Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Smith-Corona Award Nominees

...the electric typewriter award for the IT Director most determined to block anything useful. Here are the top 3 so far:

1. The IT Director who will not let his training staff access the 5,000+ member Tr-Dev group because, he says, "If it's free, it can't be any good, can it?"

2. The IT Director who said, "If SIX people look at streaming video at one time, the ENTIRE state network will crash!" After which he admitted they were blocking all streaming media becuse the HR staff kept getting caught watching soaps at work.

3. The IT director who won't let staff enable the wireless technology on the laptops, so they can't access the Internet while on the road...which was the point of getting the laptops...

OTHERS? Oh please oh please send them to me!

4 comments:

Karl Kapp said...

Here is one...
The president of a large company (over 1,000 employees) shut off the internet because he didn't want his people "wasting time"...like looking up competitor information or keeping up with what is going on in the world?

Anonymous said...

How about a major federal agency IT department that has gone to the trouble of disabling Flash in all agency browsers out of a fear that employees will access inappropriate material on the web. Apparently never heard the concept of tossing out the baby with the bathwater.

Anonymous said...

My favorite is the HR director of a large federal agency who insists on having staff prepare PowerPoint shows for presentations, but then requires them to be printed out in hard copy for distribution at meetings because she is daunted at the idea of having to click a mouse to advance through electronically displayed slides.

Jane Bozarth said...

I love them all, but especially the first. WHERE does the logic for this originate? If one employee is abusing the telephone we deal with that person...we don't take away the organization's phones... my word...