Sorry, IT: These 5 Technologies Belong To Users 348
GMGruman writes "The BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon hasn't been easy on IT, which has seen its control slip. But for these five technologies — mobile devices, cloud computing services, social technology, exploratory analytics, and specialty apps — it has already slipped, and Forrester and others argue IT needs to let go of them. That also means not investing time and money in all the management apps that vendors are happy to sell to IT shops afraid of BYOD — as this post shows, many just won't deliver what IT hopes."
Re:Security (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest security threat from a BYOD . . . is the user. Many have been nurtured with an attitude of, "Hey, it's great! I can share with everybody! The more I share, the better!"
This unfortunately leads to stuff like open calender entries of confidential meetings, etc. And don't even mention them being lost, stolen, left in bars.
My work SchtinkPad is so locked down, and monitored by our IT folks, that if I lose it, no one short of the NSA is going to get anything out of it, without a court order.
IT folks just can't know if their employees are security aware.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
Better than, I'm supposed to use this dingly dangly to do work, but the tools I'm allowed to use don't quite do what I need. If I could just use this app I could increase productivity, but IT has the system so locked down that to even think about using a different app is grounds for termination.
Fortunately my management structure realises IT is there for people that use a selection of a few specific applications, and those of us with "unusual" requirements are better opting out.
A wise IT dept allows users to add additional tools, but with the caveat that the only fix available is a system wipe and restore to original configuration. The Users are responsible for keeping their data backed up.
Official IT policy at my company is to use leased laptops (at $3k a pop), which run a complex stack of software that reduces the machine to a painfully slow mess.
When it breaks you have to take it back to the office. In the UK, then wait for a couple of weeks while some idiot prods it, before wiping it and handing it back (without fixing the original problem)
Management in one area have now rolled out 300 mac laptops for one their department, 13, 15 or 17". If it breaks, you boot from a small usb drive and restore from scratch. If the machine dies, you take it to an apple store. If it's stolen, you buy a new one.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)
One company I've worked with does it this way:
Want to use our device? Good, here it is all set up. You can use it to access internal resources.
Want to use your own? the pptp server is blah, and the exchange server is blah. Have fun, remember to lock your device, and no, we won't tell you how to set it up. You can't get anything confidential unless it's emailed. Emailing anything confidential is grounds for disceplinary action. When you lose your device, call 1-800-xxx-xxxx ASAP.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
User starts using personal device.
User develops key business practice on device.
User leaves.
Now it's MY problem to support the practice. (in my case it's a handheld inventory system- which doesn't work with windows 7, doesn't work on new hand held devices)
How many times did the user ask for a solution from IT, and when he did, did he get a ridiculous quote that it will take years and cost millions?
That's been my personal experience - that even the simplest request comes back with such ludicrous numbers that I have no choice but to "roll my own" solution. It shouldn't take a year and $300k to come up with a way to import a set of identical excel sheets with a few thousand rows in them into a database table. Yet that was the quoted solution. So I made my own using VBA and a SQL server in about a week. Also, this is for a "temporary solution" that IT says they'll replace in a year anyway. On top of that, we're only getting "serviced" because we're a high profile group in the company. Most other people are told to buzz off - so they too roll their own.
Like most of us, your guy had a job to accomplish - he needed a handheld inventory system. Did he ask for help? And if he did, was he told "no", or given an absurd, budget-busting quote for what it would take to implement? If so, he did what he had to. If he didn't, is there already a culture of "don't bother asking, because we won't help"?
I've been on both sides of the fence. But I can say it's far more frustrating as a business user to be thwarted at every turn by IT than it is to be an IT person trying to support business users. With the right attitude and solid but flexible practices, an IT dept can reliably support what the users need and even leave most of them pretty happy. But with an IT dept that's mired in bureaucracy and really doesn't care what happens, a business user is really left no choice but to go it on their own - which ultimately leaves a mess for IT to figure out in the end. In either role, I prefer being a part of the solution.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
IT doesn't make money for the company it enables the money making areas to make the money.
