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Can Your Corporate Policy Pass the Monkeys, Bananas, and Water-spray Experiment?

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Five monkeys were placed in a cage. A banana was hung on a string and a ladder was placed below it. Each time one of the monkeys started climbing the ladder, all the monkeys were sprayed with a blast of cold water. This experiment was repeated for several days. Then each of the original monkeys was replaced with a new one. The experimenter did not need to spray the new monkeys because, as soon as any new monkey proceeded towards the ladder, all the other monkeys attacked it simply for the fear of being sprayed.

Finally, all the original monkeys were replaced with new monkeys that had never been sprayed; yet all the monkeys attacked any monkey that dared climb the ladder. Now you may ask why those monkeys that had never been sprayed would attack their mates without any rationale for their acts. The monkeys were just following the policy laid down for them. They had no clue as to the origin of the policy. (To get a complete description of this experiment, visit www.wowzone.com/5monkeys.htm.)

It is highly likely that most of your employees follow policies established a long time before they joined the company and they did not contribute to their development. Ask a sample of your employees how well they understand specific policies within the organization (e.g., policies on who and what to tell the media, how to keep their computer passwords, or policy on handling confidential information). Are they doing things just because that is the way things are done or do they understand why they do them?

What is a Corporate Policy?

A corporate policy is a formal document that states specific rules that must be followed by members of an organization. To be effective, a policy must possess the following characteristics:

· It must communicate a judgment acceptable to members of the organization

· It must specify what is considered to be an appropriate behavior of a member of the organization

· It must identify tools and procedures needed to perform specific tasks

· It must be clear and understood by all employees and the human resources department to help in taking proper actions when the policy is violated

· It should be a living document

Who Developed Your Corporate Policy?

Since it is imperative that your policy needs to communicate a judgment acceptable to all members of your organization, it is necessary that a policy implementation team should have representatives from at least four areas of the organization:

· A senior level administrator

· Someone from the management team who can enforce the policy

· A member of the legal staff

· A member of the user community

As a living document, the implementation team should meet regularly (at least quarterly) to ensure the viability of the policy (Mark Ciampa, Network Security Fundamentals—Policies and Procedures, 2005).

What is Policy-Based Management? Is it Old Wine in A New Bottle?

Whether in government, industry, or academia, organizations have always employed policy-based management with varying degree of success. This paradigm is now being given a new life in designing and managing complex organizations and systems. The focus is to make such organizations autonomic. By this I mean, organizations are aiming to function just like the way the nervous system operates. The nervous system knows how to automatically transmit messages from different organs of the body to the brain for the body to function as a whole.

Policy-based management is based on the premise that the organization should be able to adapt dynamically to changing environments (i.e., self-configuring); handle operational exceptions and prevent disruptions (i.e., self-healing); protect its information and resources from malicious attacks (i.e., self-protecting), and manage its resources efficiently by using self-optimizing strategies (On Demand Computing, Craig Fellenstein, 2005).

The recent and ongoing accounting scandals among several well-established organizations could have been prevented had there been well-documented policies understood by those affected. Can the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) claim that it is not his/her role to understand the accounting practice of the company as presented by the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) as in the case of Enron, WorldCom, and HealthSouth?

A legal and well-articulated policy that documents the responsibilities of the CEOs and the CFOs could have exonerated either party. In defending its position regarding its document shredding policy, Arthur Andersen’s case would have been much stronger if its policy development team had a representative from the legal department who ensured the legality of such a policy.

What’s the Cost of an Ineffective Policy-based Management System?

Johna Till Johnson’s brief article on Telecom Carriers (NetworkWorld, 5/23/05, pg. 62) stresses the gravity of the losses incurred by organizations that mismanage information because the companies did not have or follow policies. Her examples include: (a) Time Warner’s loss of social security numbers for 600,000 employees while the storage tapes were in transit from the company to an external archive; (b) ChoicePoint lost sensitive customer data due to a security hole in the company’s security policy; (c) Morgan Stanley lost $604 million because they were unable to produce email records to support their case.

