Head of power generation

In corporate computing there is one issue that still invokes a lot of strong feeling and that is the topic of user computer lockdown.  Many IT professionals see this as the only way to control a computing environment and ensure it is reliable; however some business users see this as keeping them from what they need to be able to do.

Until the advent of the iPhone and the Xbox this sort of model was largely missing from consumer computing however both these platforms are locked down and both are undoubtedly successful.  Both also have communities dedicated to opening up these proprietary platforms that bang heads with the vendors on a regular basis but most of the users would not even think of doing this, mostly because they are not technical enough to know the option even exists.  This in turn means that there is much less resistance to an established service that you want to use being locked down than there is to the locking down of something that you already use but that has never had restrictions before.

Now I want to consider what would happen if Microsoft delivered a service based computing platform tied to their cloud services.  It is not unlikely that this will occur, especially if the rumours of Google preparing a similar service for ChromeOS are true. The platform would be locked down in that it would only allow products from its “App” store to be installed and would only allow storage within the Microsoft cloud.    

What we are effectively talking about is computing moving to a similar purchasing model to mobile phones.  All of your computing is on tap including the computing device and connectivity for a monthly fee.  At the end of the contract term your computer is upgraded.  Corporate business units will create cloud services for the unique computing requirements of their company that would be delivered through the contract devices.  It’s most likely these corporately created cloud services would also be hosted in storage and processing farms also located in the cloud rather than server rooms.  Suddenly almost all of the things a corporate IT group does are no longer necessary.

In the initial days of electricity many companies had a “Head of Electricity generation” on their board.  This was because it was new; complicated and vital to the business.  This is not unlike IT of today but how many people have this title now outside of the power companies?  There may be electricians, tuners of the end point for the electricity service, but otherwise companies trust others to supply them with electricity.  Many CIO’s today will feel computing is more complex and thus less likely to disappear from the board, but I suspect those heads of power generation felt the same.

Remember computing is a tool that a corporation uses to make money and IT groups are a necessary evil to making that tool available.  If that tool can be obtained in another cheaper way then the company will use that method quite happily.  All that has stopped this in the past has been the complexity but the cloud services lowers the complexity making business unit lead computing more available.