: Workers select, configure, manage, and ultimately support their own systems, choosing the hardware and software they need to best perform their jobs.'" Do any of you do something similar to this in your workplace? Anyone think this is a spectacularly bad idea?
In a perfect world this would actually work. But then we'd run into pirating like crazy and companies being sued all of the the place. I certainly support a more liberal approach to what employees are allowed to use on their machines, but restrictions certainly need to be in place.
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
Bad idea for those that run shops with people who are clueless to computers. These types of people are walking disasters for the entire IT dept. Good idea for those young-ins that know what they are doing with computers. These types of people not only already save the IT dept. a lot of hassle(I personally help numerous people in my area with computer problems that might otherwise get relegated to IT), but they will know how to work and manage all the software and tools that they opt to install.
Crackin' Wise - Blogging about whatever we want
Sure. I'm getting them to write their own software too, but the learning curve is a little steep. We would like to have them fabricating their own chipsets by 2010. Of course we'll have them start with FPGAs first before actual silicon, because that only makes sense.
Better known as 318230.
Any idea why this article hasn't been tagged "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" yet?
So the answer is basically, "it depends".
For security reasons its always important to manage the AV, updates, etc. on the machine.
If you have important IP on laptops, it becomes even more important to have a good policy to manage machine health, rather than leaving it to individual discretion.
And finally, if you have well-defined and relatively narrow roles for which machines are required, again it makes sense to lock them down.
So depending on how much of the above is true, the answer will vary, but in general IT shops should not trust users to manage their own machines especially because users really don't know much when it comes to keeping a machine secure.
If I went through IT at work, I would still be using Photoshop 5.0 and some ancient version of Pagemaker. They're so slow (and this is a true story, honest to God) that the last time they approved any work software for me, the company had stopped making the version they approved before they finally approved it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Some of my users would and can do a fine job of that, but they're outnumbered by the ones who aren't trained and/or bright enough to be trusted administering their own box. Click on shiny! free tool to clean spyware that it just detected when you visited this website, oh yes. Install all kinds of crap and wonder why the computer's crawling & BSODing. Get us audited by the BSA, etc.
Maybe for the better sort of user, but gods no for the unwashed masses.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
You can do all the hand-holding you can and they will STILL find a way to mess the machines up. And as long as management sees it as YOUR responsibility to clean up and correct the messes that uses create, you're nothing more than a janitor.
I have expressed the philosophy to various departmental management people that it doesn't matter whose 'responsibility' it is to get things fixed. It matters that things get broken. The amount of down time suffered happens regardless of who owns the responsibility, but can be avoided with more responsible behavior by the users.
I express that "these are your work tools. you mess them up and you're losing money until I can fix it again. There is nothing more I can offer."
I think that hits home with a lot of intelligent leaders.
So yes, give users control over their machines... but make sure they know that even though you're there to clean up the mess, the mess's fall-out is still on them. They will then take better care of their tool... their source of productivity and income.
For those in IT who think this is not the case, consider your power users. Many really can function - even if not to corporate standards of security or conformity - with very little help. They probably will spend an extra $200-$400 per machine for stuff that has marginal use, but they'll feel better about it and be productive. The problem is that there's that one guy - and everyone in IT know who he is - that is way out of his depth and just doesn't know it. You spend a lot of time praying he doesn't screw up more than his own workstation. The good thing is that considerably more than half of modern staffs will likely just want you to set it all up and keep it running.
In the case for users managing their own PCs, NASA used to be this way where I worked in the 90s. We ordered our own PCs, set them up, installed all software. The IT staff would help get us on the network and keep the network running. There were exceptionally few problems. This was, however, before most people had access to the internet, and predominantly before the web existed.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I imagine this could work and work well in an IT shop full of software developers. However it isn't going to work if the users don't know an operating system from an aardvark. You'd still want some minimal rules like keeping the PC patched and good A/V software if you're running Windows. but I'd say it's doable.
What it isn't going to do is reduce your costs. You might have a very minimal help desk and no specialized staff installing those desktops but that knowledge, time and effort must be spread through the organization. You may also find it harder to get good deals on bulk purchasing depending on how you do it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This sort of thing would never fly at a sufficiently large company. Once you get to a certain size, the pressure to "standardize" becomes too strong to resist. I suppose this is reasonable, because the licensing, support, etc. is much cheaper this way. Oh, and arguing that individual choice makes workers more productive is useless: productivity can't be easily measured -- therefore it doesn't exist.
We have 7 techs supporting 2000+ computers in 800+ offices. We give guidance but we don't tell them they have to run them any any specific manner. The biggest advice is, "Boring is good".
