Wednesday, November 03, 2004

HR & Auditors

Well this week has been fun ... in a twisted sort of way. I've had to deal with both human resources and external auditors, and strange combinations of the two.

The external auditors are always a ball of fun. They come here and tell us stuff we already knew and ask us to explain things we've already explained and then tell us we're all doing a bad job because we haven't fixed the things we told them we couldn't fix. And they do this twice a year or so. This time around it was things like password aging. "Why don't you have expiries set on the system passwords"; "Because password aging is enforced in the database and users are forced to change their password at the same time"; "You should enable both"; "If we run two seperate systems, they get out of sync when users change one password and not the other, and this leads to confusion. This way they're forced to change both passwords regularly and they don't get confused". You get the idea.

Human resources is another one of those areas you avoid like the plague. They have a reputation for not getting it, particularly when it comes to filling IT-related posts. This was amply demonstrated yesterday when it was clear that they had a completely different idea to us about where we were trying to go. Funnily enough, today they seemed to get it. The proof is always in the pudding though, and I'll believe it when I see a job advert in my local newspaper.

In a strange twist of fate, the auditors tell us they want to audit the HR system ... :-)

At least there was one good laugh though, thanks to daTechy.

posted by guy at: 18:31 SAST | path: /general | permanent link