It’s been my sad experience over the last 20+ years, that what’s in the IT Policy vs. what gets enforced, is a bit of guess work for most people.  Here is a short guide.

Always enforced.
Looking at illegal porn (kiddies, dogs & gerbils).  If we find out about it, we have to report it; you kiddie fiddling scumbag.
You won’t know that you’ve been reported until PC Plod seizes everything.
If there is a set of stairs nearby, pray that you don’t trip walking down them.
Repeatedly.

Sometimes enforced
Porn surfing.  If someone sees you doing it, hears you doing it, we find it on your hard drives, or we see visits to <insert porn sites here>, it’s going to be reported to management.

But yes, commonsense is used.

If it’s an inadvertent visit, such as mistyping the name of the llewtube.com site, you’ll be fine.  But if we see a whole bunch of porn sites in the web proxy log, then your sad arse is getting reported.

Other things which will get you reported:

• trying to bypass the corporate firewall with a Hamachi client.
• downloading warez, DVD’s or music.  Do your leeching from your home.
• Using BitTorrent.

Never enforced
If you hold a “C” title, “Sometimes enforced” becomes “Never enforced”.  Sure, we’ll report it.  The HR people won’t do anything about it, as they don’t have the bottle to do anything about it.

There’s some sage advice in this BusinessWeek article by Peter Bregman

Because the world is more global and organizations are more diverse, the likelihood we will interact with people very different from us is increasing exponentially. And people who are different from us do things we don’t expect or want them to do. Sometimes they don’t look at us when we speak to them. Sometimes they talk back. Sometimes they don’t talk at all. They defy our expectations, and we feel frustrated.

Remember the golden rule? Treat other people the way you’d like to be treated? Forget it. It doesn’t apply anymore, if it ever did. Try this new rule instead: Treat other people the way they’d like to be treated.

If you don’t like to be micromanaged, for example, you probably try to avoid micromanaging others. But there are some times and some places where that would be a mistake. Like India, for example.

Article continues here.

Using sex to sell IT services really turns me off.  It makes me think to myself:

“Is their service so poor, that they need to get my attention some other way.”

I’m sure Domain Names you will get people who do think it’s appropriate for you to advertise this way, as you keep doing it.  Just like America’s GoDaddy:

(more…)

Sometimes an organisation asks for full and frank questions, but when they see questions, they don’t really want them asked.

Such as it was with a re-organisation of a government department.  It went something like this.

Peter was appointed as  BigEd CEO.  Peter was picked on his ability to toady up to politicians, and stab his colleagues in the back.  Or so it seemed to the staff he left in his wreakage.

Peter had a brother, Vic.  Vic wasn’t much good at what he did, so he was in a dead-end job.  The rumour was that Peter was going to appoint Vic as Chief Information Officer.

So that begged the all-staff meeting question:

Any truth that the Chief Information Officer role has already been filled, even before applications close???

‘No, no, no’, was the denial.

A week later, Vic was appointed.

Proving that everything goes around in a circle, the “Anonymous questions box” appeared today at work.  I wonder if any of those questions will be filtered by our management gets to answer them.  Think I might ask the following:

1. Have any of these anonymous questions been removed?
2. What does it say about the organisation, when we need an anonymous questions box?
3. What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Work with a big enough organisation and you’ll come across the Service Level Agreement (SLA).

An SLA basically says, “we’ll provide you with x level of service, for y dollars.  If we don’t provide you with that service, we’ll give you something in return.”

That “something” might be a partial refund of your y dollars; or a credit towards a future service.

There was one customer organisation who demanded that they have an IT technician based at their head office.  But didn’t want to pay for the premium service.
Big IT Company did the calculations, and said

No, that’ll cost us $10,000 a month to place someone there.  And only $5,000 a month in missed SLA penalties if we don’t.  We’ll take the penalties, thank you.

My, didn’t THAT improve the relationship with the customer.

At my last employer, there was a focus on “Performance Management”.  I always felt, even as a team leader, that we paid lip service to the whole process.
eg.  we were going though the motions.

Performance Management has many goals.  The primarily one is to ensure that the team is working towards/contributing to the objectives of the business.  The credibility of such objectives would be shot by the employer producing the objectives 6 months into the business year.

