SF Not an Exception In Giving IT Too Much Control

CWmike writes "The city of San Francisco's IT department is certainly not the exception when it comes to allowing just one person to have unfettered rights to make password and configuration changes to networks and enterprise systems. In fact, it's a situation fairly common in many organizations — especially small to medium-size ones, IT managers and others cautioned in the wake of the recent Terry Childs incident."

Comments

its MANAGEMENT and CONTROL

[JCOTTON]

Used to be, in the good ol days of IT, or Data Processing as we used to call it, that the programmer was king. The programmer basically decreed what could and could not be done with the computer system. He was the analyst, programmer, tester, implementer, and documentation writer. And maybe trained users too.

Fast foreward to today

Management has placed so many controls on the development process. Fer example, we need to get Business owner's approval for starting work, testing, and then before move to production. We are monitored constantly. We fill out Remedy tickets for each stage of development. We can not do "systems" stuff, like even compile our own programs. Really. Every compile, move, and test is monitored and recorded.

Yep, management has certainly stepped in and taken control back.

I've forgotten what the original article was...wait a minute... oh yeh.

Anyway, I am thinking that the Frisco situation could not happen here. I am not afraid. But I really miss those days when I really had control of the development.

This is the best way, anyways..

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

When you do teamwork, everyone has some of the knowledge, and no one has a big, overall picture. That model doesn't work for a network.

Although, what if terry childs had died suddenly.. like, from a heart attack, or a very fast onset of diabetes, or choking on a donut? It doesn't make sense for a manager to give complete freedom to IT to the point where IT doesn't even have to stay with well known (to management) passwords!