Tough Love
Sometimes crying doesn't mean weeping, it means screaming at the top of your lungs so someone will pay some f'in attention.
Earlier this week, a conversation every non-profit IT manager has had with administration (paraphrased):
Fear of staff.
Today, Friday, at exactly 5:01 PM New York time, the Exchange server stopped exchanging. The database hit its cap of 16 GB.
Tomorrow, Saturday, I will trek to the office and do what I think is right:
I've been there one week and I've had it. I'm the IT Manager, I'm going to manage the goddamn Information Technology. The network needs to be babied and the staff need some tough love. Tomorrow the tie comes off.
Earlier this week, a conversation every non-profit IT manager has had with administration (paraphrased):
- CRIER: Our mailboxes are out of control. Some of them are over 1 GB. We should cap the maximum mailbox size.
BOSS: We can't do that. No one is going to like that.
CRIER: Well, at least we should cap attachment size. That is standard practice.
BOSS: It's going to be hard to get staff to accept that.
CRIER: Some of the mailboxes have almost twenty thousand emails. How can they even manage that much mail? We could archive.
BOSS: We need some alternatives, something easy the staff can feel reassured about. Come up with a plan and then we'll talk.
Fear of staff.
Today, Friday, at exactly 5:01 PM New York time, the Exchange server stopped exchanging. The database hit its cap of 16 GB.
Tomorrow, Saturday, I will trek to the office and do what I think is right:
- Run a utility that expands the database by 1 GB temporarily
- Go through the worst mailboxes and archive stuff
- Defrag the database
- Cap the mailboxes
- Cap attachment size
- Write everyone on how to manage their mailbox
I've been there one week and I've had it. I'm the IT Manager, I'm going to manage the goddamn Information Technology. The network needs to be babied and the staff need some tough love. Tomorrow the tie comes off.
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1 Comments:
I'm a former English major, not an IT manager. But I've become the social-media evangelist within my org, and increasingly I've been focused on -- and frustrated with -- my org's IT dept.
Re your post on out-of-control email inboxes: Maybe someday I'll become a GTD star who keeps the inbox clean, but right now I'm losing motivation because Google Desktop -- which our IT dept forbids us to use, a rule I ignore -- allows me to find that needle in the 5K messages I have in about 2 seconds.
What, really, is wrong with that? Isn't there some way for IT managers to let staff use all these great web services (IM, for one) without leaving the enterprise internal network completely defenseless?
By Ian Wilker, at 24 June, 2006 21:03
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