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Guerrilla IT, Embracing the Superuser?
snydeq writes "First it's letting users manage their own PCs and now it's sanctioning the shadow IT projects they do on the down low: 'You probably know them. They're the ones who installed their own Wi-Fi network in the break room and distribute homemade number-crunching apps to their coworkers on e-mail. They're hacking their iPhones right now to work with your company's mail servers. In short, they're walking, talking IT governance nightmares. But they could be your biggest assets, if you use them wisely. The reason superusers go rogue is usually frustration, says Marquis. "It's a symptom of the IT organization being unable to meet or even understand the needs of its customers," he says. "Otherwise, it wouldn't be happening." The solution? Put them to work.'"
I'm an "IT" guy by trade. But unlike most, I'm an independent - I do contract work for a lot of smaller companies that don't need full-time IT staff. Being such, this 'superuser' is usually my favorite type of employee - one of the few people who will really understand what the problem is and be able to explain it beyond "my computer doesn't come up" (which can mean anything from the "computer doesn't actually power" on to "the Internet is down" to "I can't get into my 15-year old shitty accounting software package that even the publisher tells me is shit and should be upgraded but I'm too cheap to do so"). As long as the superuser understands their limitations, this is a dream come true for IT - they no longer get bothered with small bullshit like "My mouse is dead" or "Should I cancel this AVG/Symantec/Mcafee/Kaspersky/Whatever updater? Why does it come up every day?". However, it's a fine line between a superuser who makes things easier on IT and a 'superuser' who turns a simple problem into a nightmare something even Milton never could have imagined by overstepping their capabilities. One of the examples: setting up a Wi-Fi router in an office - a seemingly simple task that any monkey can do, and one that made the skin of every IT person reading this crawl. Sure, that new Wi-Fi device probably gave Joe Dipshit the freedom to roam about his 10x10 cubicle with his laptop now, but it's completely beyond his understanding that the IP addresses being dished out by that new router are already statically assigned elsewhere on the network, and that the presence of a new DHCP device on the network is going to cause havok all over the place. And the great thing is, this usually doesn't happen until the next day, when DHCP leases expire and machines start looking to renew. By that time, Joe Dipshit has forgotten all about his little 'IT project', and doesn't think it's relevant to the current network-wide outages that are happening, which naturally are guess who's fault. So that router stays tucked away in some random cubicle in Sales, not found for a day and a half while the entire organization is screaming at poor Bob in IT because he can't find the culprit. Wow... I am so glad I don't work for a big corporation. Superuser vs. 'superuser' - knowledgeable insider who can take care of day-to-day problems vs. overreaching tinkerer who is too arrogant to realize his limitations. Good luck with that :) All I know is that the more my clients fuck up, the more I get paid to fix their problems, so for me it's a win-win situation!