Use of Institutionally-Owned IT Resources for ‘Personal Gain’

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Use of Institutionally-Owned IT Resources for ‘Personal Gain’

5/25/2005

By Terry Calhoun

Work and life–work including day job as well as maybe some knowledge work on the side for pay; and life including family and home life as well as maybe lots of community volunteer work–are already more converged, for the knowledge worker, than my Treo is for hardware devices. I can see a not very distant future when most knowledge workers will want to carry a single device that handles all their personal and work data, and that g'es with them wherever they go, including when they leave that employment. (If you think about it a moment, you’ll see that too: You may already be living it. I am.)

Our IT policies should accept this reality and not cause anxiety because "the rules" say that a staffer may not do something that, functionally, they have to do.

Some would say – and these people really do exist–that while at work and even when elsewhere with access to institutional equipment, nothing at all of a personal nature should be done with a university laptop, PDA, cell phone, email address, network, or Internet access in general. That’s the hardcore at one end of the axis.

At the other end is me. :-) I think that our IT policies should accept the blurring of personal and work life in all regards. Abuses of limited resources should be handled on a case by case basis, intelligently, and with an eye towards the mission of the institution. (It’s not hard to tell when someone’s not working hard on the job.) Not with a blanket policy that defines the behaviors of many great workers as ‘illegal,’ and bearing in mind that, yes, IT support resources may be limited, but that those resources should be applied in the most strategic way to accomplish the institution’s goals.

If that means that a professor is allowed to use his laptop to run a presentation at a conference for which he is paid well, then, fine. If that means that one of your creative people in an all-Windows shop wants to use a Macintosh so badly that he g'es out and buys his own well, then, fine. When he needs support, IT should try to help and he should understand that given his choice of different equipment that maybe the help will not be all it should be. But help should be there; not a written sign on the shop doorway that says: “If it ain’t Windows, don’t ask.”

That’s my opinion. What’s yours? I’d love to hear from someone who’d like to present an opposing view in a guest space in this column. C’ya next week!

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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Terry Calhoun, "Use of Institutionally-Owned IT Resources for ‘Personal Gain’," Campus Technology, 5/25/2005, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=40276

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