"If you board the wrong train, it's no use running along the corridor in the other direction," said famed World War II German resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We in IT boarded the wrong train a long time ago. It's the "standard model" of information technology organizations -- the familiar litany that says CIOs should run IT as a business, meeting the requirements of its internal customers. This refrain has been endorsed by our holy trinity, too: analyst firms, most consultancies, and ITIL.

They call the standard model "best practice." When they're in a different mood, they also call desktop lockdown a best practice, leaving you to figure out how it is that you tell your customers what they can and can't do.

[Read more... ]