I know this is going to sound totally insane, but has anyone, anywhere, ever worked in a place where the IT department demands you give them your password for logging on?
As stupid as it sounds, my IT department has demanded we do this - after we signed our "agreement" to not give our password out to anyone, and despite the fact that they can see everything we are doing under their "Admin" log on. The best part, this is directed towards the department managers, and will not effect staff very much.
I'm looking for documentation, court cases, to support the obvious. I refuse to give my password out to IT and therefore my resources and effeciency as a manager are being hampered. It's an obvious power struggle, but I truly do not trust the IT department, and see no reason to make it easy for them to set me up or make me look bad.
At my last job, I worked for the feds and it was a similar situation to yours in that we had an intranet spread out over multiple facilities. Our IT department was in Seattle, I think. Anyway, every 3 months our passwords automatically expired and we had to call in and reset the whole thing and yes, we had to give them our new passwords in order to make it work. It was a giant PITA, but it's not unheard of. I don't know what I can tell you to alleviate your concerns about security except that if they wanted to they could access all the info anyway and they have the ability to change your password on their end with or without you.
Better read upon your agency's IT policy. Where I work at, a disclaimer comes on the screen with every log in and states that IRM has the right to monitor the use of whoever is using that computer. They can and they do. I got a verbal reprimand for being in an "unauthorized chart" some else accessed while I was logged in on that computer and stepped away for a minute. My fault for not logging out or locking the computer.
I currently work for the feds, and our passwords change every 3 months, no big pain, we just change it on log in and go on with life. The big pain is when your passwords expire the day before you go on vacation and you forget it when you come back!
SharonH, RN
2,144 Posts
At my last job, I worked for the feds and it was a similar situation to yours in that we had an intranet spread out over multiple facilities. Our IT department was in Seattle, I think. Anyway, every 3 months our passwords automatically expired and we had to call in and reset the whole thing and yes, we had to give them our new passwords in order to make it work. It was a giant PITA, but it's not unheard of. I don't know what I can tell you to alleviate your concerns about security except that if they wanted to they could access all the info anyway and they have the ability to change your password on their end with or without you.