I wasn't aware there was a difference between "making money" and "enabling to make money". Do the digits on a watch tell me the time, but the electronics merely enable the digits... or does the watch tell me what time it is? Do the digits even exist without the electronics?
It's always curious to me when people divide up wholes that depend on parts, but then expect the parts to operate independently of the whole.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm far enough along into my career that I want to be part of the success of my company, not just a worker bee. "Do the job with the tools you are given" is a horrible corporate culture...even for the worker bees.
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Interesting)
Shouldn't that be a manager's job?
Hahaha, uhhh no. Managers are the ones who come to IT and ask us "What is Sally doing on the computer?" You think they know how to pull Websense reports? Of course not, don't be silly. And if the users would stop screwing around on the Internet (so their manager would stop asking me for reports of web activity) I'd have more time to institute BYOMD policies. Funny how that works.
Re:Sigh (Score:2, Interesting)
When it breaks you have to take it back to the office. In the UK, then wait for a couple of weeks while some idiot prods it, before wiping it and handing it back (without fixing the original problem)
Hey, I'm one of those "idiots" that wipes your computer and hands it back. How about you look at it from my perspective before calling me names? I realize my experience may not match perfectly, but hear me out and hopefully you'll realize that it probably isn't their fault. I apologize in advance for the rant. It has been a rough month for us and I'm tired of being treated like shit for doing my job.
I supervise a staff of technicians supporting a campus of about 5000 people, plus anyone within about 50 miles of us. We are tier III local desktop support and we are primarily responsible for hardware issues and imaging for enduser laptops and desktops.
Oh wait, did I say "staff"? I meant "it's just me and two other guys". Our normal ticket load is around 50-80, cycling through about 15-25 every day. We also generally have at least two or three projects going on at a time (lots of new ones coming up in January, too) and about 400 of our users are considered critical, so any ticket they open means we drop everything to kiss their feet. Obviously, we're multitasking a bit.
Anyway, for starters, we don't actually have your computer for a couple of weeks. More like a couple of days, most of which is spent waiting for parts to be shipped or for the image to install and update. Role playing a bit, you called your company's general help desk in India and the ticket went through a series of delays and transfers. It was probably closed or left unscheduled multiple times, only being saved by you calling to ask for a status update. Between five minutes and five weeks later (no exaggeration) and probably without any serious troubleshooting, your company's help desk opened up an internal ticket with local support, which is run by a contractor (my company, which hired me as a temp).
The ticket that eventually comes to us is useless. You know how frustrated you were, trying to explain your problem to tiers I and II? You know how they could barely speak enough English to read from a script and seemed to know less about computers than your grandmother? Yeah, they're the ones who open the tickets that we get. Any communication problem you had, we get that to the second power. We're not even allowed to have any direct contact with them.
Once we do get your ticket, we generally have two weeks to close it but we can only bill 4 hours of labor. And that 4 hours is not just for the actual repair, either. It includes "admin time": calling you to schedule an appointment, leaving voice mails and sending emails to hunt you down, arguing with you, arguing with your manager, walking across the campus (about 0.5 miles round trip), ordering parts, escalations, research, ticket management and documentation, etc, etc.
That leaves precious little time to actually figure out what's wrong and fix your computer. Thankfully, software troubleshooting is supposed to be done remotely with Tiers I and II. That is not our job, even if it wasn't done. We're not even trained to do it. Anything we know about the software you use, we had to figure out on our own. Mostly thanks to Google. We are not provided with any documentation and we are not informed of ANYTHING your IT department is doing.
Our job is hardware and imaging. We are the last resort to getting you up and running, even if that means without your data. We are on a very tight deadline, too. If we don't have a definitive fix figured out, implemented, and tested within about 15-20 minutes of total hands-on time with your computer (that includes hardware diagnostics), we are forced by the SLA to default to a "guaranteed" fix: reimage it if the hardware seems good or ask your company to replace the machine outright.
A lot of what we do is mandated to us, either through the tickets themselves or policies enforced from way up