Insurgent IT departments, and how to really deal with them.

Slashdot just recently posted a link to a great article that CIO magazine wrote about how unresponsive and/or repressive IT departments create insurgent shadow IT departments. CIO's advice to CIO's is to embrace and adopt the shadow IT departments. Out perform, or meet them halfway. The most important messages from the article are:
*Messy but Fertile beats Neat but Sterile
*No one jumps through hoops, they go around them.
*If the default answer is no, people will just stop asking.
*People who think outside of the box are not troublemakers, they may just know what they are talking about.

Why do I think this is important? Not too long ago, I got into trouble because apparently, I wan't supposed to have admin rights on my work computer, and got fussed at for syncing appointments between Outlook and my Sony Erisson P910. The only reason the PDA sync was bad was because there was a policy against non-government provided PDA's being connected to my laptop. I was doing things that made me work better and more efficiently, and the only thing I got was the riot act for violating policy, and creating potential security holes. No one cared that I was working better. Realizing the perils of going into details about work on a public blog, I will leave it at that.

All I will say is that this article is great advice for anyone in charge of a enterprise level information system. It will help them find a good balance between user efficiency, and complete lockdown.