Sadly, the article “10 Things Your IT Department Won’t Tell You,” by a wildly brilliant (ugh) Wall Street Journal writer, written last summer, has resurfaced on MSN as one of the most popular news articles of the week in the Tech section. Wonderful. Prominent enough that I heard about this from someone else (my manager).

My initial reaction still holds up, although I will admit one thing. As IT, we need to make sure we listen to the needs of our business users, not just from the perspective of the company dollar, but also the perspective of the employee’s happiness (at least in as much as our company/HR lets us be sensitive to that). Sure, it might be a solution to ban IM and webmail and filter sites, but does that mean the company is fighting a war against culture and social lives? The extreme of that is the RIAA clinging to an old business model. I’m not saying we should capitulate to the users, but we should always make sure we find the right balance for our users and our business.