Computers and Security

Infrastructure, antivirus, azure, office 365, drive, client management — all those IT tasks.

Is IT-management a part of the work as a CTO? Sound more like something under the wings of a CIO – but in reality in smaller companies the CTO could need to do this.

At the minimum a good strategy for using computers, sharing files, handling licenses etc should be setup. 

Short history lesson: Back in the days employees got a ready installed computer (desktop), without admin access and a user so they could log in to the “domain”. Those were the days.

The IT-department could keep all computers Windows's updated and everyone was happy. The corporate procurement departments bought “company computers” which had replaceable parts, good be serviced, had on demand replacement (onsite) and was easy to reinstall when needed.

The computers came in batches and the manufacturing companies promised “long cycles” which meant they kept spare parts available.

Did this every work practically? I doubt it. What it did was to limit users by not letting them install anything, and dooming them to slow computers that was stuck in a “batch” and whenever they got an issue they couldn't do anything themselves as the IT department needed to login as admins to fix it.

So again we created tons of work for no reason. Did I mention the computers were slow too? That prompted the managers to get faster, smaller, lighter and of course unsupported computers for themselves. Another way to distinguish important managers from the staff crowd.

This never worked for developers — as it took a second before someone needed to run some shell command in terminal, and hence needed admin access. Also, a developer computer must be fast and have a lot of memory — not to impress subordinates — but to make the code calculations faster and hence not needing to wait for builds or whatnot (wheel of doom).

In any case — the dream from the IT department to control computers was at best a good attempt to streamline and standardise, and at the worst costed the company tons of money for nothing.

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