The people who work at Google are, whats the word? Ah yes, smart. Very smart. A job at Google is very prestigious, if not among the most prestigious jobs in the world, up there with teaching at MIT. Allowing them to do whatever they want on their machines in the hopes they don't do something incredibly stupid to make the IT guys swear like sailors is pretty reasonable. As to the average worker who doesn't work for a company like Google. Well, lets just say George Carlin's observation applies.

Also, forwarding your work email to gmail just sounds like a bad idea; never mind PII leaks. Off course again, I would imagine its pretty reasonable to allow people who work for Google to use their gmail accounts instead of their exchange servers, unless their average user counterparts. I'll let you the reader figure out that one yourself.

There are plenty of reasonably competent people at large companies with managed IT departments that are stuck using IE6. I hardly think that "Well, it's Google" is a valid point to make.

What it has more to do with, in my experience, is that IT departments tend to have a dismal view of the intelligence of anyone who's not in IT. And until upper management is savvy enough to realize the difference between IE6 and Firefox, it's going to stay that way.

"What it has more to do with, in my experience, is that IT departments tend to have a dismal view of the intelligence of anyone who's not in IT."

Ok, fair enough on that point (my post was mostly tongue in check anyway). However, you do got to admit. It only takes one idiot to fuck it up for everybody.

To make a non-IT analogy:

Think about our traffic laws. How many times have you pointlessly been stuck driving needlessly slow because the speed limit is 30 m/h on an open road where you can safely do at least 50. Or how many times have you been pointlessly been stuck at a red light with no traffic coming across. Yes, its painfully annoying, but if you can save just one life, thats worth at least 100,000 pointless 30-second stops. Traffic laws are largely designed around the handful idiots, or at least seem to.

Would you argue that traffic engineers have a dismal view of the intelligence of anyone who isn't a traffic engineer (and maybe you would, I don't know. I've considered it myself sometimes)?

Right, but do traffic engineers drive 50 on that road? Or, more to the point... have you ever seen the IT guy using Internet Explorer 6?

sen - that's a great analogy. I work in an IT department, and I suffer from some of the same restrictions that Manjoo complains of (both as someone who has to impose/enforce them and as someone on whom they are imposed). The truth is, I wish that all our users were like him - smart enough to be largely self-sufficient, so they could safely unlock the value that new technologies offer to their business processes.

However, all users are not like that, and the metrics by which my performance is evaluated are negatively affected by uninformed or only partially informed users. In fact, it's also hard to measure or give me credit for the productivity that might accrue from my team enabling smart users to leverage technology. Or, to put it another way, nobody picks up the phone to give me credit for giving "good" users more technological autonomy, but plenty of people pick up the phone and make my life worse when bad users make bad decisions that have negative effects on productivity (their own or others').

Manjoo talks about IT departments "educating users" to protect them from themselves, but that's a non-starter. Interested users educate themselves, and the rest don't want to hear it (or they already would have). If he could come up with a way in which IT departments could grant different levels of user autonomy based on user education and "performance" then we might be on to something, but the sad fact is that corporate culture is increasingly less about meritocracy (in any sense) and more about a false egalitarianism that applies policy based on the least common denominator as a way of mitigating potential liability And that's how we got our traffic laws.

Actually, traffic engineers figure you have a psychologically need to break the speed limit, so they usually design the road for a higher speed than what goes on the metal signs. Usually about 5-10mph difference.

reopines:

Manjoo talks about IT departments "educating users" to protect them from themselves, but that's a non-starter. Interested users educate themselves, and the rest don't want to hear it (or they already would have).

Double correct with a fscking cherry on top! User don't want to make those kinds of decisions- that's what IT is for. And who can blame a user for not wanting to be their own IT department? They have enough to handle with just dealing with their own job.

User don't want to make those kinds of decisions- that's what IT is for. And who can blame a user for not wanting to be their own IT department? They have enough to handle with just dealing with their own job.

But that is the problem, you see -- people are forced to be their own IT department, because the IT department cannot be convinced to handle anything other than a standard PC connected to standard servers, everything running standard software installed according to standard operating procedures. For over half the systems in our organization, that highly standardized configuration is simply not enough, and we have the improvise.

Worse, we even officially delegate business people to manage IT-mandated projects, because we cannot trust the IT managers to make decisions that are appropriate for our business needs. So not only do we have to manage a lot ourselves, but corporate IT blatantly exploits the users by offloading tasks on its supposed customers. And every time corporate IT launches a new policy, it costs us far more money and time than IT itself makes available.

The IT department needs to become useful again, instead of a threat, but to do that it will have to adapt to the nature of the business it is supposed to support, instead of expecting the rest of the company to adapt to IT.

This needs to be addressed by the highest authorities of the company - the CEO and the BOD's.

Unless you are willing to make the argument for change at the highest levels, it ain't gonna happen. I bet the IT department would rather be doing it another way, but is limited in scope and direction from the top of the food chain.

More CEO's than you know pay lip service to IT and then just want it to stay off their plate. That's exactly why they hire the particular CIO they do - to keep that pesky stuff off their desk. If you work for one of those CEO's you are pretty much screwed.