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We're trying to get our company on the right track as far as IT. We're still seen as the jokers who sit on their computers all day not contributing anything (can't help it that we're competent enough to keep everything working right!)
But our CEO won't side with us on anything.
For example, we have a policy that states any hardware purchased without the aid of IT is unsupported hardware, yet he won't enforce it, and we end up supporting items we either have no direct experience with, or devices that people run out and purchase without our approval.
The other problem is that the remote offices want admin rights to install whatever they please on their PCs but their systems are all joined to the domain, and fortunately my boss is firm in his stance that they do not get admin rights, and we agree on that one (actually, my boss, my coworker and I have no disputes on anything we do to keep the company network safe)
We cannot find ANYTHING to help us enforce our stance on why this is a business requirement to enforce the third party hardware and no-admin-rights (among other problems). Do you have any feedback on where we can find "CEO training in IT" or something similar? We need it to be valid and concise.
I don't know that you are going to find anything that allows you to enforce your stance.
All most of these suits understand are numbers. So, you have to break it down into terms he or she will understand. You have to track how much money is spent on inefficient procedures, non-standard hardware, etc. and then present it.
Of course, they might come back with "we make more money playing it fast and loose". In which case, you are stuck.
Hello i'm actually going through the very same issue in my organization but I seem to have a little bit more support.
First I find that my users are purchasing outside of the IT department because that's what they are accustomed to and don't know any better. Are your purchasing standards published anywhere and easily accessible by authorized users? If not this needs to change now. You should be able to tell the users what they can have and have support from this by upper management. We will evidence this more later. I know you mentioned that you have a policy for products that aren't IT sanctioned, but the sanctioned products need to be listed as well. IF this is happening with software, you need to have your Boss go to the CEO and highlight how much money is getting thrown out the window by (presumably) purchasing off the shelf hardware and forgetting vendor points and volume license benefits.
Second you might be able to compromise with the remote office people by designating a single IT contact that has admin rights on the local machines. I don't know what type of business you're in but keep in mind different business units have different needs. Some business units need to be able to work with their machines on the power user level, so restricting access won't cut it.
As far as your CEO goes you need to introduce him to the power of ITIL and quantify how much productivity can increase if you guys implement CHANGE MANAGEMENT where IT is calling the shots. Show him how much time you are wasting supporting non-it purchased assets.
Agreed, you need to have a change management program in place. You also should have a service level agreement in place that addresses non-standard hardware and software and what your department will and will not do to support it.
We have a sharepoint with established procedures on purchases available 24/7. The users in the remote offices also know that we don't like them just running out to Frys to purchase whatever they want. We had a user recently purchase a new workstation for a new hire from Frys, didn't tell us, let it go past the return period, and then couldn't return it when we told him we couldn't support it. So he paid to have it overnighted to us to install & configure for the corporate LAN, and then we overnighted it back (both times on his dime - each trip was $206) he also requested the overnight in each case. A $499 PC cost him just as much in shipping. Oy!
In our case, my boss HAS gone to the CEO to highlight this wasting, and he's done nothing to support us. We blew $20,000 last year on remote field services IT support on the remote offices because they either broke something, or something died because of their negligence.
The remote offices don't have a single user capable of making sound judgement calls on having IT admin rights. We tried it once like this already, it didn't work. (infections, systems reset for no reason, etc)
Good luck. If your CEO doesn't want to agree there is not much you all can do about it. We have a pretty liberal policy compared to other companies. Our workers have full admin rights to their PCs and there are other policies that make a lot of work for IT.
But the amount of money that they turn and make from the client by having speedy repair time, ability to install programs, etc. outweighs the IT spend.
$20k is not much money. You need to make him realize the legal risk of having these policies unsupported. Just an example off the top of my head (one we have used). Suppose a person downloads a freeware program, however they don't read the fine print and don't realize the program is only free for private/educational use, and a license is required for use by a company/corporation. In a scenario such as this, your company is now open to a potential lawsuit for theft of trade secrets and intellectual property. A good case study to explain this is when a company called '2FA Technology' sued Oracle for exactly those reasons for $110 million for punitive damages alone. $20k is pocket money to a CEO, however he obviously doesn't realize that he is opening his company up to the potential for multi million dollar losses.
Talk only in dollar amounts and write up a proposal to show your CEO how many millions of dollars the company could stand to lose. A $110 million payout is not an inflated number...and if that doesn't catch the CEO's attention, I am not sure what will.
If you don't have policy in place that can be enforced tell him you are risking customer's business ie. admin rights allows install of malware toobars or programs, customer data is compromised, you get sued, or worse, featured on the news or even social networks as an idiot company. Sure you're anti-virus migth shut it down but maybe not before damage is done. Talk to this person in business terms, especially in terms of risk to his financial goals.
We have a sharepoint with established procedures on purchases available 24/7. The users in the remote offices also know that we don't like them just running out to Frys to purchase whatever they want. We had a user recently purchase a new workstation for a new hire from Frys, didn't tell us, let it go past the return period, and then couldn't return it when we told him we couldn't support it. So he paid to have it overnighted to us to install & configure for the corporate LAN, and then we overnighted it back (both times on his dime - each trip was $206) he also requested the overnight in each case. A $499 PC cost him just as much in shipping. Oy!
In that case are people getting reimbursed for these expenses? If so, maybe you can talk to your financial officers and make sure that they aren't encouraging this behavior by allowing employees to buy whatever they want knowing that the expense report will be authorized with ease. If managers are doing this, you're kinda sunk.
Also upper management support is essential on issues such as this. Bottom-Up approaches typically never work, and are always inferior to top-down approaches. As stated, if they don't want to give it the time of day, that's a reflection of their thoughts about IT within the organization. This could be because of lack of understanding between your boss and the CEO or something, but somewhere along the line the trust relationship got screwed up. I recommend a healthy dose of documentation and numbers based evidence, but it sounds like you've already got this and brought it to management. In this case, if they still don't wish to deal with it, i'd consider it a lost cause.
Within my organization I make all team members (managers, purchasing dept et al) know my process for procurement and distributing assets and they understand that I run a very tight ship (to the best of my ability). Purchasing dept understands that by running all their assets through my dept. that at any time I can give management everything they ever wanted to know about any machine, from the software installed to the warranty expiry, who has it, where it's been etc and they support this vision. Without their assistance and making them apart of the "team" then they had no incentive to change. But now they understand that if management needs some data and I don't have it, it's because someone before me sidestepped the process (very powerful).
Good luck.
Last edited by Xeon1210; 01-12-2012 at 12:08 PM..
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