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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

You can’t change people. You sometimes can change their targets.

So it is that while prudes will always be prudes — obsessed with the notion that someone, somewhere, might be having fun — what they are prudish about can and will change over time.

When I was a boy, a peculiar amount of time and energy went into prohibiting consenting adults from doing what they wanted to do together. While still popular in some circles, this form of prudishness is far less prevalent these days.

That’s the good news, and if someone ever introduced a Constitutional amendment that reads, “Congress shall make no laws defining crimes without victims or criminalizing acts undertaken solely between or among consenting adults,” I’d expect it to receive widespread support.

The bad news: The prudes are still among us. They live in IT organizations. You can recognize them easily. They’re the ones who say, “Rules are rules, and we have to enforce them.”

It’s an argument that falls apart on even the slightest scrutiny, but scrutiny is something prudes mostly reserve for the behavior of other people. Self-righteousness, not analysis, is their stock in trade.

These thoughts occurred to me as I read my e-mail following last week’s column (“Roving e-mail,” Keep the Joint Running, 7/2/2007), which presented the imprudence of harshly punishing violations of various corporate usage policies (such as using private e-mail accounts for business purposes).

These are the new prudes, and I’m tired of listening to them. Tired, that is, of those who self-righteously deride anyone who uses their PC for more than word processing, spreadsheets, electronic mail, Internet browsing, and the official list of enterprise applications.

We have PCs that can sing, dance, and play the tuba. The list of what they can do for us is like Einstein’s universe: Finite, but unbounded.

As specifics are more persuasive than generalities, here are some applications I use on a regular basis, which make me significantly more effective in my work. Installing them would be, in many companies, grounds for disciplinary action:

  • Copernic Desktop Search: Until I migrated to Vista (DON’T DO IT! YOU’LL REGRET IT!!!) Copernic was how I quickly found the files and e-mails I was looking for. I like it even more than Google Desktop.
  • InfoSelect: The best personal information manager in the world, so far as I’m concerned. You can use it to create outlines, notes, and flat-file databases and find whatever you’re looking for in an eyeblink. I use it to store all the random bits of information I need to stash somewhere. And, it has a version for Palm, so I can find the information when I’m out and about.
  • Desktop Sidebar: Similar to Google Desktop’s sidebar, and infinitely better than Vista’s visually appealing but space-intensive clunker, I find Desktop Sidebar to be a terrific way to keep the weather, stocks, and blogs I track right in front of me. It’s compact, stable, and … nifty.
  • Treo/Blackberry: Yes, there are still a lot of companies that don’t let you connect a Treo or Blackberry to your PC or laptop. I can e-mail or call anyone in my Outlook address book from my Treo. Their employees can’t.
  • Digital camera: We do a lot of whiteboard work with clients. When the whiteboard is full we take its picture. It’s cheaper than a “smart board,” ubiquitous, and we can store the original electronically. Many companies wouldn’t let us upload the pictures.
  • Allway Sync: I don’t know if it’s better or worse than any other file synchronization tool. It works for me. It keeps track of parallel folder trees on different drives or computers, recognizing new files, changed files, and deletions. Simple and painless.

Many companies employ professional prudes to prevent this sort of thing from happening. The theory is that doing so cuts the cost of IT. My theory is that if you buy this theory I can cut your IT costs to zero. Just turn it all off.

Here’s a suggestion: Instead of employing professional prudes to prevent end-users from finding better and more productive uses for information technology, show some leadership instead. Give someone the job of developing the richest set of tools possible for your company’s PCs, and the job of promoting their use.

The job title? I must be in the wrong mood, because everything that occurs to me right now would make at least some readers snigger.

Suggestions?

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

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.

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