On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 8:52 PM, Edward Ned Harvey <lop...@nedharvey.com> wrote: >> From: Elizabeth Schwartz [mailto:betsy.schwa...@gmail.com] >> >> how did this go? If you feel like writing about it, I'm wondering how >> you went about introducing the idea of IT policy and how it went down. >> >> (thinking the idea of introducing a sketched-out policy and then >> inviting some discussion was a good one) > > Perhaps my situation is unique because I work at a tech company. But I > don't think so. I think, whether you work at a university, a finance firm, > or whatever, users care about what restrictions they have placed on them, > and what they're not permitted to do. They think up situations you didn't > think of, and ask, "How am I supposed to _____?" > > Within the first 24 hours, 50% of the company joined the mailing list. I > will guess around 80% eventually joined.
As a vocal critic of this approach, I'm glad it worked out for you and it sounds like you came up with a good working process for your situation. I really think the fact that you are in a tech company has *everything* to do with it working well, but that is very much the minority situation. If you're in a company with less savvy users, it simply would not work. I have worked at companies where one office is savvy computer users, and another office isn't. The differences in their ability to handle general computer issues is like night and day. > By contrast, I work at another company too, where the IT policy is so > restrictive, it's difficult for anybody to get anything done. Can't > download things, can't install things, can't send large things, email boxes > are too small, response time is too slow to request some new software or > access to some resource... Everybody complains and circumvents policy, and > does anything they can to get their job done without getting in too much > trouble. IT is the enemy. And I think this is typical for enterprise IT. > You take your laptop to Starbuck's to download the package via SFTP which > your customer sent you, because outbound SFTP is blocked by the firewall. > > I personally don't see the benefit of such rules. As discussed in the original debate, your views here are extreme and you are choosing an extreme example to illustrate/justify them. Any restrictions placed on users will be within a range of permissive vs. restrictive, depending on the needs of the company. Often times users will cause so many problems that you need to be restrictive, but any IT process that does not account for the need to customize and allow new software installs, etc... is a failure. _______________________________________________ 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/