Advice Line | Bob Lewis | InfoWorld | Another take on opening PCs, or not | March 31, 2008 05:29 AM

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Another take on opening PCs, or not

March 31, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Another take on opening PCs, or not

Another correspondent weighs in on the lock-or-not-lock debate - Bob

Dear Bob ...

I'm not sure that workers downloading "stuff" on their PCs is really the place that innovation should come from. The reward that something might happen there of value is far out weighed by the risk the corporation faces of being out of compliance or having unauthorized or inappropriate software on company owned PCs. And there is no way to really quantify the risk of "catching a virus" on the back of a downloaded executable.

That being said there should be a process to initiate approval for test software, down loads, etc. that can be pretty simple and not a bottleneck. That's what my previous company did.

- Download Preventer

Dear Preventer ...

I agree that workers downloading stuff isn't where innovation comes from. Workers downloading (for example) open source solutions that will fully or partially automate a business process that is currently handled in a cumbersome way, and that isn't important enough to be a priority for central IT? That's a different story.

Your phrasing is telling. "The reward that something might happen there of value …" makes it clear you consider any potential upside to be, not the result of thought and planning on the part of employees, but an accidental byproduct of random, aimless activity.

I agree. The risks associated with random, aimless activity far exceed the potential benefit.

All I have to say is that if your employer hires employees who spend most of their time engaged in random, aimless activity, the company has a much bigger problem than the risk of a computer virus.

- Bob

Posted by Bob Lewis on March 31, 2008 05:29 AM

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What I find interesting and telling is that the assumption that someone will download a "virus laden screen saver" always seems to be the excuse corporate IT uses to make sure that employees don't download anything like Linux, or Openoffice, or Firefox, or Thunderbird, or Opera, or mysql, or gimp, or picasa, or ....

There are a lot of open source solutions out there that can be very useful for business.

Posted by: jason at March 31, 2008 09:44 AM

Intelligent end users do often find innovative ways to solve business problems when they have administrative access. The trouble comes when the clever solution turns into a "business critical" application or server-on-desktop-hardware that nobody bothers to tell IT about until it crashes, when it somehow becomes IT's fault that they didn't know about it, and didn't prevent the meltdown.

Additionally, smart end users are usually too busy providing clever short-term business solutions to be concerned with security, SOX compliance, or other issues that central IT is trained in. One good solution is a well-managed project office that can triage requests from the business side and prioritize development resources to create genuine, scalable solutions instead of ticking time-bombs.

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