Is Centralized IT Killing Tech Innovation?

There is nothing innovative about inviting disaster, or to be less dramatic about things, inviting cost. After spending on a slew of "monitors" to ensure that the network isn't just tough on the outside (firewalls/IPS, etc.), but on the inside as well, with anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-this and anti-that, asset trackers, patch management systems, another layer of network/app firewalls, ensuring no rogue wireless access points, we're suddenly saying, "yeah, bring it on employees

I have a quick answer to the situation where someone brings in unauthorized software or hardware to the office: take it home before you do damage or you're fired. An office PC, the network, and the bandwidth used, is private corporate property, period.

To the developer mentioned in the article bemoaning a less than perfect station at work: Go to your immediate manager, or boss, and ask for a quad-dual-core system with a terabyte of storage, mega LCD flat screens, and memory to the max - just make sure you have the smarts to defend your requisition. If your company is truly serious about its development team (like say you're in the software business) and knows what it's doing, then you shouldn't have any problem getting your new toy, and if you can crank out software releases twice as fast, heck corporate will even give you 2 of them, and send an extra box to your home. Come to me with a request for a joystick and I'll send you a link to Monster or HotJobs.

To the suggestion that "let users decide on hardware" and IT should just "take care of the data", well, just make sure that when the next vendor support plans (plural) invoices come in, don't point to IT when Finance bean counters come knocking. And, unless you are in an environment with fairly tech savvy employees, please make sure you listen to your IT manager when he/she asks for more staff, or more anti-this; anti-that, monitor this/that, to support the myriad devices and applications in your office. 10 employees, with 10 different computing environments, what a lovely way to increase operational costs - kudos to the suggestion. Talk about crapola!

In business, it's about productivity and adding value. If you need something, ask for it. It's not about IT "mandates", it's presenting your use case to your manager/boss, for approval/budget. If it's all good, and adds value, efficiency, productivity, then by all means, we in IT love tinkering with new toys too! We're the uber geeks, remember?! And since it's got full management support, you'll have IT support too.

I don't think IT "loves control". Management mandates and makes IT responsible for "all that stuff" - if something goes wrong, it's IT's butt on the hot seat. Any IT person with enough experience knows that a good job is ensuring that you're actually not "needed" - if you don't need me, never need to know my extension, then everything is humming along just fine, and I've done my job. No, I don't want everything to go through me, thank you very much.