License compliance is one detail were you can't offer any wiggle room. There are a number of good auditing software (including some free ones!) that will report on the installed software. That will keep you out of legal trouble.
In the days when I was on a large network, I thought it was a bad practice for the IT department to have better setups than the end users. Some IT people had not just faster computers but leaner images with less integration and less overhead. Their machines flew.
But of course they had no appreciation of how bad it was to be in the trenches. Their computers performed so much better than the equivalent computers of the end users that they often did not realize how hard it was to get work done on a standard image.
When I reached the point where I ran one of the departments, I kept an old standard-image computer as my main computer and made sure I was always at the end of the upgrade queue. My view was that if something worked well on my computer, it would work on anyone's. And if something didn't work well on my computer, then it meant some of my users were having a bad experience.
So maybe if the IT department would just use the same image and hardware as the end users, they'd know enough to provide a decent standard image, which would solve a lot of user complaints.
In my opinion, there is a vast difference between what a user "thinks" they need to do their job and what they actually need. Just like any other part of the company you need some gatekeeper for cost control and to make sure that purchases don't overlap. If every user could pick what they needed to get their job done I'm sure you'd see a lot more Quad cores being ordered with SLI video cards. Not because the user thought they needed them, but because they were more expensive so it must be better for them.
If you were in a technology company this might be different because in theory the users would be more knowledgeable about tech products. However in most companies I would guess the users don't know the difference between XP Home and XP Professional, so how can they pick what they need?
Error: Sig not found.
I have trouble convincing people not to set their beverages on the copier while waiting for jobs to complete. Give these people local admin rights and we're going to have smoke and shrapnel.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I have a 72 years old guy in a next cubicle ...I don't think the man knows the difference between a CPU and motherboard ..
I don't think he knows the difference between a 401K and lottery tickets either.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Maybe end users have changed miraculously from when I was still doing desktop support, but I doubt it. IT doesn't develop policies limiting supported configurations just to be mean (generally). They do it because that's all they can in fact support given existing staffing and support metrics. Maybe you can get small numbers of users to be sufficiently knowledgeable that they can support themselves, but the overwhelming majority of users don't know enough, and don't *want* to know enough, to do this. They'd come to rely on some absurdly obscure or broken application, then call IT when it doesn't do what they want it to, and IT would have no idea how to fix it. Plus they'd end up with massive amounts of pirated material. The techs aren't going to memorize the manuals for every possible bit of code a user might take a fancy to, and they certainly can't test every possible combination of applications to test for incompatibilities.
Letting end users choose their own machines and apps sounds like a lovely and empowering idea, right up until the point where they need to call tech support. And find out that it might be days before IT can fix whatever is broken, since they are starting with zero idea what is wrong because of the wacky config. Those days of lost productivity can be hugely expensive compared to the costs of testing a few specific configs that can be easily and quickly supported. Some tech hours of advance testing and some possible minor losses of productivity from using applications that aren't the user's favorite choices are far cheaper than having an employee turn in no billable hours for several days because his computer is down.
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
It depends on the organization. I used to work in a 20 or so person division of a software company in which the technical staff were allowed to configure and maintain their machines, within certain constraints. The funny thing is that the primary development team ended up with the same software on their machines, the consulting engineers ended up with their own tool suite, and the marketing guys just relied on the support staff to keep them running. There were a few differences as far as text editor and debugging tool preferences, but generally you could sit down at any machine and expect it to have everything you needed - a virgin install contained our core tools and network stuff anyway. That said, it was *really* nice to be able to install a necessary program or utility without having to go through layers of bureaucracy.
However, I've also done stints at telcos and other massive organizations where things were incredibly locked down out of necessity/paranoia. I never had too much difficulty getting tools/permissions that I needed, but that was probably because of my role within the IT group. Had I been a marketing guy trying to install some sort of whacky video software, things might not have gone so smoothly.
It's a good idea if your users have a clue. It's a bad idea if they don't. It entirely depends on the users.
In my shop we're all coders, so that plan would work. In fact it's vital to our work. Originally we were locked down and had to have an admin install pretty much anything we wanted to use. IT became an inhibitor rather than a helper. They eventually had to lift the ban. The policy was in the way.
On the other side of the coin, I've also held IT positions managing users. Giving some of my former customers the keys would have been an immediate disaster. In that case a lockdown was a lifesaver.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
At least the last 3 places I've worked. The Mac community helped itself out, at the largest site we had one formally trained Mac tech support person covering probably 150 or more Macs.
