Taming the Rogue User: Coping with Risk, Compliance and Other Business Realities of Socialization

Presenter: Nikos Drakos

Who are the rogue users at the university? An element of "individuality and initiative" is in the definition of a "rogue user." End users finding unusual ways to achieve what they need to—how can we embrace the initiative shown by rogue users to provide additional value…

"From a dozen applications for thousands of users… …to thousands of applications for dozens of users." Highly specific tools, solving individual problems…

Change and risk is increasing as the cost of access to computing is reducing. Risk is higher and change is higher as the number of ways in which an end can be achieved increases—all of which need to be managed.

A graph showing users per application, with an elongating tail—with e-mail, office and windows at the front of the graph, wikis, blogs SaaS Open Source and mash-ups in the middle and spreadsheets, browser plug-ins and PDAs at the tail. Micro-targeted software at the tail—claim is that there is value in the micro-targeted software. 70% of informal survey says that employees should be allowed uncontrolled use of consumer devices, applications and services. More than 60% said that IT does not need to endorse every piece of software or device an employee will use. As an institution, we already live in the world described.

As long as we watch out for: security, privacy, integration, duplication, fragmentation of repositories, data ownership and portability, can we not fill tactical gaps with quickly deployed solutions? Can we not find stop-gap solutions? Could we have used "basecamp" as a project management system during the deployment of Asta Teamplan? Can we be using del.icio.us to track vendors for specific purchases? What are: pbwiki; sprout; zoho; vyew; mindmeister…? Can we continue to engage with web owners across the institution by building "mashable" application interfaces?

Given that we cannot gamble with mission critical services; cannot risk security, quality, reputation; don't want people to waste their time—but in the same way we need to engage people to build momentum for WIP by looking at and re-using existing web infrastructure—shouldn't we determine how we can continue to engage their creativity…? Rather than looking at risk as the reason to say "no", look for opportunities which have low risk and high business value.