WHO GETS YOUR STUFF WHEN YOU DIE? (IT artifacts)

I have always thought that I’d want to be cremated when I die. Certainly I don’t want to do it ahead of time. But the idea of being six feet under doesn’t really appeal to me. I’d rather get burned and urned, then, most definitely, put in a glass case or a wall, at a proper mausoleum.

What I would NOT want is for my kids to take possession of my ashes. What would they do with them? At my writing group at the library, one lady wrote a true story about renting a house and finding somebody’s Grandma’s urn high up in a closet. When the previous tenants had scrammed, they had left it behind. Ouch.

And by the way, there is a cottage industry for more creative ways to memorialize dead relatives. They can shoot those ashes into space (too expensive), or turn those ashes into a diamond and set it into a ring (“Hey, it’s my turn to wear Uncle Ernie!”).

Of course, the kids could just scatter me near my favorite bar. They’d actually have to split me up, because I have five favorite bars. But I digress.

Once you’ve got that urn, you need to figure out how to deal with it. Sure, give it to the kids, but by the time THEY’RE gone, now THEIR kids have that urn. What if everybody in the family wants to be cremated? Now the great-great-grandkids have a collection. They can line them all up and make a bowling alley out of the back hallway. Or, more likely, they’ll dump the contents so they can have a container for flour, another for powdered sugar, another for teabags, and you see where this is going.

I am regularly amazed at the clients who have no documented procedure for the disposition of artifacts after a termination (or even a transfer). If you leave on a good note, you will likely be turning your stuff over to somebody else to carry on. And by the way, if nobody is taking over your stuff when you leave, it’s a good indication that you weren’t terribly necessary, so it’s a good idea to be moving on.

But if a user is terminated for cause, you need to grab their stuff. Not only for business continuity, but also for auditing. I fired you for fraud or whatever, so I need to examine your files, your emails, your messages. If nothing else, that stuff should be reassigned to somebody else, perhaps the manager, until it all gets a proper home, or is archived. In the book, I describe how, when our mortgage agent was fired for gross incompetence and in general being a complete idiot and who is probably working at the circus right now, his files were completely locked up. Our mortgage company had no way to recover the mails, files, or messages or a deprovisioned user. Unbelievable. We had to send all our documentation to the mortgage company again, including the stuff THEY had sent to US. This is known in the industry as a really crappy procedure.

Reassign, archive, zip up, audit. You have to deal with the detritus. In those many, many CSI shows, the good guy has to collect and examine the evidence when the bad guy shoots somebody. But in our instance, you are both the shooter and collector.