My rookie manager year has taken another hit leaving me with chaos and questionable repercussions from the management of the school. I was privately asked to investigate one of my members of the IT department for a serious matter that can acutely affect the confidence of users in their usage of IT within the workforce. Keeping a long story short, we had to release the employee for overly abusing his administrative rights on the computer systems and reading other people’s emails.
Initially, I was asked if the system was technically competent of producing an error from our limited email server software that maybe perceived as a hic-up. After three days of my cyber-detective skills, I manage to rule-out the technical glitches and found out that one of my own employees did in fact read email transmissions between two senior managers and my communications between myself and my boss. I can visualize the long hours sitting in the Building 7 conference room with older members of the administration who know nothing about technical cyber investigation relying on me to show them the facts in a non-technical way. After proving and securing the hard evidence (yes we did put a tape around the crime scene and dusted for finger prints) I was asked to bring him over to the Head of the School’s office for questioning. After a long two hours, he still denied how he was technically able to read the email messages but finally confessed to opening emails that were not intended to be delivered to him. His final answer was that he was looking for information in regards to the school’s pension plan for the local staff.
My feelings of this event have completely traumatized me where I am trying my best to build and maintain a 300 computer network and protect the data from un-authorized access. It is my responsibility as a manager to be accountable for what happened and to effectively deal with the issues and set the school’s IT systems into a better position. I am currently down one person who was very technically knowledgeable and educated leaving me to perform two job positions until we hire another IT staff member. I have already drafted a re-organization document with more comprehensive job descriptions which hopefully bring more structure into the young IT department. I know it’s something that the school has been loathing for months.
This situation has brought more inspiration and enthusiasm into my job because I am no longer setting up a school’s infrastructure but merely to secure and bring in the policies needed to maintain the infrastructure that gets heavily used by nearly 1000 people per school day.
I am very disappointed of the loss but relieve of the self mental gain in my management skills and realize what is needed to further my career and education in this volatile and dynamic information technology world.
