IT professionals, especially in schools, are frequently asked to address problems that are not technical in nature, but that management have decided are best handled with a technical solution.
Our most recent tale is of a headmaster driven to distraction by staff who can’t follow instructions:
“Some staff keep using the old version of the school logo on letters. Can you delete all copies of the old version from the network?”
Sure I could, in theory. However, I would have to search through the files of more than 150 staff, the entire shared departmental folders, and then also examine every single Word document on the network since I know a lot of staff will simply copy & paste the school logo from an old document they have.
Instead, may I suggest telling these staff that if they continue to ignore the clear instructions that have already been circulated, you will simply discipline them for being bad at their job?
This is a case of ‘Let’s solve everything by making the technician do it’ – I am very familiar with this concept.
To be honest i agree with them, its not an unreasonable request, but your angle also holds merit. Surely the SMT would have an official letterhead available for communications and not allow staff to just create their own.
SMT do have an official letterhead available. Some people still do not use it, however, as they like to make up their own layout. This is not allowed. My argument is that the rule should be enforced.
The request itself isn’t entirely ridiculous; I have in fact done a sweep of the network storage for old logos before, but the amount of work involved in a complete purge is, as I have outlined, unreasonably colossal.