On blocking access...a slight rant

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I sent an email entitled "a slight rant". It went like this:

Hi,

Corporate Overview & Scrutiny are running a review of drugs and alcohol work in the district. The Council spends some £12 million every year on this work with similar amounts spent by health services. That's a lot of money and some important services.

 

However, if I want to do a little research into drugs policy - look at the case for deregulation or at some of the work being done by charities and health services maybe...

 

...I can't because the Council blocks just about every site and I'm not going to keep sending requests to the 'infosec' address.

 

I'm a grown up. I am not about to start up a drugs peddling site nor am I about to use council IT to make or promote the illegal purchase of drugs. The presence of drugs references - or alcohol or smoking, for that matter - on my screen is not about to turn me into some sort of crack-addled speed freak.

 

What exactly are we doing? Who exactly are we protecting? And how am I to do my job?

 

Many thanks

 

Simon

Nothing to add to this but am I alone in finding this stuff utterly maddening.

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I dunno but is The Register just a little bit racist here?

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I'm not a techie and can't really comment on the causes and background to the RBS meltdown but I do think that The Register might just be a little racist with its bold capital laying of the blame thus:

Staff who oversee batch scheduling for RBS are based in India

Maybe they are (although RBS haven't said one way or another) but the implications of this statement are that outsourcing IT work to India - where wages are lower - is a dangerous and risky matter. And that none of the blame falls on British-based IT management.


The Register would have a point if there had never been a major IT disaster overseen by more expensive British workers!


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Is this how Councils should encourage members to make use of social media?

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From Bradford Council's Standards Committee:

Resolved –

(1) That the Monitoring Officer be requested to consult with the officers responsible for provision of IT equipment to Members to draw up a protocol advising on appropriate usage for issue when the equipment is first provided.

(2) That the Monitoring officer be requested to draft a brief guidance note for Members in respect of the potential pitfalls of all forms of communication, including electronic, and that this be presented to a future meeting of the Committee for comment.

They didn't think to ask us about how we might want to make use of technology merely to control and manage the manner in which we do so. Ridiculous.

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Thoughts on what you would have read if the IT had worked!

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I wrote a brilliant, insightful, budget-related article in my break today. You all would have been staggered by its depth, by the breadth of its argument and by the lyricism of its prose.

For reasons that are of no importance, I e-mailed it to my Council address. Sadly, Council IT has let me down this evening so you'll have to imagine the forceful brilliance of the article.

The great irony is that I wrote about the new obsession with being a "professional" - not that nasty lower class trade stuff. This is the snobbishness of a past age revisited in the public sector - a rejection of business, of getting your hand dirty and the professionalisation of everything - from managing a bin collection service to delivering meals on wheels.

We can't afford such superiority any more.

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On using the right tools for the task...

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I was reminiscing yesterday about working at an advertising agency before the arrival of the Internet and the ubiquity of the computer. We were really excited by a whizzo little in-house communications system, by the prospect of sending finished art electronically to the printer or the newspaper! It is striking that so much has changed in less than twenty years – to the point where the loss of Internet connection at work results in everything grinding to a halt and the phrase –meant in jest – “the computer says no” reveals a truth about how we have become dependent on the computer and all its bastard off-spring.

However, the result of all this is that we seem unable to conceive of a solution to a particular work challenge that does not involve the application of (usually costly) IT. Take the management of personnel records and the administration of time as an example. Assuming this is a requirement – and I guess in these bureaucratic times it will be – a business with fewer than 50 employees will spend time and money creating a secure record system. They may be gulled by a slick salesman into networking the system with timesheets, leave records and sickness all seamlessly undated by the shiny new system. At a cost.

And it’s that last part that gets me. Would it not be simpler to employed an old technology called “the locking filing cabinet” and fill it will folders for each employee into which timesheets, leave cards and other records can be inserted? It’s only 50 folders for heaven’s sake!

Struggling even further back into the murky mists of time, I recall a discussion at a Conservative Party Agents training event (yes, dear reader, I was one of those once) about getting computers. And yes computers are good at storing stuff, at sorting stuff and at not working at critical moments. They will even send you nice prompts! But as one of my fellow agents commented – “they won’t knock on bloody doors”.

It’s taken me a while to get here but the point is that we should use the technology that is most suited to the problem at hand – in a lot of cases this will be some form of IT but not always. Computers are lousy salesmen and using extravagant database systems to order small quantities of data is potty especially when a lot of that data is qualitative. A well-managed Rolodex and ordered folders are as effective a tool for the salesman today as they were 50 years ago.

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