ROI of Flexibility - I believe in it, do you?

ROI of flexibility. OK, I have to say I love that phrase. My friend over at Earth Justice posted a blog entry on www.idealware.org called ROI of Flexibility.  Great thoughts in there.  This was in response to a great post from Beth Kanter about how IT can support your social media strategy.

Read their blog entries, they are great and much smarter than myself.  Enough said.  Well maybe I will go ahead and add my thoughts.

This is a great example of this whole IT Alignment stuff I have been blabbing about for a few weeks now.  

Since when does IT want to be the enforcer and police of the organization?  

I know it takes more time and maybe more money to have unique and personal relationships between IT and different staff across the organization, but isnt it more important to meet their individual needs (like meeting the mission) than it is to be completely standard? Isnt that what exceptions are for?

Simple explanations of why policies are in place and then allowing for easy requests to be made to get exceptions can go a long way to making IT more approachable.

Like they always say, "try to make it easier to ask for permission, rather than asking for forgiveness."

OK, no idea if those thoughts made any sense, but I have a lot of work to do now.  Gonna go try to break the WebSense filter at my org.