Then another place I worked, the one time the tech support people touched my Mac, they screwed it up...
On the other side, I watched an employee of a Fortune 50 company visit another company's location, where the latter would assign you a specific IP address to use. This guy didn't have enough privileges on his Windows box to configure the IP address on it, and of course his corporate help(less) desk's attitude was that they had to have the machine hooked up to the internet to remotely administer it. Catch-22...
Dilbert's "Mordac, Preventer of Information Services" is unfortunately the way of life for most corporate IT departments. When I'm King, every CIO will provide each employee with a charge number against the CIO's budget, when an IT problem prevents that employee from doing productive work.
dave
We ended up putting them on their own network and cutting them off the WAN fairly often because they couldn't patch, protect or resuist opening every random attachment they came across. Yes, they ran Windows by and large (one guy had a four-processor box with eleven VMware images, all infected with something), but these were supposedly "young" and "tech-savvy" people who didn't need to be controlled and could be trusted to patch their own machines.
At least they didn't place many support calls.
In a big shop, someone needs to either rule with an iron fist, or self-adminned machines need to be sequestered into the own network and allowed exactly zero access to company data. Heck, even in a small shop there has to be one person designated to kicking ass and taking names. People have day jobs--even IT people--that would get in the way of proper maintenance and someone needs to ensure that:
- Stuff gets backed up
- Stuff is secure
- Stuff doesn't screw up other stuff
Yes, even "Web 2.0 aware hipsters" need to do this, and it's not their job any more than bookkeeping or balancing cash would be.--srj/mmv
I work for IT for a decent-sized department at a university -about 200-300 machines. All purchase requests go through us, but we usually get what they ask for (as long as it's a Dell or an Apple, but mostly because we have institutional deals with them and they're on the cheap). We set up XP (Vista only if the user wants it). We lock down antivirus and things like that, but for the most part the sub-group they're in has admin privileges on all their machines - but no one else's. When things get fubar'd, they call us to fix it. If it's something they could have avoided, we'll try as hard as we can to fix it. If it's something stupid ("I opened an e-mail attachment") it may take us a while to get to it. YMMV.
I worked as help desk at a bioinformatics research facility, with roughly 200 people, and I can fit the number of power users that I could remotely trust to run their own machine in one hand. And 3 of them have gone over our heads - one wiped his own RHEL Linux (not that I'm a fan, but it's managed) with his own Ubuntu install, causing us grief when we change settings. He also cause a Kent State Computing Science PhD (who's more like a n00b who can't type his password right) to demand the "same" setup, burning up weeks of time for 2 out of 4 IT staff, myself included. The other 2 would routinely try to install pirated software on work computers.
And we do try to install software in time for our users. We would try to allocate the right software in time, and if there's no reasonable way to do it (i.e. the user can't get the funding), we try to offer alternatives. In the past, yes, the IT department had been sluggish, but the majority of them have left, and we do try to provide good service.
Apparently, in a bioinformatics research facility, most of the staff who do research don't know jack about computers, or how to maintain them. If the users are allowed to manage their own machine, I would spend so much time fixing machines, I would want to jump off the building.
Thank god I left that place. It was bad enough with the existing setup. To think that most users can maintain their machines is pure folly.
A government institution, to be precise, and the locals were using government computers, government media (CDR's) and various other resources to pirate everything from Windows to Games for Windows... and you know what? I was nearly fired for bringing it up. Taking action with my "superiors" in IT over what I perceived to be a legitimate issue, and being not only stonewalled but also treated like scum, is what resulted in me tendering my resignation shortly thereafter. Total time on job? Less than a year... far less. Reason? Dirty business practices. Yes, this was a SCHOOL... these are the people teaching your kids what to think, and possibly (in rare instances of "good teachers") even how to think. Another example of government "honesty" and examples of justice. Piracy reigned, and when notified, my "superiors" felt offended that I did not remove the offending software. After much correspondence and arguments, and nothing getting done, I finally got fed up and left. There is a reason schools enjoy Linux like pricing on software. So many of the teachers pirate everything in sight, with full oversight of the various officials.
And then they teach kids that "crime doesn't pay". Talk about hypocrisy.
Another reason to pick up homeschooling.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Depends on how technically savvy the users are.
Technically clueless users wouldn't know what to do anyway.
Technically savvy users need little more than an IP address and a beer to do the right thing. Hell, our sysadmins consult with me to help figure out how to do things right.
The middle ground is the one that makes me nervous. The nouveau-techie little bit of knowledge types are the ones that scare me.