It was also shot like a lame duck, when one of our Human Relations people, was giving us a update on the Performance Management programme.  A couple of chaps were discussing a point which was raised by the HR person.

SHUT UP, I’m giving a presentation

bellows the HR person.

I can’t remember the substance of the programme update, but all the attendees remember “Freida Nurk” as the HR person who told people to shut up.

… so writes Scott Barnes over at The MossyBlog Times.

The larger an organisation becomes, the more it’s Mass of Stupidity grows.  Until it reaches critically.

Sure, there are pockets of brilliance in one field or another, but on the whole, once an organisation reaches Stupidity Critically, it’s lost.

Even if the CEO might realise this, and wants to change:

No one person can control Microsoft today, which has been obvious to Gates for at least eight years, since that’s how long ago he put Steve Ballmer in the CEO job. For at least eight years, then, these guys have known that their jobs are not so much to steer the Microsoft ship as to try and keep it from drifting onto the rocks. That’s the way it is with huge and successful companies. At best you can trim the sails, because to come about (to significantly shift direction) is just too dangerous for the money machine.
- Robert X. Cringely reflecting on Bill Gates in Go Home, Bill … (my italics)

You can tell that Stupidity Critically is reached when management starts talking about cultural change.

This is at least 20 years old, and is as valid now, as it was back then.  Our training folks used to show it up on the overhead projector before any training course kicked off.

I suspect the artwork is by Hank Ketcham, but I don’t know.

The humble bucket of water is a simple way to gain work/life perspective.

1. Fill up a bucket, with water.
2. Put your hand in it.
   Move it all about if you life
   Notice the waves?
3. Now take your hand out.

You’ll notice the water has settled.

So what actual difference have you made to that bucket of water.

NOT. A. THING.

If you’re working for a large organisation, you’re doing the bucket of water thing.

I used to think Robert Scoble SUCKED.  I found his work at Microsoft Channel 9 sucked because it was all Microsoft-centric.  Gee, what a surprise eh?  Bloke works for Microsoft, so OF COURSE he’s going to be all "Hoo Rah Microsoft".

Glad I’ve changed my mind (ie. I was wrong) and now have him on my RSS feed list.

Saw this over at FriendFeed, and some of Robert’s learnings are worth noting.  DO READ the whole feed to get the context.  My comments in BLUE.

I sure learned a lot about how a company can screw up big time.

Brother, I know how you feel.

Major learning’s for me?

1. Have a story.
2. Have everyone on board with that story.
3. If anyone goes off of that story, make sure they get on board immediately or fire them.

Other things I learned:

1. Make sure people are judged by the revenues they bring in. Those that bring in revenues should get to run the place. People who don’t bring in revenues should get fewer and fewer responsibilities, not more and more.
2. Work ONLY for a leader who will make the tough decisions (see above).
3. Build a place where excellence is expected, allowed, and is enabled.
4. Fire idiots quickly (didn’t happen at PodTech — even if you count me as one of the idiots).

Working for people incapable of making a decision SUCKS. Learn to manage your boss in that case. Or leave.

Failures of companies often happen around failures at the leadership level.

Particularly when they say one thing, and then demonstrate something else.

We never played together as a team. It is why entrepreneurs need different skills after they start their companies. It is not enough to sell people on a dream. You must coach your way to it too.

I have been thinking about what Furrier said about me not having a full picture of what went wrong. First of all I don’t think he is right, but if he is I will add one last learning: never work in a VP position when those above you don’t share a complete picture of the business with you. Especially when that business is a social media one that was pushing transparency and community values.

Never worked as a VP, but that seems right. If you can’t be informed at the VP level, there is no hope for the company.

FastCompanyTV is making our bosses happy (we’re bringing in more revenue than is being spent) but we’re a private company so we don’t discuss our finances in public. About our audience. I’d argue that I know more about our audience than any TV show does and we’re soon going to require logging into FastCompanyTV to comment. Who is making tough decisions? I have a boss and he has a boss but the community is really our ultimate boss.

Listen to your audience. Your audience is the customer and your bosses.

Some Scoble links:
scobleizer.com
Scoble’s Google Reader Shared Items
IBM unveils nano-projector based VirtuaHuman with 1TB of memory