In conclusion, it is the responsibility of the managers and administrators to institute effective policy-based management that consistently educates the members of the organization on the value and rationale behind the policies. This is critical for the survival of every organization and reduction of economic losses, which creates a strain on the economy.

The final support date for Windows XP is just 840 days away and while that might seem like a long time, you and I both know that April 8, 2014 will come all too soon for some companies who are still reluctant to make the move.

If you’re still on Windows XP and are planning to rollout Windows 7, here are 10 questions you’ll want to ask yourself while planning out your deployment:

1. Do we need to invest in test hardware, personnel and infrastructure? Notice it doesn’t say IF testing should be done. That’s a given. But can you set up a lab – either physical or virtual – where the deployment process and end configuration can be tried out? Who will do the testing? How will it be done?
2. What hardware do we need to replace? Make sure you know the minimum requirements are for Windows 7 and which of your computers will need to be upgraded or replaced. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is a free tool that can help you collect detailed information on your current infrastructure for an analysis of your hardware and device compatibility and give recommendations.
3. Do we need to build and maintain a desktop image? If your organization tends to get a lot of new machines coming in or computers that get handed from one person to another and this is taking up a lot of IT cycles, you probably want to look at building a desktop image if you don’t already. A well built image can reduce your deployment time substantially and advancements in imaging technology mean that it’s no longer necessary to spend hours saving user data off an old computer, cloning the hard drive of a reference computer and then restoring the data you saved. Having only one image to maintain even if your organization uses diverse hardware is more of a reality than ever.
4. Are our corporate applications going to work? The Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) is a free download that can help you evaluate and mitigate application compatibility issues. Applications that can’t be upgraded may be able to be shimmed or run in Windows XP mode.
5. How will employees’ files be moved? Knowing where employees are storing their files is critically important. How many times have you heard: “I didn’t put that file in the System32 directory – the computer did it!”. Once you know where files actually are, a plan is needed to ensure that user files and user settings are migrated. Bob won’t care if the rollout is a complete resounding success if his desktop wallpaper isn’t as he left it!
6. Will Office 2010 or IE 9 be rolled out at the same time? Often this is the perfect time to make other adjustments and upgrades to the desktop infrastructure along with Windows 7. There is all sorts of information on deploying Microsoft Office 2010 and Internet Explorer 9 that can be used in the planning. If the Microsoft Desktop Toolkit (MDT) is being used for the deployment, Office 2010 can be added to the MDT environment.
7. Is this a good time to assess and update policies and security? As in #6, deployment projects present good opportunities to revisit and revise other areas of the desktop infrastructure. What policies are in place and what can be improved? Are there group policies that we could benefit from to better manage and streamline our desktop environment? Are there security enhancements that we can take advantage of?
8. How will remote users get updated? Instead of remote employees like the sales teams shipping their notebooks in to get upgraded and incurring downtime, consider swapping out old hardware for newly configured machines or sending them a bootable USB with the Windows 7 image on it to do the upgrade themselves.
9. What’s the impact going to be to users and the helpdesk? Will there be any planned downtime and how will this be communicated to users? As with any change, there will likely be a short term increase in calls to the helpdesk. Is the helpdesk appropriately staffed and equipped to handle questions? Using tools such as the Windows Troubleshooting Platform and the Problem Steps Recorder can help resolve issues quickly and diminish ongoing helpdesk calls.
10. What’s the ongoing maintenance of the desktop infrastructure going to look like? Taking control of the desktop environment is a huge step in streamlining staff productivity, improving processes and freeing up IT time to devote to developing new ways to use technology and IT know-how to business needs. Tools like those found in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) and practical guidance found in the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) can help.

I’ve included a lot of information in the above 10 questions and each one could be a separate article on it’s own. That’s why the conversation doesn’t end here.

On the next AlignIT Manager Tech Talk, Jonathan and I will be discussing how to de-risk your Windows 7 deployment with Dave Kawula, a Senior Consultant with 1E and a guy who has more knowledge of desktop deployments in his pinkie finger than most people have in their whole heads. Join us LIVE on Thursday, January 12 from 12-12:30pm ET for De-Risking Your Windows 7 Deployment.
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