Embracing a loss of control
One of the industry rags I like to read is eWeek. It’s just the right size for casual consumption between meetings or, in my case, while waiting for the flight attendents to announce that I can take out my laptop. The October 22 issue has an article entitled “5 Steps To Better IT Job Security,” and it meshes nicely with my previous pos^H^H^Hrant about some IT directors.
The second step is “Lose control without losing”:
Gartner, in an Aug. 15 report titled “Anarchy Knocking at the Gates of IT Security,” rationalized that if “no” is the default response from the IT department, user populations will simply conspire against IT, creating an endless game of whack-a-mole.
“But you can’t just relax control,” Robin Simpson, Gartner analyst, wrote in the report’s summary. “You need to delineate between the business and personal computing worlds so they can work side-by-side and the boundary can be secured.”
IT professionals will make more meaningful relationships within their organizations by ceasing to say “no” by default, and instead asking, “How do we allow good things to happen safely?” Mann said.
“Move beyond ‘How do I control everything’ to ‘How do I keep things in order,’” Mann said. “Learn to lose control without losing control.”
Industry is realizing that they can’t completely control their employees’ technology use even if they wanted to. That’s why I favor an collaborative approach that engages with teachers and students to identify and implement innovative tech-rich teaching and learning strategies. I’m not smart enough to do it by myself.
Our IT department want us to think that they’re flexible and willing but they have two tactics to avoid all that and keep control. One is to issue long white papers full of geek speak which put so many constraints on anything we want to do, it becomes too much trouble for most people. Their assessment of Skype (after almost a year of asking) is the most recent example.
Or they go out and buy a product which they tell us is just as good as whatever it is we wanted to use and almost always isn’t. The blogs and wikis module for Blackboard is their latest in that area. That piece actually does something I didn’t could be done: make BB even clunkier.
Thanks for the opportunity to vent.