Outsourcing Irony

If you piss off your IT staff, maybe you should be a bit more care­ful about what they can find on your hard drive.

Out­sourced IT staff fin­gered porn stash banker
By Lucy Sherriff
Porn-surf­ing bank supre­mo Michael Soden was caught with his brows­er down last week by the very same staff he out­sourced to HP at the start of his reign at the Bank of Ireland.

Soden hit the head­lines last year in Ire­land when staff took indus­tri­al action in protest of the depart­men­t’s shift to Hewlett Packard. Staff were unhap­py about the prospect of becom­ing HP employ­ees, as they had enjoyed con­sid­er­able perks at the Bank of Ire­land: favourable mort­gage and loan deals for instance. Now it seems that he has been forced to resign thanks to the very depart­ment which he sent mer­ri­ly on its way.

Staff informed the bank that they had dis­cov­ered pornog­ra­phy on Soden’s machine on Wednes­day last week, dur­ing rou­tine main­te­nance. Soden resigned his post on Sat­ur­day, after the inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion into the dis­cov­ery was leaked to the local press.

It would be disin­gen­u­ous to sug­gest that the “rou­tine main­te­nance” was any­thing oth­er than that, but it’s clear that Soden’s machine was thor­ough­ly attend­ed to.

The out­sourc­ing move was Soden’s sec­ond high-pro­file deci­sion after his appoint­ment as chief exec­u­tive. His first was to update the accept­able use pol­i­cy that pro­hibits staff from access­ing porn using com­pa­ny equipment.