10.29.07
Halloween IT Horror Stories: Blogging
 By Dan Morrill
As Halloween rapidly approaches, it is time for the IT Halloween Horror Stories.
We all have stories that have freaked, amazed, made us wonder, and otherwise, stunned us into submission or disbelief as we have wandered through our IT careers. Today's Halloween IT story from Hades is:
Narcissist Personality Disorder or Return of the Superiority Complex
Behaviors related to this mechanism may include an exaggeratedly positive opinion of one's worth and abilities, unrealistically high expectations in goals and achievements for oneself and others, vanity, extravagant style in dressing (with intent of drawing attention), pride, sentimentalism and affected exaltation, snobbishness, a tendency to discredit other's opinions, forcefulness aimed at dominating those considered as weaker or less important, credulity, and others. Source: Wikipedia
We all know these people. We have worked with them.
In an interesting article posted in 2006, Mike Schaffner points out that for IT to be successful; it has to relate to people. These are going to be people across the spectrum of skills, knowledge, and desire to work with IT. If IT isolates itself, then in many ways we have lost our ability to do good, behind a narcissist personality trait. In the sociopath in the cube next door, some of the folks in IT, as well as other branches of the company, well they might never get it, nor understand the influence that they will have on the organization.
The best narcissist has an inflated self-value, but pointing that out to them is one very quick way to become the target of the person.
At one company that we did some work for we found that three people in the IT department were blogging, and talking about the company, other employees, and had given everyone names that made it very easy to find out who they really were. The influence on the company was devastating, the moral of the groups being talked about were broken, and the people who were being talked about were duly upset. Management had no policy on blogging, nor did they really know what to do with the information that we found.
In the end, the employees who were blogging all left the company within a year of being discovered, their blogging activities were shut down about them being able to blog about anyone in the company, and as the event moved into the past, just about everyone who had any association with that whole episode had left the company. This means that the company lost some very good talent, but felt like their personal and professional reputations had been ruined.
As a Halloween horror story, a company should know which employee's blog, what they blog about, and make sure that they are not talking about their co-workers or the company, or are blogging on a professional level. If the company does not know what their employees, are saying, it could end up being a bad experience all the way around, with broken trust, dysfunctional teams, and a loss of quality employees, because someone decided to take their issues on line.
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About
the Author:
Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management.
Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through
his blog, Managing
Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the
ITtoolbox blogging community.
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