Roving e-mail

That members of the Bush administration used Republican National Committee e-mail accounts instead of their official government accounts leads to troubling questions.

No, not the troubling legal and ethical questions. They aren’t KJR material. If you’re looking for self-righteous indignation on that subject, plenty of political blogs have already plowed that field.

Here at KJR we rarely indulge in self-righteous indignation. Our preferred vices are sarcasm and irony. With that in mind:

Many in the IT punditocracy have made much of the RNC’s amateurish systems management. It’s clear system security and recoverability went well beyond dreadful.

This is no academic concern. The RNC acknowledges it lost hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages and can’t get them back. Unless you interpret the loss as the result of malicious intent, it’s difficult to explain away the problem as anything other than total incompetence. (And can you imagine how frustrating it must for Karl Rove that he can’t retrieve his e-mail archives?)

But that isn’t a proper KJR subject either. Well, it is, actually, but not this week. You’ll have to wade through another few paragraphs for the point to emerge, though, because, elsewhere in the news:

Gloria Long Rollins, Town Manager of Walkersville, Maryland, removed the toilet paper from all restrooms in the town’s parks. Vandals, you see, had set some paper on fire in a men’s bathroom. And so, to combat vandalism, graffiti and drug use in the parks, visitors will henceforth have to bring their own, whether it’s toilet paper, spray paint, drugs or kindling.

Here’s the connection, and its relevance: Bush administration members aren’t alone in ignoring the official systems IT provides them, and Gloria Rollins isn’t alone in overreacting to irritating infractions of the rules. The combination is, to coin a phrase, a vicious cycle.

Okay, I didn’t really coin the phrase. Still, it is a cycle and it is vicious. Please make allowances.

The Bush-league question for KJR readers is how many business users in your company make use of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail!, or Hotmail for business use, and why. The Walkersville question is how you respond when they do.

Here’s the usual response. I’m sure someone somewhere calls it a best practice:

1. IT writes a policy making the use of private e-mail accounts illegal.

2. IT explains to all managers and staff that this is the policy, and that failing to adhere to it will result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination.

3. Someone actually enforces the policy, including termination, proving that in more than one small village, the local idiot has gone missing.

It isn’t that the use of private e-mail accounts is a good idea. Of course it isn’t, as the RNC was kind enough to demonstrate.

It’s that the proper response isn’t to remove the metaphorical toilet paper. It’s better to ask the offending parties, in a friendly, engaging, and entirely unthreatening tone of voice, “So … er … when you compare Gmail to our corporate e-mail system, why do you like Gmail better?”

And then, when they tell you (“Gmail gives me gigabytes of storage. You don’t.”), take what they say seriously.

E-mail is just one example of this common phenomenon: If end-users don’t like the systems you provide, many will find alternatives they like better. If they hate your BPM (business process management) system they’ll put together their own tracking sheets in Excel. If they detest your locked-down PCs they’ll buy their own Macintoshes.

And if they hate your CRM system (“customer relationship management,” but it’s a poor use of the term) they’ll use Salesforce.com, or install Act!

(Not that it matters, but if Yahoo! was to host Act!, where would it put the exclamation points? Oh, never mind.)

For some unaccountable reason, instead of assuming these employees come to the office wanting to succeed at their jobs, many in IT assume they’re malicious vandals who in other circumstances would set fire to the toilet paper in Walkersville’s public restrooms.

I don’t want to push the metaphor too far. I’m not saying Gloria Rollins should have asked her vandals whether they were mad because she didn’t buy Charmin. Even if she had, I’m guessing the vandals would have been too drunk to answer.

So let’s leave it at this: When the employees in your company try to avoid the systems you provide to make them more effective, find out why.

They have a reason. You need to know what it is. Then you can figure out what to do about it.

Other than firing them.