Creeva’s World 2.0

Cur­rently where I work we are imple­ment­ing the to role the NIST’s FDCC guide­lines. All gov­ern­ment agen­cies are man­dated to be migrated to the “one desk­top” archi­tec­ture across the board. Mean­ing each agency whether it be DHS or the Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture will have the same set­tings applied to their machine.

All in all I believe this a good first step in encour­ag­ing some basic changes that need to be done across the fed­eral level. Treat­ing the gov­ern­ment as a pri­vate indus­try would do won­ders to improve it’s image, secu­rity, and income. We can go into the debate on why or why not treat­ing the gov­ern­ment as a busi­ness is a good thing, but I would pre­fer not to at this time.

Cur­rently how­ever most of the changes being swept in via the FDCC are already imple­mented in most pri­vate busi­ness are­nas. Bring the cul­ture of mod­ern poli­cies and enforc­ing them instead of waiver­ing every excep­tion will raise the secu­rity level of hte fed­eral gov­ern­ment across the board.

When most peo­ple read the changes though they flip out. They assume that they couldn’t pos­si­bly oper­ate under those con­di­tions. Things they have been able to (wrongly) do all these years is going away. They also may *gasp* have to learn new meth­ods for doing things that has changed for the first time in 20 years.

If peo­ple would just sit down and read, ana­lyze, and test the changes instead of knee jerk­ing at them this would go alot smoother. Every­one imme­di­ately assumes “my stuff will break with this” they haven’t tested it. They don’t fully under­stand the set­ting. They assume they should be spe­cial. Peo­ple need to real­ize that they don’t own their work com­put­ers if they work for some­one else. The com­put­ers belong to the com­pany or gov­ern­ment that hired you. They make the man­dates on you and you truly are not special.

This leads into the cry wolf sce­nario where “Bob” says this will com­pletely break every­thing he does. “Linda” hears “Bob” and thinks of her­self equal to or more impor­tant task wise then what “Bob” is, so she starts scream­ing. “Fred” hears “Linda” and the same thing hap­pens, etc. etc. etc.

Peo­ple — to your place of employ­ment you are just a tool. You essen­tially are no bet­ter then a com­puter. Effec­tively to your place of busi­ness a lot of time you are worth less then a com­puter since your role would be eas­ier to replace then the com­put­ers. Remem­ber you are no bet­ter then “Bob”, “Linda”, or “Fred”. Change is com­ing to all of them and that is a good thing.