Chances are if IT upgrade her browser she won't even notice. Just get them to do it.
Or get someone more senior than her to put her in her place.
Or get someone more senior than her to put her in her place.
It's not a tech company, so it doesn't work that way. IT doesn't tell management what to do, it's the other way around.
get someone more senior than her to put her in her place
To get to someone more senior than her would mean contacting her manager on the other side of the country, who would likely wonder why I'm was wasting her time, and come down on me through my boss. Again, it's not a tech company.
If it "swings both ways," I would be most interested in an opinion about the "other way" if you're willing to offer it.
At which point you show how much money is being thrown away here.
You assume that wasting a few days of my time will cost the company more than me wasting her time. Remember, this person is probably seven or eight steps higher than me in the org chart. This is a large organization, not some startup.
Also, 7 or 8 steps in any org chart is insane.
It’s more likely to cost a ton of money if someone hacks her browser/OS though.
Do you honestly believe she cares about the IT department wasting a little bit of money (and it really is just a little bit relative to what she probably deals with), or would respond well to an IT guy pointing out his salary in an attempt to convince her to upgrade her computer? The advice you gave is more likely to get someone fired than it is to help.
That's even worse advice than what I was responding to. Great way to anger a high-ranking executive and probably get fired.
Frankly a lot of the advice in this thread seems to be coming from people who are very junior or otherwise don't have experience dealing with high-ranking executives. Heck, even mid-ranking executives would respond very poorly to the kinds of actions advised in this thread.
Here's the situation: a high-ranking person in the company is so powerful that she can disobey IT policy by refusing to update her computer. This person is also powerful enough to demand that changes be made to a corporate website to make it compatible with her older computer. This is a problem for the head of IT, and the head of IT either lost that battle or decided it was not worth fighting.
This is not the right place for a more junior IT person or developer to stick their nose in by going directly to that executive with some bogus "liability waiver" or appeals to wasted money or whatever else. It won't go well, and it's wrong to do it in the first place because it bypasses layers of management and the historical and political context that led to this outcome. If the head of IT couldn't solve this problem, a stunt like what you are suggesting won't solve it either.
I get what you're saying, and I think that most corporate IT departments run themselves as little fiefdoms with false pretensions of importance and power. But if someone is insisting upon running systems that don't conform to reasonable standards of the company, then something needs to be done. I would consider requiring that device to be isolated from the network with a small firewall.
But the waiver is a good idea—though unlike your assumption that it would be handled by an junior, such matters ought to be sent up the chain to the CIO or equivalent, and it should be the responsibility of the CIO to get the signature or take personal responsibility themselves.
Either you make progress or get... encouragement to go find a better job. Sounds like a win-win to me.
This assumes one has a job where you can easily replace it with an equivalent. Even in IT, this is not the norm outside of a few limited areas and fields. Most people have to worry about keeping jobs that arent perfect.
Frankly, this is the kind of "if it were me Id just be an asshole because being right is the only thing that matters, just don't look at my actual life actions" advice I got from my grandfather growing up and just sounds very unaware and privileged today.
Does it suck? Yes. Is there some act this person can do to change things? Maybe. Are there a lot of actions that can feel morally justified but arent, and are also really bad ideas to attempt? Oh my yes.
Do I think you are offering this terrible advice? Cant say...there's a lot of context we can be assuming differently. I can say that I dont see the take away from many of the messages on this thread being terribly helpful.
Sometimes you need to break the chain of command (either from below or from above) to get things fixed, otherwise some problematic people never called on their shit and the whole organization suffers.
IT might be lowest in the foodchain, but they always have the last word when it comes to something.. technical.
No, but IT come and say "in order to get ISO313186461 certified we need to do an upgrade" tends to work pretty well.