More News of The Rebellion
excerpted from article on employees’ common circumvention of IT
Gartner Analyst Stephen Prentice said, “The critical thing to understand is that your employees are not doing any of these things … to be awkward. They’re not doing it because they’re trying to break security. They’re simply trying to get their job done… The approach has be to not go in there and stop them from doing it. Go in there and find what constraint have you put in their way that’s forcing them to do something that is out of your control, and then fix your problem. If you gave people the option of using an in-house, secure, controlled environment that meets all of their needs, they simply aren’t going to have the need to go outside. If you fail to give them that — if you give them restrictions that are unreasonable or stop them doing their job effectively — then they will find another way.”
Gartner Fellow David Mitchell Smith added, “If rogue users start to see some flexibility on the part of the IT department — some genuine interest in wanting to provide what they need — they may be more open to go to them first and say ‘Can you help us provide this,’ as opposed to just going out and doing it. [They could] be part of the solution, instead of part of the problem. But long term, there’s this unstoppable force which is demographics. New people are coming into the workforce, in IT and in non-IT functions, and they are becoming more open-minded and having more and more of an impact. Over time it’s pretty inevitable that the trend is moving toward the more open way of doing things. It’s just a matter of how long it takes and how well it fits into the culture of each organization.”
Ultimately, this “civil war” is merely a sign of two larger problems that IT must address:
1.) There are lot of IT departments that have policies and attitudes that are stuck in a time warp. The procedures that allowed IT to deploy important technologies while protecting users from themselves are no longer valid in a world where individual users often have newer and more advanced technologies in their homes that the IT department has in the office. IT is now entering into more of partnership with users, and policies and attitudes need to reflect that.
2.)There’s a general disconnect and lack of constructive communications between many IT departments and their users. IT departments need to view themselves as customer service organizations, with their users being their primary customers. IT departments have got to lose their paternalistic approach to users and focus their efforts around serving users and enabling them to become more productive.
The IT departments that make these changes will thrive. The ones that don’t will see their role within the organization diminished and become prime targets for outsourcing.
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=548&tag=nl.e101
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