Chinese Handcuffs or the Chinese Finger Traps are classic analogies on what happens to IT security in large companies and how to eventually navigate them internally!
These Chinese Handcuffs defy your natural inclination to pull harder once your fingers are caught in them. You need to resist your natural instincts, relax a bit and push your fingers towards each other, then the bamboo interlocks of the Chinese Finger Cuffs ease up and you are able to extract your fingers out! The trick is to resist your natural urges and go exactly the opposite way!
Sort of like going with the skid, when you skid on ice. Counter intuitive but that's how it works!
I have been on business to a number of large companies where by their very nature of work they need to have high levels of IT security (IT Enabled Services Companies or Call Centers, or Back Office Centers, to be specific!). One thing I am increasingly beginning to notice is that IT security that is so much necessary in these places, is tightening its grip in ever so larger measures, with the result that Operations people inside these companies are hardly able to function and do any kind of analytics that will help them manage their operations effectively!
Like Chinese Handcuffs!
The answers may lie in actually easing up and going with the flow of IT security needs and hopefully there will be better ways of meeting your most stringent IT security needs, while at the same time, creating and using enough Business Intelligence so that you can manage your operations well!
In Managing operations, you may not need access to individual transactions as much as you need summary Business Intelligence that shows you patterns or "pictures at a higher level of abstraction".
Even though drilling down to a transaction may be desired, you may not always be able to get it at that level - like pulling against the Chinese handcuffs. Security restrictions may prevent you from accessing that level of detail outside a totally enclosed, IT bubble.
However, you may be able to convince the IT powers that be that you are abstracting and taking only summary information and not the individual credit card number of anyone or the personal medical history of any one person!
Sometimes the analogy to the Chinese Handcuffs can be pretty close and scary! But that does not mean that there might be other answers, especially if you know how to really get your fingers out of one!
Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate. - Chuang Tzu
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