Anyone who’s worked in a Big Corporate environment knows first hand the pain of working with severely constrained computing tools. Either that, or (rather like the probable majority) you possibly have know idea what you’re missing. Colin has a great post up today Web 2.0 or 1984 – which way is right? over on the Bank Watch looking at the number of office workers who are accessing “Web2.0” content today from their desktop — and what some IT dept’s are trying to do about it.
Again I ask the simple question, If you can’t trust your own employees and knowledge workers to use the tools you give them responsibly, who can you trust? What message of trust an moral are you sending to your people?
It may sounds crazy, but draconian IT policies are one of the reasons I walked out of an otherwise good job at a major Canadian (Red and Yellow colored) bank. I just couldn’t take it any longer. No access to webmail accounts, any number of websites or IM clients. That and the daily Denial of Service attacks on my PC by the IT department (20 min security patches and forced reboot cycles every other morning across ten thousand PC denying more aggregate productivity than any likely virus attack I can imagine).
But how will BigIT’s war on productivity be maintained in the feed-based web? With feed splicing & aggregating tools and web api widgets popping up all over the place, how will IT manage to keep blocking access to everything interesting on the web? And even if so, what of employees with their own devices or accessing outside wireless that might be drifting in through every window? I like to think that this is a war that constrictive IT policies can’t win.
For one thing the coming generation “N” won’t stand for it. What I see is that BigIT will have to change… from being digital nannies and security guards to technology coaches and enablers. Let’s call this the New IT.
The New IT will be working with us not against us. The New IT will be constantly showing us what we can do (not what we can’t) to help us be more productive, more collaborative, and more engaged with colleagues both in and outside the firewall.
Helping their employees maximize a healthy life-work balance is a stated priority of nearly every Enterprise.
IT should be inspiring us in how to use the latest tools to balance work AND life to get more out every day – and how to do that safely and constructively.
Now doesn’t that sound like a more fun job?
