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Dec 14You Will Be Admin-similated
by in Feature Articles on 2015-01-14
Peter Drucker said "Culture eats strategy for breakfast," and you'll never see a better example of what that means than when a big company tries to digest a small one. As a helpdesk support tech, Woody had a front-row seat for the merger between his employer, a 100-person shop named Initech, and Megatrode, a hulking giant of a corporation that saw Initech as (according to the stirring on-boarding speech given to Woody's team by one of Megatrode's seven-dozen VPs) "a strategic acquisition in the enterprise space." Drucker's remark became more than just a pithy witticism when the time came to bring Initech's systems in line with Megatrode's Byzantine corporate policies. First on the long list of blanket edicts: "local admin rights for all users".
Woody's boss, Ryan, stumbled into Woody's cube and poured himself into the spare chair. He delivered the new policy with a cheerful "what could go wrong?" But Woody had never seen him look less cheerful: since the merger, Ryan's days had been an endless series of conference calls with Megatrode's Hydra-headed IT departments, trying to address their disparate and frequently contradictory support procedures. Woody was sorry to burst his boss's bubble. "Something already has," he said, pointing to his inbox. "Eleven—make that twelve—users have reported that the shortcuts to the network databases have gone missing from their desktops."