Users Vs. IT (Rated M For Gory Violence and Profanity)

Slowhand

I came across this article on Boing Boing today, and I thought I'd share with all of you to get some thoughts on the points made by the author and the responding members.

Cory Doctorow wrote:

I've just had a quick article on the wars between corporate IT and tech enthusiast employees published in the Harvard Business Review. I've been on both sides of that barricade, and while I understand the plight of IT, I think that it's against everyone's interest to give them to power to lock employees out of figuring out better ways of using their PCs and the Internet to get the job done.

The dirty secret of corporate IT is that its primary mission is to serve yesterday's technology needs, even if that means strangling tomorrow's technology solutions. The myth of corporate IT is that it alone possesses the wisdom to decide which technologies will allow the workers on the front line to work better, faster and smarter — albeit with the occasional lackluster requirements-gathering process, if you're lucky.
The fact is that the most dreadful violators of corporate policy — the ones getting that critical file to a supplier using Gmail because the corporate mail won't allow the attachment, the ones using IM to contact a vacationing colleague to find out how to handle a sticky situation, the incorrigible Twitterer who wants to sign up all his colleagues as followers through the work day — are also the most enthusiastic users of technology, the ones most apt to come up with the next out-of-left-field efficiency for the firm.

There has to be a way to bring those people inside the church, rather than going to war against them. I suspect the answer is in modern virtualization tools, which allow users to have a "clean" OS and environment that they use for in-compliance processing and work, and a "wild" sandbox where anything goes, each on separate network segments. Earning this setup would require demonstrating skill and desire to imagine new ways of getting the job done, and its use would be subject to regular, brief reports on lessons learned, techniques tried, failures and successes.

His full article can be found here. So, what do we think? Agree, disagree, think he/they are just nuts?

zen master

There has to be a way to bring those people inside the church, rather than going to war against them. I suspect the answer is in modern virtualization tools, which allow users to have a "clean" OS and environment that they use for in-compliance processing and work, and a "wild" sandbox where anything goes, each on separate network segments. Earning this setup would require demonstrating skill and desire to imagine new ways of getting the job done, and its use would be subject to regular, brief reports on lessons learned, techniques tried, failures and successes.

I've always thought this was the best solution but the cost was too prohibitive. The good news is that modern cell phones are making it easier and easier for this to be done without the need to provide an additional machine and network. In some cases, employees could even be allowed to purchase their own laptops and use wireless cards from whichever ISP offers unlimited access at a reasonable rate. That said, it's important to make it clear that there must be ABSOLUTELY no interaction between the work pc and the other one.

drainey

I like the idea, but it sounds like a logistical nightmare to support. Imagine a large enviroment with 2000+ users, 500 of whom use thier own favorite software/varient of same who need support for it. How do you support them? How do you standardize a desktop for those users? What happens when their favorite application doesn't work with the required work software and they want you to make it work? Not to mention the security side, which applications will need special ports opened in the firewall? Which are prone to attack? etc. And finally how to you quantify if the user is actually using a favorite application to be more productive or simply to bypass corporate policies?

But that's just my .02

the_Grinch

I understand the issue with e-mailing an attachment. But why do workers need Twitter? Same with Facebook? What it will lead to is the leaking of information and problems between workers.

For example....

The New York Times > Log In

Vogon Poet

There's really nothing new with this complaint. It's employees vs. decision-makers. Not unique to IT at all. This can be said for pretty much any department in an organization (personnel, engineering, education, as well as IT). If you have a good idea that would make the workplace more efficient, how does it get done? Books have been written about Total Quality Management, decision making committees, flexible management, etc. Some of these have good ideas, but require extra time and additional training. Ultimately it comes down to corporate structure as well as environment fostered by upper management.

For this guy's complaint, I see one of the biggest impediments as accountability. If you have a good idea that will help the workplace, what happens when it gets abused or simply does not work out as well as intended? Does the innovative employee step up and take the blame? No way, the IT guy is responsible. That's what he's in charge of. Do you want your job security to be reliant upon your users making good decisions?

"I think that it's against everyone's interest to give
them to power to lock employees out of figuring out better ways of
using their PCs and the Internet to get the job done."
-Against everyone's interest? So when they download that nasty virus, it's a good thing?
(ask the legal dept. what they think about this)

"The dirty secret of corporate IT is that its primary mission
is to serve yesterday's technology needs, even if that means
strangling tomorrow's technology solutions."
-Its primary mission? Really? Unless you work for Google, this probably isn't true.

Good ideas should be submitted for consideration. Like Social Security applicants, expect most to be denied the first time out. If you're sold on it, keep trying. You have to know how to sell the benefits, who to sell them to, and what potential liabilities you would be creating.

msteinhilber

the_Grinch wrote: »

But why do workers need Twitter? Same with Facebook? What it will lead to is the leaking of information and problems between workers.

