In corporate IT the main topic of conversation is always management, how will we ensure everything is managed and safe. Inherent in that discussion is how will we stop users from doing things that they should not? This is often enhanced by security discussions and user indiscretions, all driving IT to put in place restrictions on what can be done to ensure people conform. This all adds up to IT departments controlling all aspects of business users digital life.
This is something society can learn from, if we put chips in people so we know where they are and develop technology that can control their actions and ensure they can do no wrong . We can use this technology to fully monitor them and ensure that they are truly under control and carrying out only the designated tasks in exactly the manner they have been told. That way the world would be a much better and safer place, wouldn’t it?
Not to me and probably not to you we'd be giving up too much, although there will be some that will be nodding thinking it is a great idea anyway. The truth is it is in our non adherence to the current way of working that we discover new and better ways of working. These ways of working can only come into being if the freedom to change is there, but this does not have to mean anarchy. It means we have to develop ways of management that can change quickly and respond to new thought, even if we do not believe the idea will work as new ways of working can come from failed experiments too.
Alas most IT departments are not able to act in this flexible manner, technical staff are too often very opinionated about what is right and surprisingly unwilling to change. This escalates through the organisation and it seems the bigger the IT organisation the slower and more unable to change it becomes. For example in one organisation I worked for the process for creating a collaboration site involved an official online request which prompted the receipt of a document which had to be filled in and returned prior to a three week SLA on delivery of the site. The rationale behind this is site management but compare this to the process involved in creating a Google site and you start to get the picture.
This is what makes consumerisation and cloud computing attractive to a business, they see it as a flexible and rapid way of working. They feel they can come up with new ideas and ways of working that will propel them forward, but underneath they miss that these systems are actually every bit as standardised and restricted as corporate IT, you get what the system delivers and nothing more. If you have ever wanted to use a flash application on an iPhone or iPad you will already know that, but you probably still think you iDevice is the coolest thing around.
So here is the real trick, you need to provide IT to your business in a way that is managed but feels like it is completely free and cool. To do this you need to give way on the little things that really don’t matter, like creation of collaboration sites and compensate by absorbing the complexity of managing them. This applies to the use of consumer technology in business and so much more, you may KNOW that something will not do the job but don’t stop it on this basis allow your business to find it out for themselves. Set up a small scale pilot, be enthusiastic and supporting , if it goes wrong you can easily clear up if not you learn something too and the business is pleased with your supportive attitude. Win Win.
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