We found out a couple of days ago that there’s a proposal to change policy so that only people working in Operations have card-swipe access to the data centers; the rest of us who work on the machines there will (under the proposed policy) have to be checked in and out by the operators.

Well, this seems like a great idea. Now every time we need to go into the data center we’ll get to stand around and wait for an operator, who will have to interrupt whatever he’s doing to let us in. And what benefit does this provide? It certainly isn’t going to make things any more secure. (The amount of effort being expended on physical security for the data centers already seems way out of proportion to the risks.) It will, however, increase the feeling that management doesn’t trust us or respect our abilities. (And hurt morale, as was so eloquently expressed in yesterday’s ITS all staff meeting.)

Some people seem to have the idea that if you set up sufficient rules you can prevent bad things from happening. This never actually works: as long as you’re doing something, there’s a chance that things will go wrong. The best way to get things done with minimal risk is to trust people but hold them accountable for the results.

This morning we’re having an all-ITS staff meeting, and one of  the agenda agenda items is a breakout session to discuss “Improving ITS customer service.” Which (perhaps inevitably) is the wrong question. When we start thinking of people outside ITS as “customers” rather than friends and colleagues we’re already heading in the wrong direction.

The “customer” label assumes and supports an “us vs. them” point of view. Trying to improve ITS customer service is more about making ITS look good than about advancing the mission of the University. It’s also about avoiding responsibility for the overall success of our projects: “I provided the service you asked for, so if it didn’t work it’s your fault.”

What we need to ask is, “How can we work together with other staff members, faculty, and students to make the University of Texas at Austin the best place in the world to learn, teach, discover new things, and share what we’ve learned and discovered with the people of Texas and the whole human race?” If we could have a vision of how the University can improve the world, and how our own tasks contribute to realizing that vision, the “customer service” issues would disappear.

This past weekend was General Conference for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which means I spent it watching broadcasts from Salt Lake City. In one of his talks, President Monson (the president of the church) referred to a passage in Alice in Wonderland that I think has some application to ITS:

“Cheshire Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

Whether we run applications on a mainframe or a Solaris box or a Windows laptop doesn’t make a lot of difference if we don’t know what we want them to accomplish.

So this is cool: Andre Geim, one of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics was also one of the winners of the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics. (The Nobel was for experiments with graphene, the Ig Nobel was for using magnets to levitate a frog.)

The 2010 winners of the Ig Nobel prizes were announced last night. I think this is my favorite:

MANAGEMENT PRIZE: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.
REFERENCE: “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,” Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72.
WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo.

via The Register. Also from The Register: Artist crafts Kevin Bacon bacon bust.