> I think that asking the 'general public' to help decide IT policy is a > noble cause, but not practical. You're the IT guy, so you should know > best (and if you don't then you shouldn't be the one working on the > policy ;). If your employees knew enough about IT to write policy, > then > you wouldn't need to have said policy.
FWIW, anybody who said users would have no interest: I got 50% userbase mailing-list subscription, within 24 hours. While most things I decided to write are acceptable, there are two things of value which have come of this so far: #1 Users are reading the mailing list, and responding positively. Particularly to the "you must read software licenses before installing or using, and you must notify IT of any software you install, including an explanation of why you believe it's legal." They acknowledge the alternative is to prohibit or control software downloads or installations, and they generally agree that without the policy requiring notification to IT, people would generally just skip over and assume the "free" software license agreement is free for whatever their use case is. So it's a good compromise, which allows users to do whatever they need, while providing a reasonable level of legal diligence. I think this is a higher level of participation and acknowledgement than what I would have, if the policy was simply released as the Nth chapter of the employee handbook. #2 By design, some contractors bring in their own laptops to do their jobs. Many of the policies I was writing would have been incompatible with this behavior. So by discussing it in advance, that conflict has been avoided. The policies still prohibit installing company software on any non-company hardware, and prohibit intellectual property from non-company laptops and so forth. But to resolve the conflict, each contractor who uses their own laptop will need to have an agreement that explicitly states which things, for which purposes, they'll be allowed to do, under what conditions, that would otherwise have been a violation of policy. It is worth mention: This is a technology company, with a very high percentage of technical people. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
