"In large organizations there are hundreds of people poring over Excel spreadsheets and Word documents trying to determine what the business meaning of a specific term -- like 'customer' -- might be," says Dubois. "And every silo in the organization might have a different definition. If I order a book from Amazon for my wife, who's the customer? To the billing department, it's me. To marketing, it's my wife. To shipping, it's the address where the book got sent."
The data drone has to go in and figure out which definition is the correct one for each group -- an expensive and time-consuming process. Data quality software like Netrics' or Trillium's can automate many of these tasks, detect errors, and reduce guesswork. More often than not, though, you still end up with outliers that have to be handled by humans.
"They call it data cleansing for a reason," Dubois adds. "It's a tedious process to go through data files and figure out the meanings of each term."
Dirty IT Job No. 2: IT mortician
Wanted: Morbidly minded individual sought to gather up dead or discarded electronic equipment and perform last rites; excavation and embalming experience preferred.
In every organization there's always somebody who has to go in and deal with the dead parts of IT -- whether they're reclaiming infrastructure from companies that are no longer in business or simply disposing of machines that are too old to use, even if they're not quite dead yet.
As with disconnect/reconnect specialist, the job can be literally dirty, says Dimension Data's Lawrence Imeish. "This stuff can be pretty disgusting," he says. "You're dealing with years of dust, grime, and neglect. A guy gets back from one of these jobs, you'd think he worked in a coal mine."
Sooner or later, someone will demand you take possession of their "extremely valuable collections of IBM AT look-alikes, Pentium-1 knockoffs, and 'does 386 sound familiar?' artifacts from the Mesozoic era," says Bill Horne, a systems architect with William Warren Consulting.
Horne says he patiently explains that the best resting place for such systems is a local charity that will take them off the company's hands without charging a recycling fee, but most clients remain unconvinced.
"You'll be rewarded with angry demands to remove them that very minute, no matter what you thought your plans were for that day," he says. "The rear surfaces of at least one machine will be razor-sharp, and that's the machine you will make the mistake of grabbing as it starts to fall off the shelf where it was balanced precariously for centuries."
Worse, every machine will have at least one virus on it, and the software will be unsalvageable. "The best you'll be able to do is get a couple of 'free' Windows ME serial numbers," says Horne. "But you'll have to resign yourself to your fate, put bandages on your hands, wipe the blood off the face plates, flatten the hard drives, and deliver them to the Disabled Veterans' collection point."
Dirty IT job No. 1: Espionage engineer
Wanted: Network sleuth willing to secretly read employee e-mail, shadow coworkers across the Web, and unmask corporate spies; ability to keep secrets a must.
Work in IT long enough, and one day you may be asked to monitor your fellow employees' e-mail, scan their browser histories, or rifle their hard drives looking for evidence they've broken the rules. It's just a fact of doing business, says Roger A. Grimes, a senior security consultant and proprietor of InfoWorld's Security Adviser blog.
[ Your boss is but one of the Top 10 reasons to be paranoid on the Net. ]
"I'd say it happens in 100 percent of large and midsize organizations, less often in smaller ones," he contends. He estimates that half the time employees who are investigated ended up being fired. Only about one in four prove innocent.
The biggest single issue Grimes is asked to investigate? Sex between two employees. "That accounts for 50 to 75 percent of the requests," he says. No. 2 on the list is corporate espionage, usually in the form of soon-to-be-former employees absconding with proprietary company data.
At one company, Grimes discovered that nearly half of the network Web traffic was porn-related. When he informed the CEO, he was gently dissuaded. "'We don't want to be the Internet police,' he told me."
Grimes immediately looked at the CEO's hard drive, where he found a generously endowed cache of gay porn, as well as evidence the executive had booked a session with a male prostitute on a business trip to Miami. At the time, the CEO was days away from getting married.
Two weeks later, the CEO called him into his office. "He said a couple of teenage boys had broken into his home and surfed gay porn on his computer, and now he wanted to know how to get rid of what they left behind," Grimes said.
Shouldn't the chief executive call the police? Grimes asked. No. He just wanted to know how to clear his cache. A few weeks later, the marriage was officially over.
The CEO was hardly the only one in that company caught with his hands in the, umm, cookie jar.
"I could prove a large percentage of senior management did no actual work at all," says Grimes. "These guys were making several hundred thousands dollars a year, and all they did all day long was surf porn."
But being an IT spy is not all fun and games. Grimes says he's been approached by spouses of executives seeking evidence their significant other had been cheating. He has to tell them no, he can't legally do that. Over the years he's also investigated dozens of employees charged with viewing child pornography at work.
"I try hard to not find images on people's computers," he adds. "There are some things you simply can't unsee. It's an emotionally difficult thing to be involved with."
Sometimes, however, it's hard to avoid.
"One time I was asked to clean off the computer of an executive who was leaving the company," says Grimes. "She was in her sixties, with gray hair. Going through her hard drive I found pictures of her in leather bondage with another executive at the same company. I just deleted them. But I never could look at her the same way after that."
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This story, "Even dirtier IT jobs: The muck stops here" was originally published by InfoWorld.