The demise of the corporate computing experience?

In the year 2000 I was recruited onto a bold new project within my company.  The idea was to replace the entire fleet of computers both end user computers and back officer servers.  This would provide a computing service that would give consistent, supportable computing to the company.  This would provide all the computing and support necessary for a modern company with a centralised service desk and all the facilities normally expected. This included computer software available from a central store of applications without so much as a CD ever touching the computer.  All this would be available for only £180 per month, with regular updates of equipment every three years.

To many of you this will sound familiar as it has become quite a common model for a number of large corporations.  There is evidence to show that this is indeed the cheapest and most effective way in which to deploy IT to a reasonably sized corporation, however the resulting spiked spending pattern every three or so years is not often popular with accountants!

In the year 2000 though consumer computing was very different to the world of today.  Consumer computing devices tended to be lower power than corporate computers. Likewise links to the internet tended to be much slower, even at the edge of technology for the time my home ISDN link could not really be considered to be fast!  In the last 10 years this has flipped completely, my computer at home is an order of magnitude more powerful than the machine I use at work.  Though my broadband is limited by distance from the exchange it still delivers acceptable service, though not the 40mb and upward that many are used to on a daily basis.

This flipping leads people to experience a more acceptable computing environment in their home than at their place of work.  This in turn leads them to question why they can’t use their consumer technology to do their work.  In their minds the only thing that is stopping them is the IS Group that is telling them they are not allowed to do this. 

With the release of the iPhone appstore an easily accessible consumer service began to operate in a similar fashion to corporate IT.  Not only that but users loved these devices and completely forgave the lockdown on them in a way that the corporate IT user never had!  The advent of the iPad brought the use of consumer equipment in the business environment solidly into the boardroom of many companies as its size made it appear a valid computer replacement.  The question “Why can we not use this in business?” was met by many IS groups with FUD about security and understanding of where the data is being stored etc.

This approach is consistent with the we know best attitude I remember so well from the early 90’s when I was asking the central computing mainframe department about when we would be able to use Microsoft Windows.  I would get answers like “We’re looking at it” but in truth they knew they were already doing the right thing and so did not spare valuable business as usual resources to investigate Windows more deeply.  By the time they did, we had already exploited the new way of working and moved so far beyond them that attempts to regain control were useless.

Does this sound familiar to you?  If so you should ask yourself where are the mainframe computing departments today?  A few survive but in most corporations they were an evolutionary dead end replaced by an IS Group that evolved out of those early windows users.  Looking back I can see that a lot of the knowledge those centralised groups had built up was lost. Now we have through experience regained it are we really willing to lose it all again by following the same flawed strategy of our ancestors?

Before you answer that question follow this link and then consider my first paragraph above.  If at the time the company could have had the service we were suggesting for a mere £14ish a week simply by using a cloud service would we ever have been asked to implement the in house system we did?