IT is expected to do any number of impossible tasks, but there are 7 things that it ought to be doing (but isn't) I don’t have the time to do what I need to do — let alone what I would like to do. Yet I realize if I could just set aside some time, I could find new tools or work methods that would make me more efficient and the people I work with a lot happier. I may be past redemption, but IT can find salvation in Dan Tynan’s Seven things IT should be doing (but isn’t), an outstanding article that draws on the passionate opinions of users, consultants, and IT folks to highlight new initiatives that IT should focus on. Dan put out the word about this story weeks ago. Before long, “I was buried in responses,” he says. “I gave up reading or replying to them after awhile, there were so many. In fact I’m still getting them. It seems there are a lot of things IT hasn’t done that it needs to do.” So how did Dan choose seven suggestions from that huge response? “I picked them because they came up again and again — and also because I thought they were more interesting than the run-of-the-mill stuff like ‘IT must learn to communicate better.’ I especially liked the ones about Web 2.0 changing how companies deliver IT services. The coming ‘millennial’ generation will demand that boring in-house apps not be boring anymore — a lot more like Facebook and less like Filemaker 1.0 — or they’ll leave.” InfoWorld gets the scoop! Speaking of disgruntled employees, did you hear the one about the network administrator who flipped out and held the City of San Francisco hostage? A week ago the San Francisco Chronicle first reported that Terry Childs had been arrested and held on $5 million bail for refusing to cough up network passwords that apparently only he knows. To InfoWorld blogger Paul Venezia, something about this story smelled fishy. “Nothing in the statements from city officials seemed to make any sense,” says Paul. “I got the impression that they were just running around like chickens after a beheading, with no real knowledge of what was happening. That and the claim that undoing the damage could cost ‘millions of dollars’ sent my BS meter into the red.” So Paul started making some educated guesses. “My only real clue was that I’d read Cisco experts were being called in. This conflicted with reports that Childs had denied access to city records and claims that he was an Oracle DBA who had corrupted databases, among other rumors. So I guessed that he had simply never given access to these routers to anyone else, and that recovering those passwords could cause some downtime, but that this whole thing was being blown out of proportion.” After writing a couple of posts about the matter, Paul landed a real scoop: An inside source, apparently impressed with Paul’s deductions, gave a full account of what actually happened and how it was allowed to occur. “If my source is accurate, Childs may have done some wrong, but he’s not the only one to blame — the fallout from this should go much higher up the ladder.” We posted the full story on Friday. Right about now, I’m willing to bet the City’s IT department wishes it had done a few things it neglected to do. Technology Industry