Install Programs at Work

[BeKirra]

The reason I raised this issue was that I have seen something behind...
I agreed with the point from cadtag on the other thread mentioned by heath.simone

If you treat staff as though they are partially trained monkeys, locked in a miniature sandbox, then you'll never have any employees that are worth keeping - because anyone who is will head for greener, friendlier pastures where they can be more than a monkey clicking on icons.

and from Wanderer

At any rate, it's got to be frustrating to be shackled...

What I have experienced is that I and my colleagues have been working fine without any network/pc failure issues in the company for years.
No-one complains until the IT guys set the such rules.
We used to install/upgrade the programs by ourself to meet our needs, for the job of course.
But now people in the office would not know when the Autodesk releases updates because the IT guys take over your rights.
Every updates for programs even for Win7 have to be installed by the IT guys.
One of the frustrated things is, when people go overseas, they cannot adjust the timezone on their laptop.
By saying this because my colleagues have to visit overseas frequently.

What I can see is there must be something gone wrong.
First of all, the architects/engineers/other designers are the main roles in a firm apart from the management.
The IT team, on the other hand, is the support rule in the firm.

On the other side, people in the office now start to play some games:
They report/complain (a formal word, eh?) one problem to the IT guys one single day.
Just want to keep the IT guys to be busy.
Can you see the poor performance/efficiency of the company?

[jaberwok]

You often see this when a large business buys/acquires a smaller one.

I mainly see small mech eng companies that have a very relaxed attitude to IT - mainly because they can't afford to devote a lot of resources to a dedicated department; sometimes the IT department is a 1- or 2-man bureau on the other end of the telephone so they rely on their own staff and contractors to know what they are doing (a dubious assumption, at best). This is very diiferent from the situation that cadtag, heath.simone and others describe where there are maybe thousands of users and hundreds of CAD users spread around the world. The company MUST keep control in that situation.

I, a contractor, have often been the most IT-capable person in a company - believe me, that is a frightening thought since I have NO formal IT training, I've just been an interested amateur for the past 30+ years.

[heath.simone]

One of the frustrated things is, when people go overseas, they cannot adjust the timezone on their laptop. By saying this because my colleagues have to visit overseas frequently.

I think this is where there needs to be more interaction / communication as to what is required by staff to do there jobs. IT needs to work with the business and the business needs to work with IT to get to a level of understanding about what is and is not required to complete their job. What OS are you using as i thought Microsoft changed that in Vista to allow regular users to edit timezone? But you are aware that time syncing on a domain is a very important thing, i.e. without clocks that are synchronized to the correct time on all computers, Windows Server 2003 authentication might falsely interpret logon requests as intrusion attempts and consequently deny access to users.

A perfect example for me at the moment is we are doing a large project with multiple companies where we are not in charge of IT for the site offices. We have our staff setup with direct access on windows 7 so they are able to access our systems (email, network file, etc...) without needing VPN or Citrix, this allows them to use their company machines on any network and access our systems as long in there is an Internet connection (no borrowing licenses anymore!, no site license servers!, whooo). The site CAD Managers have called and complained about our staff not having admin rights because they can't access certain web-based resources, the site IT staff have called and complained about our staff needing admin rights...

So guess what...

They didn't need admin rights. There was an issue with our company proxy corrupting a small web based application that sets up the site office drives and printers. The solution was to turn off the proxy in Internet Explorer and this resolved the issue - our staff can still access email, our company network drives, etc... because of direct access, but now when they surf the web the traffic doesn't come back through our company.

Too quick people are to jump on the whole needing complete access to the machine and not actually resolve the issue thats causing the problem once properly.

I'm in IT (CAD Administration), i could start having a go about how hard it is to work with the business. How hard it is to get the business to do testing of deployment packages, provide configuration files/information, supply requirements (and know what they are talking about), etc... Again a perfect example of this would be the current 1.5 month long packaging saga I've got, where I've been waiting for 3 weeks for the business to verify the deployment before i can deploy it to the rest of the company - we are holding back the deployment of 64-bit machines to some users due to one of their software packages not being 64-bit compliant. The business is sitting on this deployment as they are "too busy" to test the software and verify that all of the settings (their request), additional files, additional plug-ins, etc... have installed correctly. These few users are now holding up the deployment to 60 other users... We (IT) are currently providing some of these users with 2 machines 1x 64-bit and 1x 32-bit machine to allow users to work (memory restrictions in 32-bit cause some projects to crash from lack of memory for another piece of software they require).

The business in themselves can be their own worst enemy, demanding more control over CAD systems but not wanting to spend time on maintaining, testing, training, development, standards, audits, etc... because they are $$$ focused because of section/department budgets typically do not have that allocated as an expense - which is why there is also the hatred for IT / Corporate departments which are just seen to spend all of hard earned money that production / chargeable time based departments make.

[dgorsman]

Not so much money-based, but certainly schedule-based and a little too focused on their own discipline to the exclusion of other factors. I'm right there with you, our AutoCAD 2011 roll-out was delayed 3 months because of dragging promises. Eventually I had to talk with my boss who brought in the executive VP to start kicking behinds. I'm sure we will be in a similar situation with our own 64-bit upgrade, with supervisors too concerned about their own work to provide resources but still demanding the upgrades.

[j_follett_88]

You are looking at this in the optimistic way that you think it has to do with the user of said workstation. Remember all that software that you get at home you know the stuff you have no clue how it got installed. well auto installed programs have no privileges in this kind of environment. If your computer is running too slow because you packed it full of start-up ready software then your IT department has to go and delete all of it and you will be even more slowed down.

If you think its valuable enough to have it installed talk to your IT department and let them put it in the GPO for you.