IT guy battles his clients
April 27th, 2006[ Office Gossip ]
While I no longer have the luxury of an available IT staff, in the past I’ve had a recurring beef with them. An example was a previous attempt to acquire a particular email address. My name’s challenging to spell at best, and having to explain over the phone how to spell ‘brydon’ is frustrating enough. Having to convey how to correctly spell ‘brydon.gilliss’ or ‘bgilliss’ is just a pain in the ass.
“ahh, two s’s.”
“two s’s?”
“Yes, two.”
“At the end?”
“Yes.”
In an attempt to make this process simpler in dealing with clients and cut down on potential missed emails, I requested the email address ‘brydon@’. That request sat for almost a year before the IT guy finally cancelled it with the explanation:
“Firstname@company.com emails are an artifact from the past and violate the current firstname.lastname or FirstInitialLastname standard used by ABC Inc. and the world for email. The only exceptions are made for name combinations that would be rude (Stanley Hitter) or names that are regionally impossible to spell”
If you work in an internal IT department then who are your clients? The people that work within your company. Should they not be working to get their clients what they need? Or am I missing the point? Is it their job to make up standards that must be adhered to regardless of what their clients require and request?
I understand the idea of standards. They create consistency, making it easy for someone to guess my email if they know my name. As well they benefit the IT guy. They’re required to have a workstation in place and operational the day a new person starts. This standard allows for that.
Fine, keep my existing email addresses in place. Just add another line item that directs emails from the additional ‘brydon@’ to my existing inbox as well. Why would I be taken to task on an issue like this?
“This is a classic struggle between the IT manager who wants to be the totally dominant person making all the IT decisions [and the business manager],” he says. “There is a struggle going on out there – I witnessed it just this week – between a business manager and an IT guy. The IT guy was saying, ‘I make the decisions’ and the business guy replied, ‘I want this’.”