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Managing Personal Electronics and Software In the Workplace
darien writes "Last night Symantec hosted a round-table discussion on the topic of consumer devices in the workplace. John Brigden, Symantec's senior VP for EMEA, pointed out that regardless of the policies businesses may lay down, individuals will always try to use their favorite gadgets and websites at work. Reminds me of when I worked in IT support: no matter how many times we told users they weren't allowed to install ICQ, or to connect their personal laptops to the corporate network, they insisted on doing it. Frequently they even asked us to help them do it."
To quote Einstein: "The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."
The same kind of thing applies in a corporation. You don't want to lower morale, and you especially don't want employees to lose respect for your policies. That certainly poses more risk to the success of an organization than connecting your iPhone to the wifi network.
Maybe a better solution would be investing in IT infrastructure.
I don't see why some IT departments bother to block web sites. It is a double-edged sword, and both edges cut against the company.
On one hand, if employees are visiting porn sites on company time, they should be fired. Setup a proxy, trap it, and get them out of there. Don't block them, and keep an unhappy unproductive employee around.
Second, if small things like checking the sports scores, or stocks, or news is what keeps them happy at work, then don't waste resources trying to stop them. Their boss has measures to determine if an employee is wasting time - let those measures work. If you want to keep logs of how often they do it, then fine. But don't try to block them because ultimately you can't. You can't stop them from talking about it at the water cooler or checking the scores on their cell phones, or bringing in magazines and newspapers. It isn't the IT departments job to police social behavior in the office. That's their boss's job. Often times these types of activities lead to comradery like the after-work fantasy football league. It bonds the employees and makes them more stable.
I've lost count of how many time I've been forced to circumvent stupid policies to be able to actually do my job. Cos neither my boss nor myself want to go through the nightmare of calling the stupid IT guys (I work in IT too, it's not an attack against the whole group, only against the ones that are stupid) to tell them let me download latest winscp executable, latest linux ISO, latest spring framework release, etc.
.zip, .iso, .exe file.
Cos yes, the bright minds at my working place have a blanket ban that prevents downloading every damn
And of course they also ban every IM program available, even if using it actually would save time and improve productivity, cos we won't have to send a freaking internal email (slow as hell, btw) to just give the other a job related url, a block of code, or whatever.
Yes, I know I should just tell my boss "hey, can't do it, go and tell IT their policy sucks bigtime". But my boss answer is "download it at home and bring it back in your usb". And since I'm not going to spend my free time downloading things for my job, I just circumvent their stupid policies.
So before blindly defending a strict IT policy, make sure it actually makes sense.
I don't think anyone would question IT's value - just that when they get all self-indulgent like the obviously trolling grandparent... well, then.
You don't fire a guy for installing software - unless he's being malicious. And then you still don't fire him for installing software - you fire him for being malicious.
We used proxies to do our football pools while at work... after 10 years of doing it they suddenly installed a blocker. Did our manager know? Um, yeah, he was in the pool. Sure, we could have done the pool from home - but shouldn't work want me there? Old lab machines running Windows 95 suddenly stop working because some IT guy decides to put some policy enforcement agent on them that uses up the entire 32MB of RAM... doesn't put in RAM of course. We disable the program, computer fixed. As a result, the helpdesk guys refer people over to me when someone complains about a really slow ancient computer. IT one day caps our outgoing email size - tells us that "email is not suitable for large file transfer". Of course, they don't give us outward-facing FTP or anything else that is "suitable". Nice. So we buy space on a godaddy FTP server and use that until they get their act together.
IT is great - except when they aren't. Not everyone breaking the rules is someone you'd want to fire.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If your IT staff members are a bunch of jackholes, then they need to be replaced. I am an IT manager (worked my way up through the IT ranks) and I simply do not tolerate my staff acting the way you describe in your post. The people we support are the reason we are here and they need to be treated with dignity. I also do not tolerate people we support berating my staff. There is absolutley no reason that IT workers and the people they support need to be at odds. One cause of this that I have personally witnessed is, for example, many IT workers can not understand why the marketing guy needs to have ICQ. Well, you know what? That is between the marketing guy and his boss. If the software has been approved by a user's manager, then install the software and support it as best you can. We have processed requests from managers asking that their reports have access to gaming sites over lunch. The boss wants you to be able to play games? No problem. Here's your access. If you have any problems, let me know and I will try to fix it.
There doesn't need to be this rift between IT staff and the people they support, the two groups need to work together. At least, that's what my group does.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."