IT should back off

Brian Prentice at Gartner has written a post about why IT should not be charged with making decisions about productivity.

"IT has no charter to concern themselves with an individual’s work productivity - either specifically or as a group - unless it is their own. That is the responsibility of those people’s manager. In this regard IT departments would be well advised to heed some advice once provided to me by a sage manager - "organizations do not become more effective when their employees spend their time worrying about what other people need to do - they become more effective when the employees worry about what they themselves need to do."

The best examples of intranet use are usually ones where IT is one of the partners, not the owner. Yet we all know places where IT is given carte blanche over access to whatever sites they deem unworthy, often with clunky, time-consuming (and productivity-sapping) methods to get legitimate sites unblocked.

[Via Ross Dawson]