If “management” are half-way competent, they might make promises about training, conferences or trips — but these are honoured more in the absence than in fulfilment, Jenkin says.
According to Jenkin, four worlds collide on the Admins’ Desk: technical. business, users and vendors/suppliers. The resulting pressure, he says, means that the question isn’t “is such anger endemic”, it’s “what proportion of the time are you on the verge of walking out or causing damage”.
“The answer would curdle the stomach of any competent risk committee or governance sub-committee of any Board,” Jenkins says.
In fact, if a recent study conducted by security company Cyber-Ark at the Infosecurity 2008 event in Europe holds any validity such folk should be quaking in their boots. Of the 300 system administrators surveyed, 88 per cent said they would take sensitive data with them when leaving their current place of employment if fired, and one-third would abscond with company password lists.
“Most company directors are blissfully unaware of the administrative or privileged passwords that their IT staff has access to, which allows them to see everything that is going on within the company,” Cyber-Ark CEO Udi Mokady says.
You’d think that might make for a pretty powerful incentive for keeping admin staff happy at all costs, yet levels of discontent in many sectors seem instead to just keep on growing.
Matter of Opinion
Just how prevalent tech workers’ anger and frustration is in Australian workplaces would seem to depend very much on who you ask.
When it comes to the federal government sector, both deputy CIO for the Australian government at the Department of Finance and Deregulation Patrick Callioni, and Australian government CIO and general manager AGIMO Ann Steward, insist that staff are, on the whole, fairly content.
“I don’t see evidence of [such anger] in my immediate workplace and, in my three decades plus in the public service I have observed it only rarely,” Callioni says. “I think this is because the public service workforce is driven by factors peculiar to that sector. However, with the departure of the boomers and the ascent of the X and Y generations this may — I stress may — change.”
“From the interactions that I have with my CIO peers and that my team has with their peers, there’s a lot of vibrancy around, and government continues to be a marketplace that has some of the most interesting work under way, and access to a fantastic array of technology,” Steward says. “I know from our own apprentices — and now graduates — that we have coming in here, they are just absolutely delighted to have the chance to work on something that is really stimulating. It’s a really positive response we’ve seen.”
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