How To Thwart the High Priests In IT

GMGruman writes "You know the type: They want to control and restrict any technology in your office, maybe for job security, maybe as a power trip. As the 'consumerization of IT' phenomenon grows, such IT people are increasingly clashing with users, who bring in their own smartphones, use cloud apps, and work at home on their own equipment. These 'enemies' in IT are easy to identify, but there are subtler enemies within IT that also aim to prevent users from being self-sufficient in their technology use. That's bad for both users and IT, as it gets in the way of useful work for everyone. Here's what to look for in such hidden IT 'enemies,' and how to thwart their efforts to contain you."

Comments

Re:Sour Grapes

[girlintraining]

Sounds like the article was written by a tool with no understanding of how enterprise IT works, and no grasp of what bringing alien, unknown systems into contact with critical infrastructure can lead to.

Yeah... then there's my job, where somebody recently pushed out a GPO update that was supposed to make internet explorer "more secure" by preventing downloads. It's been five days now, and our company is at a virtual standstill... it's costing tens of millions every day, probably more. Bonus: I work for a major health insurance provider in the US.

The problem is when you get people who just start adding restriction after restriction with no understanding of what it does not just to productivity and worker morale, but in some cases to the very applications they support.

It's like how they've encrypted my whole drive and then added 3 antivirus scanners to it, running constantly... and now they're planning on upgrading to Windows 7. The only reason the system works at all is because it has 4GB to run XP ... and a couple web browser windows. It chokes on anything more.

No, IT policy is often both foolish and stupid, and getting around it is the only way to get work done. Unless you don't care about that sort of thing, in which case, yeah... feel free to do nothing until they fire you and replace you with someone who does bypass the policies. IT has become like marketing that way -- sure, it's probably against policy, but if you want to make quota, you better ignore them too.