Is your IT department the real enemy?

a shel of my former self.

In case you hadn’t heard about it, some companies have begun blocking RSS feeds at the firewall. The rationale for this short-sighted, counterproductive bit of paranoid stupidity ranges from bandwidth worries to productivity concerns.

Exactly, IT departments have strengthened their control over their internal systems in recent years. Now, they have to let go because we're entering the era of the user as controller. If IT departments don't let go - the HUGE productivity gains to be had from things like RSS feeds and aggregators will be lost.

OTH, I continue to be amazed by the absolute IT illiteracy of most people, even people who use computers all day seem completely incurious about how they operate.

Yesterday, at lunch with a group of friends, I was stopped midstream by the question 'But what is Microsoft Vista?', and when I explained, at least some at the table were pretty unclear about what an operating system is and does. Now, I'm not a technology expert myself, but ...

Perhaps, if I worked in an IT dept and had to deal with this level of ignorance all day I too would be a paranoid, control freak. Especially, when anything goes wrong, no matter what the cause, the IT guy is always to blame.

Comments

[Shel Holtz]

On the other hand, I've been to companies where representatives of IT haven't even heard of RSS. Illiteracy happens on both sides.