Session 9 - Telework

This week's topics of choice were security breaches and security precautions. I think that security loopholes are just another facet of IT workload that must be factored into the IT project review process.

It seems to me that people tend to assume that technology will make life easier and improve productivity. When considering new project, however, people tend to ignore the extra work needed to secure those new pieces of technology. A web portal, for example, may open a company's operations to customers and employees around the globe, but it also provides a door for criminals to compromise a company's systems. Similarly, Blackberries may be a great tool for communication, but each wonderful portable pocket pc is a great opportunity for a criminal to masquerade as a member of the network and gain privileged access to corporate systems.

Imagine how teleworkers would protest if they received laptops without wireless cards and were forced to use landlines to connect to the internet. Imagine if corporations required teleworkers to have a dedicated telework landline at their homes - a landline whose activity would be monitored as part of the telework process. After all, convenience has a price, and the cost of a landline would almost certainly be less than the costs of gas and childcare. Imagine that corporations required teleworkers to acquire certain approved home safes or secure their homes with a required number of locks in order to help ensure the safety of the information contained on the machines.

If corporations required these things, then teleworking would be much safer for corporations and much less convenient for employees. It is ultimately corporations, however, that bear the brunt of the costs when teleworkers compromise information either inadvertently or through gross negligence. The VA is blamed when its employee loses a laptop containing personal information and social security numbers. The general public is enraged at the VA's lack of security, but no one is toilet-papering the employee's house. I think that most people don't even know the employee's name.

Because corporations bear the costs when broken procedures result in disaster, they have greater incentive to ensure that procedures are followed. Most employees would balk at more secure procedures or telework, so corporations may need to resort to banning telework entirely.

In the future I will think of security costs as one of the costs of implementing new technologies.

Session 8 - Library Scientists & IT

This week I considered the role and importance of planning in IT operations. I also read a book on the role of library scientists in developing IT systems. I always wondered about the uses of a library science degree, but now it seems pretty straightforward. Librarians aka Library scientists were the original information organizers. They developed card catalogs, microfiche systems, and reference systems that allowed users to locate information without the help of fancy computer programs. Their work was time-consuming, repetitive and maybe even tedious, but they built systems that worked. In a way, the tedious, time-consuming nature of their work forced encouraged them to plan their operations carefully and standardize them for future integration. Today we easily discuss scrubbing the data in a database to main it uniform and integrable with other systems. Can you imagine telling a librarian that his entire card catalog must be rewritten on 5 x 8 index cards so that they can be filed in the same cabinets as the library next door? Can you imagine telling a librarian that she must change the names on every card in her catalog and replace the first initial with a full first name? Librarians were extremely thorough in their thinking and they learned to plan ahead.

I also considered the way that the study of the organization of information has largely fallen by the wayside in today's IT operations. That brings to mind the question -- how can you understand a system without understanding its underpinnings? How can you build on the system when you do not understand the fundamentals that serve as its foundation? The more I ponder these questions, the more it appears to me that information technology focuses so much on technology that it fails to consider the intricacies of information.

Session 7 - What is IT?

This week I began to think seriously about the impact of the structure of our thinking on the problems that we face within the field of information management. There's a book that I skim past each time I go to the library. It's on the outskirts of the technology section, on a shelf that blends into books on sociology and maybe cookware. But the book deals with the effect of biology on thought, essentially arguing that thoughts are theoretically unbounded, but are in the real world bound by biological restrictions. We are therefore we think -- and what we are is a flesh-and-blood creature subject to the laws of gravity. We cannot create something from nothing. We eat and sleep and breathe. It is these elements of our existence that shape our thoughts.

This week, I continued research on our great group project and the question of backlogs. I stumbled upon research from the Industrial Engineering field, and found that IE has a different structure for considering information and therefore a different system of information management. IE considers information to be an asset similar to capital and staff. Have you ever heard of a staff backlog or a private enterprise capital backlog? Backlogs seem very normal and unavoidable when you discuss information management as a department like human resources, accounting or sales. Those offices all have backlogs of paperwork to fill out or applications to review. They all have long to-do lists to occupy their time.

However, it is not required that information technology management be structured along the same lines as the accounting department or human resources. Information can be considered as a resource like capital and dealt with according to basic principles of resource management. Look Ma, no backlog! Of course, there are a host of other issues that must still be addressed as companies develop IT strategy, but the underlying point remains sound. Just think, every department could use an extra $100,000 dollars, but no manager feels free to bombard the company execs with demands for more capital. The execs would expect a detailed accounting of how the money would be used, and the benefits it would bring to the company. "Well the other guys got money last year" would not be a good enough excuse to dole out significant amounts of capital. "Studies show that money is useful" would not suffice as a rationale for handouts.

In short, I always thought of information technology management as part of the IT field, but information is everywhere, and the answers to many business IT management questions can be found outside the IT field. The field of industrial engineering brings a much more mathematically-based edge to the study of IT. Their paper actually contained an equation with a sigma and lots of squiggly subscripts!

Similarly, when I continued researching ways for minimizing the burden on IT staff in terms of application backlog and maintenance load, I found that the field of library science has great suggestions for participatory IT management. Research in teh library science field is in-depth and detailed, because of their special collections management. Libraries often receive monetary donations in conjunction with donations of special collections. The donors want to see these collections maintained and utilized, and they can cut off their funds when disappointed. Libraries have a vested interest in reducing the backlog of archiving, maintaining and cataloguing their special collections. In fact, their responsibilities are very similar to those of IT staff who are responsible for developing and maintaining applications. Like IT departments, libraries have limited employees, and they are unlikely to have guardian angels who pour funds into their projects to help resolve problems of poor management. In short, libraries face a problem of livelihood, and they have developed very creative solutions to maintain their collections and their cash flow.

The fields are very different, but there is much to be gained by examining them.