Are the IT and HR practices in your organization making it impossible to break out of the silos, the firewall, the bureaucracy?

Are you being held hostage by the “Experts”?

Is the Chasm between the connected reality outside your organization and the prison inside becoming a strategic problem.

Does the idea of a static “department” make a lot of sense when all you do is project work?

What does “manager” mean when what is needed are project managers or coaches?

What does “Job” mean when what people need to know is whether you are any good at the work that is on the table?

What do skills mean when your character and your network are key values to what you bring?

What does “employee” mean when half of the workforce are contractors?

What is a contractor?

What is performance? A contractor knows – she is hired to do a job – not told how to do it. If she completes it well she has done well and gets more reputation. Her best rating is to be rehired – why is this so simple for them and yet so tortuous for an employee?

Why can’t you connect to the outside using social media tools? What are the real risks and solutions?

Are you really “working” on a task 8 hours a ay and so cannot look Outside?

What about when you are at home or on the road?

Why when millions of people look after their own tech are you so helpless at the office?

Why when you have all the latest gear at home do you use semaphore at work?

Why when you go to the CEO and complain about all of these things and she agrees with you that HR and IT still get their way.

It takes a poacher to become a good game keeper.

Jon Husband, ex HR Consultant with the Hay Group and I ex SVP HR OD at CIBC will be tackling these issues over the next week or so.

But first – what about your stories? Please fire away in the comments about the strange world of HR and IT – what do you see and what do you think can be done?

The difference between the web experience at the office and outside has just become a chasm.

I sent an email today to a client with four text attachments – not only did the firewall block it but stripped attachments off and destroyed them. The firewall is so extreme that it is getting all but impossible to send information in.

I was setting up a conference call with another client last week. It was a UK, US and Canadian call. I suggested Skype. But we could not use it because one of the parties, a university would not allow it. They also ban Twitter and Facebook.

Many I know have to go home to get much work done.

I have a friend who is working in the security arena for the Olympics. They were all given really heavy duty laptops. Great I thought, they can be in touch at any time at any place if there is a problem. But the problem is that the security is set so tight that the laptops only work when docked at the office.

So in the outside world – the cloud – iPads – a world of amazing connections and content – a world of conversations and sharing where all the tools that make life better can be applied.

In your office – a 3 year old Dell box – Windows XP – Word or worse Word perfect – and a firewall that wont allow anything.

And you want to join the 2.0 world too?

Oh I forgot – an HR and an IT department that makes the Gestapo look like nuns

Jon has put the fox among the chickens – what is all this control about?

More soon on HR and IT and how their grip on the culture of your workplace is so toxic.

IT - the challenge for many organizations. Here Euan gently puts the IT = Control issue on the table and hows how to work through it. HT to Johnnie Moore