IT Dept, Please Remove That Barrier!

The primary concern of the IT dept should be to aid employees in being more productive and also to help them do their jobs more efficiently, it shouldn’t be to create obstacles for them. IT managers are so concerned with safety that they restrict essential Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise such as RSS feeds and social networking, just to name a few. Oscar Berg shares his annoyance with the IT dept in his latest post. Oscar mentions a few things that provoke his “allergic reactions” to barriers in the enterprise. Here are some of the things:

• Not allowing employees to buy or download and install software on their computers
• Not allowing employees to set their own browser home page or not allowing multiple home pages in pages that support multiple tabs
• Not allowing browser plug-ins such as Flash
• Restricting access to information resources by default instead of only restricting access when it is really needed and having as default to let employees access information resources
• Not allowing instant messaging
• Not allowing external RSS feeds (simply because they are seen as something alien that the IT department cannot control)

These obstacles put on by the IT dept are crippling business strategy. After a long time of frustration, employees will start to seek ways to go around these restrictions, thus breaking some company rules. If IT pros want to avoid this conflict, then they must start to realize the value that Web 2.0 tools can bring to the enterprise.