Segregation of Duties

Ever since I've been introduced to organizational model based on the "segregation of duties" it has me hypnotized. It's many advantages are not so to me, on the contrary. I wonder every time again and find for now i have no definite answers. Maybe my greatest worry is this model has taken the world by storm, in a way it is inherent to a society but has it no gone far out of place.

By now a duty is dumbed down to a task while to my 'sense' a duty would mean much more, it would also invoke being able to work others dedicated tasks. Mentally i often refer to the benefits I've seen from growing skill outside of a domain in ICT. Not just network, not just system adminstration resulted in a fundamental sense of an ICT Infrastructure, in time this has grown into a fundamental sense of Security.

The best example i experienced was in an enormous corporation where a senior specialist system administrator showed me his entire task-range consisted out of template installs, creating pre-defined groups and adding users to them according to a pre-defined scheme. Just one step away from 100% automation.

I had a simple question to validate, since I was once one of a few dozen people requesting a feature to be added to a mail server. But neither he, neither the corporate security could offer relevant feedback regarding my proposal. I even spoke with corporate 'professionals' and 'experts' who seemed to be unable to grasp what was a pretty straightforward proposal.

It took 1 month and a half to motivate, document and defend a change. Which in the end exceptionally was not accepted world-wide. Despite having been documented on the vendor website for almost a decade.

In a way it would be understandable this change had not been accepted, but it had been by some and the region's who did not had displayed a complete lack of understanding what it was about.

To me this is an exemplary situation for the much famed segregation-of-duties being not only counter productive ( proposal-to-decision time explosion ) but also undermine a solid understanding of the corporate (ICT) environment.

I hope to one day advocate an holistic approach to ICT in favour of the s.o.d. approach, paired with smart communication strategies much will be gained and service will improve. After all ICT is the autonomous nervous system of a modern corporation, it should not burden the body but rather support it.