ONLY 10%!!! :smack: At the small university where I work, I would bet that at least 50% would click on it.
I teach IT, rather than work it, but I fully appreciate how much work the IT personnel do–most of them, anyway. However, there are one or two whose functions I really don’t understand. For example, we have a webmaster who is constantly “too busy” to help faculty maintain webpages, and who can’t find the time to help develop a Computer Science web page (even though all we want are privileges on the web server to create our own, since every faculty member is fully capable of actually doing the work). If there were constant upgrades to the server or if there were constant changes to the university web pages, okay… However, NOTHING has changed in technology, software, or accessibility in more than a year. I see this person on campus (a very small campus) smoking in the parking lot nearly every day, but even the changes that we have specifically requested to existing web content have not been addressed at all in several months…
The company does everything. My division is software, and most of us are either Software engineers or technical sales. But the company has its fingers in everything.
Security is still pretty locked down, in terms of not being able to access other people’s machines, login policies, access to servers, etc. But the desktop machines themselves are pretty open. Maybe some other divisions lock their machines down more, but ours certainly doesn’t.
Is it just me, or does this sound like thrashing the hard drive (like in the Linux memory manager)? The system ends up spending all its time on juggling the bureaucratic stuff it has to do to handle the real work that it has no time for real work.
I just wanted to step in and say thank you for using one of my favorite Addams Family lines ever in your sig.
Oh, and sometimes you need a bunch of people on staff in IT so that you have the body count necessary to cover times of trouble; the rest of the time, there can be a serious cooling-of-heels going on. Some of the jobs I’ve worked, we’d have nothing to do for days, then something would go wrong and there’d be more than a little pressure to Get Things Working Again.
There are big fluctuations in workload for IT. At a college, things are very busy from May through October, slow down in December/January, get busy again in January/March, and they are pretty slow through May.
There are also workload priority issues. If the accounting system for the college is down, then IT drops everything to get it running. The user who wants some software installed has to wait.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is a law that essentially says management must be aware of what’s happening in the company, and holds management personally responsible for ensuring that everything is on the up-and-up.
From the Act’s preamble: “To protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures made pursuant to the securities laws and for other purposes.”
It was written in the aftermath of Enron, WorldCom and other corporate finance skulduggery.
