Great Post About IT Restrictions in the Workplace

My friend, former coworkers and MBS alum has a thoughtful post following on some of the themes from a previous post. In it, he sites a great Slate article which argues for a loosening of IT restrictions:

…The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies’ success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.

Ameel thoughtfully concludes that IT departments would be wise to add their own in-house analysts to match IT tools available to those in the company who might need to use them, lest services be blocked somewhat arbitrarily.

What is often missing is…:

• In-house IT Consulting: the people who liaise directly with different parts of the business and use the latest technologies to improve the way those people work
  

Without that fourth part, IT departments have a hard time keeping up with what people in the organization believe are the most effective and efficient ways of doing their work. They also don’t keep up with the latest technological solutions for various business problems.

I couldn't agree more. I'd like to think that my former team in Melbourne Business School performed that function admirably. Often, we would just connect business users with simple off-the-shelf services that would dramatically effect productivity. Three examples would be Confluence, Google Groups, and Google Desktop, but there are many more.