Yep, dealing with the "bean counters", which in many instances will include a bunch of management and the CIO is dealing with people who are not privy to what reality is. All they sit there and do is crunch the numbers and read reports, numbers, and statistics but yet have no clue what reality is. You can sit there and explain what the reality of a situation is but they will continue pointing at a number whining and moaning and crying even though it may have no real bearing to an actual situation.
As a poster I have seen says "Do you want to speak to someone in charge or someone who actually know what's going on around here?" The problem is very often that these management types up to the CIO have never really worked as technicians at any level, they're simply people who got their Business Administration degree and happened to know just a bit more about computers than the average user. What makes this so clear is the fact that every time we get an e-mail from the CIO, it's for simple issues that really any technician should be able to figure out but yet the CIO can't.
And yes, this will make the IT Department very institutionalized to the point that they simply don't care anymore and just do what it takes to skirt by and make the management happy. I used to work at a company where Internet Explorer 7 was the standard browser to use and technically, everything else was not allowed. They did it for security reasons because IE 8 according to someone in management, broke everything. I don't know exactly what that everything was as when I used it, everything worked fine but I guess change must have scared him. And heaven forbid you use Opera or another alternative browser, that would give them a heart attack. Then again, this same company upgraded us from Windows 2000 to Windows XP in April of 2009 so that makes a mark of how slow they are. And they locked everything down and had us on air-gapped internet. Working in a West Coast branch, to use the internet, first the request had to go to their East Coast HQ to retrieve the page then come back to the West Coast to load. And what's more, a lot was blocked such as IGN, some sections of Reddit, and a lot of other popular yet fun sites to read.
Management has this idea that by locking the user down more and more, they will make them more productive and ensure they can only focus on work. But it has the opposite effect, it actually makes the user less productive and more likely to not care and simply do the minimum allowed to skirt by and actually makes them more likely to attempt to circumvent Corporate Policy to do what they want. I now work at a company where none of these restrictions exist, internet is direct and nothing is blocked. We use Windows 7 with Office 2010 and they let us run our computers as local administrators to our machines. We can do what we need without restrictions and browse the way we want. With no restrictions in place, we're more productive because there's nothing holding us back, nothing making us hate the environment or place we work for and yet we don't suffer from a bunch of virus infections as the previous company would have believed.
I guess this somehow turned into a rant about bad management. Oh well, good to get it off my chest.
.
