Staying the Course as a CIO. Jonathan Mitchell
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Because They're Worth It?
Let us look first at our user community, or to use a better term – the workers. They are the most voluminous group of your stakeholders and they are comprised of real people doing real jobs. Workers are really cool people. They actually get to do stuff other than emails and meetings. On occasions, what they do get up to can even be useful to the company. It doesn't matter whether they are on the floor of a factory bending metal, or in an office creating what I believe is known these days as “intellectual property”; these people are precious and you have to look after them as best as you can. However, as far as a voice in IT is concerned, most of these folks will strictly be in the silent majority category.
“Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work.”
That said, the needs of the many are simple and straightforward – at least from their perspective. When I've spoken to computer users over the years about their requirements, the answers they give me are fairly consistent. I'm sure it will be the same for you. These good folk will want the latest models of phones and tablet computers and they will want to change them as frequently as they change their socks. They believe they cannot live without the most powerful laptops and personal computers known to man. They will also want to store infinite amounts of email in their inboxes and send and receive massive PowerPoint files that run into terrorbytes. They will demand full and unfettered access to the Internet, so that they can use whatever social media, home banking or any other e-commerce sites take their fancy. Some will want you to fund small pet projects because they naively believe that technology will make their working lives easier. Finally, everyone wants a helpdesk that is instantly answered by a beautiful, courteous person who has bucket loads of empathy to hand. Some may even want these people to solve their problems.
While such requests are easy to understand, responding to them sensitively can be tricky. Many IT leaders faced with the enormity of the task just throw up their hands and subscribe to the pleasing mantra “The only good user is a dead user”. The security needs of your network will of course, horribly constrain the things that you can do for them, but it is pointless explaining this to anyone. They won't understand and they won't care. Why should they? Your users will just see a computer that's much the same as the one they have at home, except that this machine is probably older and of course they can't change their wallpaper or replace the arrow cursor with a banana that peels itself. When people come to work, they will demand and expect all the freedoms they enjoy on their virus-laden, spyware-riddled, zombie-bot, home computers, smartphones and tablets. However, despite all the corporate problems, allowing “reasonable personal use” on company computers is a policy you should strongly consider championing. It is a winning (if sometimes painful) strategy. It is particularly helpful if you want to promote computer literacy amongst your workforce. There are of course always unexpected and sometimes unpleasant things that can happen when you give human beings a bit of freedom. Kings worked this out pretty early on, which is why they were so fond of the operating system we know as Feudalism. Basically, they got to be the Lords while the rest of us were “vassals” and had to do what we were told (Abdy, 2012). Back here in the twenty-first century corporate life is slightly more egalitarian. This new freedom allows any miscreants to get up to amazing things. I have seen some horror stories that would make Mary Shelley blush.
Some years ago I recall that we lost a complete night's worth of backups in a data centre I was managing. This was because a computer operator spent his entire shift downloading gigabytes of video files of his favourite soccer team – it was Manchester United as it turns out. The network was so overloaded that all the applications eventually timed themselves out and backed out of the rather important job of backing things up. Imagine people running all around the computer room like headless chickens. Meanwhile the operator in question, oblivious to the chaos he had caused, quietly sat in the corner of the office repeatedly watching videos of his favourite stars with spray tans and hair transplants kicking a ball and waving garish trophies around.
Then there was the time when we found an employee who clearly didn't like his job. He spent every single minute of every working day surfing the Internet. He usually started five minutes after he had clocked in and continued until he stopped for lunch. Forty-five minutes later he was at it again, only to finish five minutes before he clocked out. This went on for weeks on end. When we looked at the usage logs, we could even calculate how long it took for cups of coffee to pass through his system. Before you think “too much information”, let me reassure you that we could work it out quite simply from the breaks he had taken in between surfing sessions. It was about an hour and half if you are interested. The incandescent HR Director wanted to fire the individual. He was not amused by my suggestion that we put the employee's name forward for some kind of Guinness Book of World Records nomination. Clearly supervision and motivation had failed this person in abundance in his day job, but I certainly couldn't have surfed with anything like the dedication he showed. The individual's manager was the one who ended up with the biggest rocket however. He was told in no uncertain terms that from now on he was expected to harness the dogged conscientiousness of his loyal employees.
My all-time favourite “user howler of the century” story however, happened shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York. A Middle East-based employee, appalled by what he had seen, decided to send an email to every other employee in the company. He wanted to tell everyone that people in his part of the world condemned the terrorist action. His plan was to express solidarity with his colleagues in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia and even a polar station in Antarctica. Normal controls within the network meant that our intrepid hero was not able to simply send an email to the 105,000 employees on the payroll at that time. Bulk emailing was both discouraged and curtailed by company policy. Nevertheless, undeterred by such a flimsy set of obstacles, our hero spent many, many hours and probably several days putting together a dazzling number of distribution lists. The size of each was carefully crafted so that it slipped just under the “number of recipients” restrictions that the computer administrators had put in place. The results were spectacular. Sending off his emails in batches, the disaster unfolded with delicious slowness. First, local servers became clogged, after which regional servers started to choke. Within a couple of hours network diagrams at Network High Command began to glow with angry tones of red. The “Clark Kents” at Network crisis control struggled into nearby telephone boxes to don their “Superman” outfits. In the command centre confused reports suggested that a virulent virus was spreading uncontrollably across the globe. Blizzards of sandy emails marched across North Africa scattering bloated, overfilled, groaning mailboxes before them. Even Field Marshal Rommel and his Afrika Korps would have been impressed as first Egypt and then Tunisia ground to a halt. It took several more hours of headless chicken antics before the panicky network team had calmed down enough to diagnose the problems in the Middle East region. Network traffic was eventually throttled back and re-routed via various improbable countries. The over-impressively large “world domination” screens covering the walls of the Crisis Command Centre began to turn amber and eventually, to everyone's relief, they settled to a soothing, verdant green. Later that day, most of the offending messages had been identified and a mass deletion process was underway. The countries initially affected found their computer systems disrupted for a few days, but the damage was, to be fair, fairly limited. It did take some time however, to persuade the authorities that we did not have another terrorist on our hands. Happily, our employee with a conscience was neither shot nor disciplined nor was he even sent to an American holiday camp on a Caribbean island. Everyone lived happily ever after, except perhaps the network manager, who I am told is responding well to medication.
All this goes to show that everything has its price. Indeed the price of electronic freedom can be very expensive for its custodians. But it is still nonetheless a recommended course of action for the avant-garde IT leader. You will be fine as long as you are the type of person who is not easily surprised by the wit and wisdom of man or woman.
If you consider the business applications that people use in their day-to-day jobs, however, the situation is not good. This is because the views and opinions of actual workers are rarely considered by their leadership when new computer applications are conceived, developed and introduced on their behalf. The average worker must