More on whether or not to open up PCs

Dear Bob …

I’ve read your recent article concerning the PC at work viz-a-viz the PC at home (“The portal,” Keep the Joint Running, 2/25/2008).

Needless to say as a support technician dealing with the users in a corporate environment, the idea of the PC as a portal is not only a bad one, it merely throws wide the barn door to a series of problems and issues. And opening up the PC for the users leads not to a portal, but a black hole that sucks away time and energy from both the user and the technician who has to support the systems.

Let me give you a good example. Our systems are locked down so that the users cannot install whatever software they wish on the machines. The reason and rationale for this is because of the cost of maintaining and repairing the machines when (not if, when) the user causes either conflict with existing company packages or incompatibility with the same packages.

The need for maintaining a common software platform is to provide ease of maintenance and lower the cost of support. Yet when we do allow the user administrative rights (either via local rights or via a software server that elevates rights prior to installing software) the user will put all kinds of software on the machine that has nothing to do with the business. Media players, browser plugins, screensavers and other downloads will appear overnight, springing up like the fungus that they are.

When the machine starts having problems, it’s your responsibility to fix it, but mention removing the problem software and they’ll scream they need it.

You also mention ‘work/life balance.’ Oddly enough, I may be an exception to the rule, as when I leave work for the day, I LEAVE work. As in, I leave whatever problems, issues, projects, documentation, etc. at my desk where it belongs, and enjoy my evenings, weekends and vacations without having to answer emails, phone or text messages about work issues.

I don’t want to be bothered when the idea is for rest and relaxation, and actually despair at my co-workers who absolutely have to bring their work home with them. That portal is a ball and chain, erasing their personal life and replacing it with a madness that typifies today’s society.

Central IT provides a core set of procedures and products that every user in a company has. You don’t want the users to be going down to Costco to purchase those PC’s as they’ll come back to you demanding support for their problems, their mistakes and failures.

Because I’d tell them ‘you bought them, you support them. Oh, and figure out how you’re going to get the company software on them, as we won’t let them on the network otherwise.’ Letting the users go where they want, install what they want, do whatever they want only leads to madness.

Please have exact change ready if you’re going that route.

– Support tech

Dear Tech …

I’m not recommending that users view their PCs as portals. I’m reporting it.

I’m not advocating a wide-open free-for-all either. I’m pointing out what should be obvious to everyone in IT. The reason it isn’t is because of the tendency most of us have to look at the world through our own eyeballs instead of the eyes of the people we need to communicate with.

What I’m asking you and my other subscribers to do is to forget all about how inconvenient and costly it all is, and instead to think about the world as end-users experience it. They go home, fire up their Costco PC (or whatever) which has, in addition to Office and e-mail, and AOL or MSN or whatever: The software they use to download digital photos from their cameras and edit them; Skype; various games; browser plug-ins; iTunes; PDA/Smartphone interface software; Quicken; and TurboTax.

Or whatever their list happens to be, and it all works together with no problems.

Then they go to work, where they have MS Office, Outlook, a browser with no plug-ins allowed, and nothing else. Knowledgeable people like you inform them it has to be this way because if you allow anything else it will all fall apart.

Then they go home, where it hasn’t fallen apart. They don’t feel like they dodged a bullet. They wonder about why you tell them something that’s so counter to their experience.

This is the world IT is living in: End-users who find themselves using crippled technology at work compared to what they use routinely at home.

Just my opinion: IT’s credibility is at stake. Providing an impoverished technical environment is why. Figuring out what to do about it won’t be as easy as just locking everything down. That doesn’t make it less important. Just harder.

– Bob