I've installed and configured everything in my cubicle, and have root/admin access as well, because I need it. This is as it should be. I do not have root access to our main file server, because I do not need it. This is also as it should be.
...laura
My old(as in previous) boss is finally retiring at the age of 80. he was still working a 55-60 hour work week.
He didn't need the money, but did it so he wouldn't get bored. I have another friend who is 63 has 4 seasonal jobs to keep himself busy and gives him just enough extra cash to play. he doesn't need the work, but he works to keep himself going.
You don't have to stop hard when you retire, you just change priorities.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
1. User just deleted a "critical" data directory/file.
2. User just deleted an OS directory and their computer will not run.
3. User kept everything on his/her local drive and it just caught fire.
4. User wants an email from 3 years ago that user had deleted from his/her last computer 2 years ago.
5. The legal department wants all email to/from Mr.X, Mr.Y and Mr.Z.
6. User keeps getting infected with viruses.
With centralized control, all of those are simple. Once you start allowing users to choose what to run, how to configure it and so forth, all of those become major issues.
It entirely depends on the company. Small companies, Linux shops, and engineering-focused companies work better with people maintaining their own machines.
I work at a Linux-based network security startup. Engineers maintain our own Linux boxen, IT maintains the Windows boxes given to non-engineers. Most employees, engineers included, have Windows laptops assigned to them as well; those laptops are maintained by IT. Of course, we're a small company...IT consists of one person in our US office and one person in our India office.
Not much piracy concerns with Linux; we don't run any commercial distros on our desktops (we run a hodgepodge of Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora), and none of us have any use for Linux commercial software.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Like most slashdotters, I'm in IT.
The last couple of companies I've worked in, have made the decision to allow us -employees- to admin. our PCs. We are mostly semi-senior developers: we have the knowledge to make our computers perform their best, and we know what we want -and need- from them. No one else -not even support dept.- can know what service, application or tool is best for us and, being highly trained, we're the best admins. these computers could have.
-- For instance, even though we need to use Windows XP, no one uses IE --
And last (but definetely not least), this is what we *do*. Most of us could hack through the security policies if they were there. I don't think that having over a hundreed skilled developers trying to bring down your security infrastructure is the best way to go.
Whenever I start my own company (that's right, I still like to daydream), I'll make sure I hire talented, trustworthy people, and grant them admin. rights of their PCs.
PS: Note that admin. of PCs != network admin. Everyone here should appreciate the difference
I've been at a number of companies with totally opposite ways fo doing things. Currently, where I now work, we let users do mostly as they please. Surprisingly, the amount of support time isn't must greater than when one has to control the IT worker's every move. The greates part of support is still helping users with various software issues. Generally, it works quite well.
In tech-savvy teams, yeah, let them manage their own computers, especially programmers and sysadmins. Otherwise they'll have every moment and to be honest their productivity will probably be reduced. Especially because many IT facilities are nazis on a power rush who take positive delight in being obtuse and difficult - especially to those more skilled with computers.
However other people? Noooooo! Not even with a course in basic computer management.
I'd still get the former group to take a course in acceptable computer use, of course. Too many universities don't have a proper ethics course on their CS courses these days - then again, too many CS courses are glorified "programming" courses.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
that stored the music. It's pretty reasonable to assume that well, lets see the music is stored under
C:\Documents and Settings\John User\Documents\My Music\Lita Ford
I think John User must have done it. I am pretty sure if you spell it out as policy against such actions, that the company would divert *.aa to the actual user that comitted the infraction. No amount of hand holding can really prevent this sort of thing. If they have access to the box, they have root right? That's what we say all the time here.
They will do stuff like this. It'll get worse as the younger generation grows into working age.
That's why I don't store too much personal data on my work computer, but access my own music via streams from orb.com
However, I guess we could just make it illegal to use workstations at work, and make everyone access company infrastructure via a terminal. Yeah GREAT IDEA...
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Saying that "backups exist" does not address the question of HOW the backups are made when the user can put any file anywhere on their system.
With a centralized system, the users can be restricted to ONLY saving files on their TEMP directory and the servers. Those are MUCH easier to backup and lots of packages exist for that exact purpose.
As someone who has worked for 10 years as a network admin, the answer is NO.
Yes, there are special cases out there. But they are special cases. By default, the only policy that works is to lock down a machine and grant access as needed. Too many people treat an unrestricted machine like a "rental." They abuse it. They don't take simple precautions because, hey, it's the company's machine. Given a chance, they will treat it as a personal plaything.
To deny these truths is to deny basic sociology. And as I said, 10 years of first hand experience that is amplified by every competent admin I know.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming