Tips on Creating IT Policies

Having a set of IT policies in place doesn’t mean they’re the optimal policies. Sean Michael Kerner reports.

According to a new global study sponsored by Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), 82 percent of IT professionals said that their organizations have an IT policy. When Cisco asked the same question to non-IT employees, only 47 percent of respondents said that their organizations had an IT policy. To add further insult to injury, for those employees who have an IT policy, 64 percent said that their IT policies are in need of improvements.

“IT departments can really make a difference and can open a door for a better relationship between employees and their IT departments,” Inbar Lasser-Raab, Borderless Networks marketing director at Cisco, told InternetNews.com. “IT departments have a lot of opportunities to be considered partners in the business. We already have that inside of Cisco, as we view our IT department as representing our customers.”

Having the flexibility to deal with change as new applications and devices come into the market is often a challenging policy item for IT departments. Among those respondents that admitted to violating IT policies, 41 percent said they did so in order to be more productive and to get their jobs done. The reason why IT policies were broken by 20 percemt of respondent was because they didn’t think that their IT department would enforce the policy.

Read the rest at CIO Update.