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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.'"
You can't let the end user have any power. Just ask the BOFH ;)
On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996
Great...now I get to do IT's job for them. In addition to my own work. So, I'll get paid for all the extra time I put in working on an IT project, right? Remind me why we even have an IT dept. again?
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
In which case they should toe the god damn line, because they're fucking shit up for other people.
Yes, enterprise IT can be frustrating. But your cheeky little wifi hack maybe just took down three buildings of network, resulting in thousands of dollars of lost productivity. Actually happened, in my org - 100% true story.
I don't like meaningless limitations any more than the next guy, but these know alls who think they're 'superusers' because they can set up a wifi network need to lay off - they don't have the big picture, they just think they're being clever. Guerilla? Arse-scratching chimp, more like.
I don't think that's true. Lots of people just want to screw around with things and get an ego boost out of flouting authority or trying to show-up the IT staff. You know, there's always going to be that guy who wants to install games on his PC, and figure out how to tunnel past the porn filter. Maybe it's because he wants those things, but also it's because he gets a kick out subverting the rules. Either way, it doesn't mean the IT staff isn't doing their jobs.
Please tell me people don't really talk like that. "Grew the solution"? "Drive business value"? These people need to get a hold on themselves and listen to the feces streaming out of their mouths.
hahaha, let the users have admin rights?
does the author have **any** experience of the commercial environment?
If you look back in history, people originally used computers together, sharing access, tips, and source code. Now it's all top down - someone dictates what you'll do and how you do it. You, as the unempowered user, receive prebuilt restrictions, prebuilt computers, prebuilt binaries. You can't tinker, you can't fix, and you aren't even supposed to poke around.
The problems of restriction in DRM, restriction in EULA, restriction by not providing source code, restriction in IT are all the same. Instead of educating users and providing them the ability to solve problems, IT mirrors large software companies and media companies, and removes any control, forcing them to be "stupid." When users can't even diagnose on their own, and are forced to run to IT for the most minor software install, the bureaucracy justifies itself. IT is necessary because it's been made necessary. Dumb down the users and they need someone to hold their hand. But create a community of educated and empowered individuals and people will share information.
In a community of empowered users people don't just share solutions, they create solutions.
"Put them to work?" I'm not about putting the beatdown on non-it tech guys, but I'm also not about giving them free reign. Isolate them from the bulk of the network, where their antics won't cause problems for the regular users, and impress upon them that they have a level of responsibility for their data and any problems that crop up with their projects. Make sure you bring their managers into the loop and impress upon them the problems that could crop up when their Access and Excel scripting guru runs amok, and then let 'em do their thing.
Oh, and wireless? I don't think so. Messing with network infrastucture is a cardinal sin, and any organization that doesn't have its internal network secured well enough to prevent someone setting up their own wireless inside the building needs to do some serious self-examination. Some things you just do not screw around with.
In my experience, the biggest problem is that the non-it power users don't have the same appreciation for security as the people whose job it is to make sure things are secure. Security is a pain in the ass; no question about it, and a lot of users view it solely as a pain in the ass, with their inconvenience rating much higher in their estimation than IT's "Unreasonable Paranoia". If you restrict those users too much, they're going to spend all their time trying to get around your rules...Same as a child will. But like a child, if you give them a certain amount of freedom inside the rules, then they're much more likely to be obedient. They will understand that the rules are there because they have to be, not just because you hate them and don't want them to be able to do what they want to.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I've been on both ends of the IT/user divide. I've administered networks of several hundred machines and am well aware of what some people will try to do with them. In my current position, however, I'm just a regular user. So when people in the department start talking about doing something that IT wouldn't approve of, I can usually explain to them in their terms why it wouldn't be such a good idea. OTOH, there have also been times where I've been called in by my boss to take care of a situation that IT hasn't been able to resolve, but that I've figured out because I face the problem daily. In those instances, I don't mind making a quick lap around the department and tweaking the machines a bit, because I know that it's exactly what IT would be doing anyways if they could be bothered to figure it out. And before someone says anything, I've contacted IT before to explain the problem and the fix. It's just that it's usually such an esoteric issue that they can't even begin to get their heads around it (e.g., font caching issues involving using certain programs in a certain sequence).
This guy's the limit!
My last employer had firewalls that only allowed traffic through ports 80, 443, and an unusual port for VPN. I heard they also sniffed unencrypted packets, mostly to watch for viruses and breakins. Some of my coworkers wanted to use IM, although it was banned on the network. So I set up an encrypted squid proxy through my work desktop and home server. My whole team had IM and was able to communicate more efficiently.
