In Woody Allen’s 1973 comedy sci-fi film The Sleeper, there is a fascinating proposition that anything we know with absolute certainty today can turn out to be nonsense in the light of new information in the future.

Miles Monroe, the manager of a health food shop, wakes up from an ulcer operation 200 years later. The doctors of 2173 are aghast that Miles believes wheat germ and organic honey are healthy, when 22nd century science has revealed otherwise. “Have a cigarette,” offers one of the doctors, earnestly. “It’s one of the best things for you.”

The health business is an easy target. But what about IT? Looking back over the past reveals plenty of U-turns and shameless backtracking in what was supposed to constitute good practice. Do you remember when networks were said to be inherently insecure and that moving files between machines would be safer using portable hard drives? Fifteen years later, the experts sound no less plausible in warning that USB Flash drives are a sure-fire route to data being stolen.

It will also be interesting to see what the future holds for automatic software updates. Installing your own software on your employer’s computer is unquestionably a bad thing. But many enterprise systems also put a lock on software updates, preventing individual users in an organisation from installing bug fixes and improvements to their legitimate, pre-installed applications.

I can see why it might be important from an IT support point of view to keep all users at the same level. However, if corporate policy was to allow or encourage clients to let updates download and install automatically, all users would still be at the same level – it would just be a higher one.

The other day, I overheard one IT manager cursing that scores of users could no longer log in remotely because the corporate gateway had been upgraded, yet none of the company’s laptop users had the privilege level to permit the security update to install. As well as having to visit each person in turn to apply the update manually, this poor guy had to field all the associated phone calls and process all the helpdesk incident reports.

And all this for something the client machines could have done automatically, probably without requiring any user intervention.

I can see more trouble on the horizon because the company has yet to roll out the bug fixes issued over the past 12 months by many of the applications it uses. I can’t wait to hear what will happen once users catch on that the crashes and glitches they are suffering were fixed some time ago, but denied to them by their employer’s policy of “good practice”.