IT Turf Wars: the Most Common Feuds In Tech

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan reports on the most common feuds in tech: turf wars in the IT department. 'IT pros do battle every day — with cyber attackers, stubborn hardware, buggy software, clueless users, and the endless demands of other departments within their organization. But few can compare to the conflicts raging within IT itself.' Dev vs. ops, staff vs. management — taking flak from fellow IT pros has become all too common in today's highly territorial IT organizations."

Comments

vim

[bbqsrc]

it's the best.

Dont forget the choreographed dance/fight numbers.

[Kenja]

Or is that just a California thing?

To quote Lincoln Spector and sung to the tune of the Jets song from West Side Story.

When you use DOS you use DOS all the way
From your first data loss 'til you format drive A:.
When you use DOS, why your confidence grows;
For your keys there's commands, for your mouse there's Windows.
It's DOS that's sublime; it's used by all go-getters.
At file-namin' time, we're never locked in fetters--
We choose eight letters.


When you use DOS, old hardware you can swap.
You can buy something new, next month prices will drop.
When you use DOS, why, you're never a stooge,
If your 640's low, well, there's always a cludge.
DOS users: On clones we can run, with brand-names we're the choosers.
The Macs'll buy none, cause all the Apple users
Are mouse abusers.


We're using DOS, yeah! and we're gonna fix
Every last system that's not something eighty-six--
Not something eighty, very weighty, six.

Turf wars... Pfft...

[Lumpy]

Got a great idea and want to get it past security without trouble? that's simple... simply get buy-in from a senior executive. get him to adopt it as his pet project and get it working on the Dev servers. now when he announces it Security cant do anything but say yes and do your bidding because they do not dare tell the Senior VP of marketing that they wont let his project run. Do I make enemies withing security? yup. Every one of them hated me because my default approach to them was an end run. And it was simply because the security guys were incapable of thought outside of the "lock it all down" OMG OMG! DANGER DANGER! WE got a iphone/ipod app launched for use in the company and made every one of the security guys froth at the mouth and fall on the floor convulsing when I end ran them to a VP who loved it and wanted every sales person to have it. They lost their mind at allowing 190 non company locked up iphones and ipods connected to the holy internal wifi.

Just wait when my ipad system for sales forecasting get's greenlighted and they have to allow 200+ ipads on it as well...

Re:Turf wars... Pfft...

[Just Some Guy]

I admit: my first reaction is that if I worked security at your company, I'd want to kick your ass. I mean, I like you, but they probably have a very valid point about not wanting untrusted apps popping up all over the place.

But my second reaction was that you're right. There's no valid reason why you can't have unsecured guests on the holy internal wifi. We have an open WLAN here at the office, but it's firewalled away from anything we actually care about, with exceptions on a case-by-case basis. You don't get open access to the database server just because you're connecting to our corporate wifi. If your security guys can't handle that, then, well, sucks to be them. Good for you for finding away to make people actually do their jobs.

The cycle to hell.

[nosfucious]

Sigh.

Daily life around here.

Marketing wants what marketing wants. To hell if it has a positive cost/benefit ratio. "Nice and shiny and uses lots of Flash ... and runs on my iPhone ... drool"

Devs dev what marketing wants. Dev only wants to dev in production. As Administrator/root/qsecofr (or ALLOBJ).

IT Management, but especially Finance Magement skimp of every possible detail until they end up spending more time AND money patching it until it would have been cheaper to do it the way joint Ops/Securty said it would.

Ops/Security is handed a dogs breakfast of non-working, insecure code that produces amiguous, and often wrong results. Last to find out or provide input. But it's our fault when it doesn't work, or opens all security doors, or breaches laws in several countries. (The last ones to touch it must have broken it).

Classic way NOT to do it.

Re:The cycle to hell.

[DrgnDancer]

No offense (I'm an ops/security guy and I was nodding the whole time till I thought about it), but this is exactly what the article is talking about. Of course Marketing wants it shiny and iPhone enabled. It's marketing, it's supposed to catch the eye and cause people to pay attention. Of course management wants to save money.. Money saved here is money that can used elsewhere or go into someone's pocket (often management's of course, but in theory anyone's). Of course Dev wants to have access to the live servers, there's info they want/need on there and very rarely it actually is useful to make changes on the fly when the situation is serious enough (It shouldn't ever be, but we don't live in a perfect world). Of course you want reliable, stable secure code that changes as little as possible.

The solution isn't "Make all these other guys understand that I'm right". It's to try to minimize the siloing so that everyone has a say in process from the ground up. So the dev guy can tell the marketing guy, "Hey you can't have iPhone *and* Flash. Do we want to find a shiny that doesn't use Flash, or accept that iPhones don't see our shiny?" Marketing can say to Ops "Ok that shiny I wanted was insecure, I get that, is there a secure way to do something similar?" Ops can say to Dev "I set you up a limited access account on the live servers to collect the usage data you need, please don't let it stack up." And Management can say to everyone "This is how much we really have to spend and the results if we break budget."

That way everyone can be an adult. There'll still be conflicts of course, but if everyone knows that each group is legitimately trying to facilitate everyone else, they can become points of discussion and resolution instead of small scale wars that every side is trying to "win".

Re:The cycle to hell.

[jvonk]

I've got friends who work in hospital security who have a devil of a time with people leaving their passwords and usernames on sticky-notes everywhere. Building security has problems with assholes defeating the building's fire alarm so they can sneak out to a fire escape (or worse yet, a ground-floor alley) and smoke and get back in.

You had me up until this point. While your cited cases might be reasonable, there is also the all-to-frequent case where "security" regulations induce this behavior.

What does hospital security expect users to do when users are required to rotate passwords every two weeks, have a 12 character long mix of upper/lowercase alpha's and numerics, and then also be subject to a 7 password history non-reuse restriction? Security is cognizant that the result of these provisions will be that users write down their passwords on stickies, so how is this more secure than allowing people to pick a less complex password and retain it longer?

The answer is that this presumes that everyone is playing the same game, with the goal to be the best possible security equilibrium state balanced against inconvenience/usability. Running counter to this is security's CYA factor: they experience no penalty for the insane password restrictions that reduce overall security, because if there is a security breach from the post-it passwords they can dump all the blame on the hapless user for violating the published security protocol that prohibits such actions. So, security has a payoff table that disrupts the equilibrium resulting in the paradoxical, reduced security steady state that is observed in these cases (ie. security is externalizing the costs of implementing the high-grade security practices).

PS. As for defeating the fire alarms, maybe they shouldn't have turned the entire hospital into a "tobacco-free campus", with the nearest "approved" smoking area located six blocks away. This is basic psychology. Normal people like to abide by the rules/laws even if they find them onerous, but there is a limit to their willingness to comply. This is essentially what happened to the entire US during the Prohibition. Again, as I said, your cited cases might be reasonable, but I have seen many that were not.

Re:Network vs. Servers

[nedlohs]

Paint one half of the cable blue and the other half white, and hide the switch point in a mass of cables somewhere.