Employee Monitoring

CWmike writes "Michael Workman, an associate professor at the Florida Institute of Technology's Nathan M. Bisk College of Business, estimates that monitoring responsibilities take up at least 20% of the average IT manager's time. Yet most IT professionals never expected they'd be asked to police their colleagues and co-workers in quite this way. How do they feel about this growing responsibility? Workman says he sees a split among tech workers. Those who specialize in security issues feel that it's a valid part of IT's job. But those who have more of a generalist's role, such as network administrators, often don't like it. Computerworld contributor Tam Harbert found a wide variety of viewpoints from IT managers, ranging from discomfort at having to 'babysit' employees to righteous beliefs about 'protecting the integrity of the system.'"

Comments

Great post

[kancncnish]

This is really great post. taller 4 idiots

This is the anti-Unix approach

[davecb]

To quote Doug Gwyn, "UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things."

In Unix, one of the design principle is that you can do anything, even something insecure and stupid, but we can always find out what you did and whack you over the head.

Auditing what your users do so you can diagnose an error later is roughly O(n) with the number of errors. Predicting what users should be allowed to do and granting them permissions is maybe O(n^2) or worse with the number of things allowed. It works, but only for small numbers of allowed things. Watching everything users do doesn't scale at all: worst case, you could need as many sysadmins as users, O(n) with number of users.

--dave

Re:Waste of time...

[Myopic]

Apparently the achievement of UK students in language composition is similar to that of USA students. That gives me a wry sort of satisfaction.

Re:Please do

[myrmidon666]

Someone mod up the parent as funny. I lol'd. HARD.