I work for a large real estate firm and one of the biggest, if not the biggest, buzzwords spreading around the industry these days is social networking. Somewhere along the line an individual planted a seed and it exploded and as a result many real estate executives, office managers, marketing workers, as well as all of the outside factors offering the training seminars, audio books, e-books and so forth are all touting the social networking idea. I know a great deal of people who firmly believe that this sort of marketing/farming effort is the wave of the future and as a result it's becoming quite popular and many are investing a significant amount of money into various aspects of the social networking idea.

Do I agree that it's really such a huge tool for our agents? Absolutely not... I suppose I fall a few years out of the target demographic in terms of age perhaps, but even the younger generation I can't honestly see coming in contact with a real estate agent through Facebook or Twitter for instance - at least not in the masses they suspect it will be.

It's becoming a big fad among a lot of organizations I suspect, executives and managers keep hearing about this social networking thing and they get interested. The next thing you know they begin to think that the sales staff needs to be using this technology and it's a explosion of suck from there on out. There is an entrepreneurs group in Madison, WI that hosted a seminar just recently essentially all about Twitter and it's place in business, some people are taking this thing very serious - I wonder what the non-technical people such as your average user or consumer think about this, I can't see this being an ongoing success or even a very successful fad.

the_Grinch

Agree very much with you and you do make some valid points. I think these tools would serve best with politicians. I agree it will be nothing more then a fad....

msteinhilber

the_Grinch wrote: »

Agree very much with you and you do make some valid points. I think these tools would serve best with politicians. I agree it will be nothing more then a fad....

Lets hope it's just a fad... and I hope it's a fad that becomes obsolete quick. My organization has already invested into the 300k+, probably closer to 400k realm by now on various software, training, contracts and so forth as a result of this nonsense. All during a time that money was supposedly non existent which lead to hour reductions and salary cuts as well as numerous lay offs. But they expect us to accept the increased workload dealing with all that comes with using resources such as Facebook with glee (so long as I do so during my now 30 hour work week for much less pay)!

skrpune

it's great to give folks freedom with technology, but it's hard (or rather impossible) to support EVERYTHING. If users are allowed to install whatever they want, well then *shocker*, they WILL install whatever they want, including viruses and programs that are unstable. Guess who's going to have to fix them??

And when it comes to unrestricted internet access, we all know that you give folks an inch, and many will undoubtedly take a mile. It's not just a couple people ruining it for the others, it's way more widespread than that. If free internet access exists, then you will have an ungodly number of lost production hours per person on random surfing, going to myspace/facebook, IM'ing, etc. Multiply that out over the number of employees and it costs companies LOTS of money in lost productivity. And in this economy, that means layoffs & cutbacks. Do your really want to be losing your job because your coworkers are not producing and not making money for the company because they're spending too much time chatting with Aunt Daisy or their buddies on Facebook?!

I hate to sound like the grumpy curmudgeon here, but there's just no way to allow total freedom on a company network. It's just not logistically possible without the IT department that supports it going completely bonkers.

All that being said though, if the IT support department is too overly paranoid that they won't give folks enough leeway to do their jobs, then that's not good either. You can't put up roadblocks that keep people from doing their jobs, or there will be no users for the IT department to support!! There has to be some happy medium where applicable technologies are used & made available for the people that need them. For example, there's no reason that everyone should be "twittering" while at work, unless they are providing services for customers via twitter for the company. If you want to twitter or go on facebook or myspace or IM your buddies, then you really should be doing that on your own time.

Kaminsky

I never thought there was a "war" between IT and user pseudo techies. IT techies support what they are told to support and generally try to be as creative as they can with what they have whilst trying to negotiate the IT manager who generally never wants to rock the boat outside of the IT department.

I've always thought that pseudo techies are just too lazy to build up a buisiness case for whatever it is they want and how it will benefit the company. It is up to the IT director to decide if it is nonsense or not. I did think that they were IT wannabes and never understood had a much bigger job to do other than make them happy. Ask any long serving desk side support which users irritate them the most and it's those that think they know everything, every time!

I remember once persuading the IT director that the user base should be allowed full access to the internet. He was very against it thinking only their managers should be allowed. My argument was that, yes they may play around a lot. checking the news, weather, road home, recipes, etc but whilst they were doing that, they were learning how to use the internet so that when they needed to use the internet for work, they would alredy have the skills to do so. ( We did monitor it and had desk side chats with a few about excess use and there were one or too that left hurridly in disgrace ... eww some of those images were just nasty, but once they got the message that they couldn't take the pi$$, it all worked out fine.. Most of them just got bored of it very quickly anyway)

As for MSN, Facebook, Twitter at work... Hell NO ! Get on with your work ya lazy basts ! Socialise on your own time !

Slowhand

Kaminsky wrote: »

As for MSN, Facebook, Twitter at work... Hell NO ! Get on with your work ya lazy basts ! Socialise on your own time !

Except for IT. . . after all, let's not go crazy here.

markk2008

It would be a nightmare trying to support a setup like this, some staff need special access to certain folders/files, also what about certain applications that a member of staff may need to use. I think that most members of staff would understand tht excess internet usage would no be tolerated.