One day I got called into the boss's office. He says, "I hear you've installed IM on everyone's desktop." So immediately I think I'm in trouble. Then he says, "Would you mind setting it up for me? How did you get it on the network?" He realized it increased productivity and any personal use wasn't seriously inhibiting work.
The point is don't hinder technology for a whole company only because you're afraid one ignorant user will bring in a virus. If power users want something, it's typically because it'll make them better at their job. Figure out a way to let them have it.
Developers: We can use your help.
It really depends on the organization. There may be some overriding legal or safety reasons why you don't want to let anyone out of the sandbox: end user apps may not place nice with air traffic control or nuclear plants. ;)
On the other hand, some IT departments fully live up to the Dilbert character, Mordac, Preventer of Information Services. My IT department happens to be one of those, and the main consequence of my supervisor's blanket refusal to do anything that bothers him is that everyone, including his boss, comes to me to get things done. And that's okay with my boss, because his real objection is to doing anything unfamiliar, not the fact that it's being done somewhere.
But that's obviously a dysfunctional situation. The problem is that our IT department -- and presumably many others, including some of the snitty, arrogant posters in this thread -- isn't doing its job. By definition, if the IT department is either preventing necessary work from being done, failing to help get it done, or imposing arbitrary obstacles to get out of doing work in the first place, the solution is not necessarily giving end users IT responsibilities; the solution is for upper management to kick ass and, if necessary, hire IT people willing to do their jobs.
Contrary to some of the polarized views I've seen here, IT isn't always the problem, nor are end-users always the problem. Most often, it's a failure of both to work constructively and flexibly together and a failure of upper management to insist that they do.
Of course, if the dysfunctionality in your company isn't going anywhere anytime soon, you may have to look for workarounds, and the solution proposed by the original poster might work in some situations.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
...and even I think this is a BAD idea. You want to mess with your own PC, okay - there's some merit there for some people. Mess with the network - hell no. There are too many things that need to get done, and the ability for one person - even an otherwise knowledgeable person - outside of IT to screw things up is just too much of an unknown.
I'm not usually one to chime in on the side of IT, as they often throw out the baby with the bath water, but letting people who's primary function is something other than keeping the network up mess with the network is just a massively bad idea. Screw up a workstation and one guy is dead for a day. Screw up the network and the whole company can go toes up.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I can relate to this issue. My co-workers often come to me to fix their email and various other apps that have been screwed up by an incompetent IT staff. I try, I really do try to get my coworkers to call IT if their is a problem, but sadly, they often don't trust them. I have been accused of all sorts of things by various IT employees and none of it true or even provable if it was. The truth is mine is the only computer they are _not_ regularly fixing (or screwing up) here in my office.
Are you seriously saying that the company you work for would support you NOT helping an employee recover his system just because he broke it himself?No, seriously, the company supports that position for you?Again, and the company supports that position?That's a LOT different from what you've been saying.
We only support our standard configuration. Yet if a machine breaks, whether from an employee's actions or not, we still repair/recover as much as we can.
I'm fascinated that you seem to be claiming to work for a company that values your self-esteem over actual customer contracts.
Hey powerusers... how much privs do you need? You say you want to install whatever you want on your PC. Which btw you didn't purchase. You say you want to pick our the exact model of server your app runs on, but you don't want to be the one to stock the 97.56GB drives as replacements, nor do you want to carry a duty pager to swap out parts when they break at 2am.
Why stop there? Why not just ask for the admin password on the core routers. I'm sure your expansive knowledge of networking (and installing dd-wrt on your linksys does not make a BGP expert out of you) could provide invaluable when the DWDM gear is malfunctioning. We're upgrading to AIX6 shortly, maybe your vast experience in managing/installing mysql at home will help us optimize a 10TB DB/2 database. Please help us out, since you installed parallels on your mac, you can lend us some of your expertise in VMs when we consolidate two z990s into a z10.
You say you manage a 5TB nfs server at home? Please show us the wisdom of your ways as we try to consolidate 50 EMC DMX arrays so we can save on power and cooling.
When we fuck-up, an entire company and its' customers feel the pain. When you fuck up, you prevent us from doing our job as we clean up your mess.
Users should be given just enough privileges to do their job. This is why you do not have root on your server, you download pre-packaged software from the intranet, you do not have admin on the core routers, physical access to the datacenter and why we don't "tinker." You want to tinker, go work in your garage where you can tell your wife that you built a jumpstart server for the two linux boxes in your home media center and thump your chest. We support hundreds, thousands of users whom would rather spend their days focusing on doing their job.