Comment Re:Short-sighted and thoughtless (Score 1) 538
I think the IT groups are short sighted and impatient. The rest of the business is trying to get work done, IT staff is trying to implement and preserve policy, and said policy is generally geared towards protecting IT turf and keeping people from getting their work done and is so far from being aligned with the rest of the business strategy that it's pathetic. This is not a new problem.
Why did the PC get popular? To circumvent delays in reporting from IT controlled mainframes, accounting departments bought PC's with Lotus 1-2-3 so they could produce their own reports and do analysis on financial information without a multi-month IT project.
Why did SOAP get popular? To circumvent firewall restrictions on RPC. Getting a firewall rule put into place for different apps is really hard, not from a work perspective but from a process perspective. Dropping in a single web server and making it handle all the requests is a one-time thing and removes the power (and security management) from IT.
Why are cloud services popular? Because IT is trying to keep everything so locked down that people have to use dropbox to get access to their data or share it outside the organization.
All these technologies were huge risks and have, in the long term, created a lot of security and manageability problems for IT. And every problem that was created was created indirectly by IT by not giving people the tools they need to do their jobs. It's raised costs, it's raised vulnerability, and it's increased the IT workload because IT wasn't foresighted enough to realize that, hey, sometimes people do need to share big files with people outside the company, or sometimes people do need to send an attachment through email that's more than 10 MB.
Most people in organizations aren't paid for being in compliance with IT policy. They're paid to get work done. Very few IT departments understand that.