In a recent Infoworld article by Tom Sullivan it is pointed out that companies are investigating or implementing policies and procedures to allow users to manage their own information technology assets.
This is of course a high heresy for those of the information technology godhood. Why users are idiots and regardless of such things as utility computing, commodity computing, and other terms which scream thematic analogies of “let me drive and quit monkeying with the fuel injection”. I can’t imagine why we would allow users to manage that which about any monkey half drunk on rancid Jack Daniels could accomplish. I’m sure we can come up with reasons to expend $50K a year on desktop support, plus another $25K in associated employment costs per 100 to 250 users. With high levels of incompetence and rather shoddy customer service skills.
Why not educate users and perhaps impact a lot of the myths of information technology? I mean from the article companies like GOOGLE are doing this and really what would they know about information technology? And, if you could make a case for a company like GOOGLE who else would want to do this besides BP (with a local presence to my home location). Well maybe. Sure I hope this reeks with sarcasm because I’ve been preaching this to my students for years.
Desktop computing is going away as an information technology management function. Information Technology providers should be looking at the “service” side of their information technology assets and less at their commodity assets. In many cases it is becoming cheaper to just throw away a commodity PC then even attempt to put an hourly paid asset to work on it at highly competitive wages. Work on the servers and the core systems, but Mr. Sullivan tells us this in the article.
Oh, and while you’re at it. Get rid of the stupid password rolling monthly scheme. You already have single factor authentication when you use the userid for the email address. Rolling passwords monthly just increases the chances of weak ones being used, and besides single factor authentication is useless.