IT departments need to become part of the solution, not the problem

Farhad Manjoo picks up on a question a State Department employee asked Hillary Clinton: "Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox? I just—(applause) —I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn’t use this browser. It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don’t understand why State can’t use it. It’s a much safer program. Thank you. (Applause.)"

The response is that the free program is too expensive.

In Slate, Manjoo writes that millions of workers would like to use Firefox, Google Docs, and other programs or Web sites but are stymied by the IT department, that class of interoffice Brahmins that decides, ridiculously and capriciously, how people should work."

Continues Manjoo, "The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies’ success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway."

Manjoo recounts this situation at a New York publishing house: "An artist will need to look up, say, pictures of 14th-century Ottoman swords in order to illustrate a fantasy novel—and she’ll run into a notice saying, "Access to that site has been blocked because of the following category: Weapons." And here’s my favorite complaint: "Even though many companies are now looking to popularize their products or brands using social-networking sites, IT departments routinely restrict access to Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk.," writes Manjoo.

In a time when every company is trying to do more with less, IT departments need to be part of the solution, not the problem.

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For the record, I can run Firefox and access social networking sites on my work computer; I cannot install Rosetta Stone or the Olympus voice-recorder software I use to transcribe recorded interviews. My solution is to use my own computer and avoid battles with the IT department.

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