311–320 of 326 posts
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Outgoing SSH is blocked at my company, even to non-SSH ports. Even to virtual machines I had already setup in Azure before the block. Sure, guys. Of all things to block, let's block the most secure one. That'll really improve our security posture. At this point, I'm continually surprised they haven't superglued the USB ports.
You can switch SSH to port 80 or 443, right?
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The issue here seems more cultural than technical - it seems non-tech firms are vastly more paranoid about data sharing or leakage, despite usually having less valuable data. The amount of effort put into anti-exfiltration measures in finance is staggering compared to what existed at Google, and it kills productivity to an enormous degree. This seems to go hand in hand with a much greater obsession over IP. I've seen…
> My guess is that outside the tech industry, new ideas are relatively rare so even very simple ideas feel incredibly valuable. Are they not rare even inside the tech industry?
See how all the big firms file gazillions of patents but actual patent infringement suits between them are quite rare. Patents are seen as a defensive posture: everyone knows everyone violates a million patents so by and large, mutually assured destruction is avoided. In a world where ideas were rare you'd see patents be treated as much more valuable.
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I don't think it's reasonable to treat everyone you work with as your customer, but that's not what's being proposed. IT's role is generally to support the organization. The organization is its customer. For the most part, it doesn't "work with," but it supports. In any organization, there's a complex network of who is a customer, who is a client, who is a peer, and so on. There are places I'm not IT's customer, but…
Boxing IT into a support role minimizes its potential contribution. If business enablement is the goal, that includes innovation, business development, and fixing what isnt broke. Coming to management with new business ideas instead of either waiting to be handed something, or only moving forward with ideas because they address risk and security.
The primary question is one of purpose: someone in a support role is hired to keep me effective and productive, and evaluated on their ability to do so. I am their customer. If I win, they win.
The goal of IT isn't good systems architecture or innovation -- it's me. Supporting me well often requires good systems architecture and innovation. It also requires compromising those at times to my goals, having clean transition strategies, and similar choices as well. Those decisions are made based on their impact on me.
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Boxing IT into a support role minimizes its potential contribution. If business enablement is the goal, that includes innovation, business development, and fixing what isnt broke. Coming to management with new business ideas instead of either waiting to be handed something, or only moving forward with ideas because they address risk and security.
I don't quite think you understand the point of a support role. People who support me do a lot of innovation, fixing what isn't broken, and all of that. Most are highly empowered and I expect a few to take serious leadership roles in the organization, depending on seniority. The primary question is one of purpose: someone in a support role is hired to keep me effective and productive, and evaluated on their ability t…
I absolutely think you are wrong that innovating is derived from your needs, a technology group driving innovation could just as well include obsoleting you. An IT department can bring new business ideas to a leadership team, and arguably their leader is a part of that leadership team, at least until every c-suite person is tech savvy enough to obsolete the CIO position.
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Your problem statement does make it sound like you need a CRM, but I do wonder why is has to be a big CRM with a big consultancy, and why IT aren't delivering it? Who's going to run the thing afterwards? Will the bigdogs deliver something that you can maintain, or is that generally against their own interests? Finally, who's gonna secure all this customer data? Are they taking that on as part of their remit? They rar…
The CRM needed to be sophisticated enough to accommodate high standards for data security and access control, several marketing integrations, and the complex data model that resulted from a permissive culture. I'm NOT an expert but my understanding is that, in terms of complexity and cost, there's a whole tier above Salesforce where you're provisioning servers and installing Oracle or SAP. We didn't need and could no…
Still, as an IT contractor, better you pay the big bucks for the projects. :p
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Maybe create a 'time wasted' ticket system to help quantify employee hours wasted by IT roadblocks? It smells like it could be gamed heavily, but it might work better.
the same should then apply to "adopting the tool to the process" instead of "adopting the process to the tool" when a new technology is implemented but process and behavior are declared immutable.
Now what.
There is also an inversion of responsibility here. It really should be IT's job to 'adapt the tool to the process' instead of externalizing it to their staff. Until they can do it, the staff needs outweigh the lazy 'default no' of IT.
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the same should then apply to "adopting the tool to the process" instead of "adopting the process to the tool" when a new technology is implemented but process and behavior are declared immutable.
It's proprietary software (adobe, apple/microsoft, autocad, etc) and they file it as a no fix. Or it's open source and it will take $30k+ in engineering time to change it and $100k+ in time wasted waiting. Now what. There is also an inversion of responsibility here. It really should be IT's job to 'adapt the tool to the process' instead of externalizing it to their staff. Until they can do it, the staff needs outweig…
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It's an incentive misalignment. IT is evaluated in 'how secure things are' or 'how easy is it to maintain' or 'does this give me more headcount'. Not letting people do their jobs, or in how fast they can do their job. Employees are a captive audience, and if there was competition they would probably chose something else.
> It's an incentive misalignment. IT is evaluated in 'how secure things are' or 'how easy is it to maintain' or 'does this give me more headcount'. I tend to summarize my experience with IT in large companies and universities like this: IT is evaluated in "how secure things are", or "whether things are not broken". The only sure-fire way to ensure a system is secure and not broken is to make it completely unusable, s…
Never mind that it took double as long, and sucked the life out of everyone subjected to the system.
Efficiency!
This is exactly extremely common. In my company there is this constant battle about the devs having admin rights on their machines. We need admin rights to do our job. We have had dozens of meetings explaining the situation but IT can’t come up with a solution so the devs go around security because they have no alternative if they want to finish their work . Same with Dropbox. They block it but we have suppliers who…
I have my own PC strapped under my desk connected to public Wi-Fi. I use it to do all my work. My company pc is left turned on but disconnected, sitting on top of my desk to dissuade suspicion.
We can't connect to anything internal from outside, there is VPN access but it seems a step too far to use that all the time.
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Judging by the statement that he worked with some high-level EE/CS/ME people, I assume the actual job was pretty interesting or cutting edge.
No job is interesting enough that I would tolerate targeting and succeeding in firing a productive employee for internal politics. Doubly so if that behavior is coming from a department nominally in a support role. That's a dog to be put down.
Also it's not always so easy to up and quit every time someone looks at you the wrong way.