Consumer Driven IT: Are You Ready?

Consumer driven IT presents enterprise IT with stiff challenges. While consumerization wins accolades for empowering users, mobilizing the enterprise, boosting productivity, and shaving costs, it’s also ratcheted up the demand for IT to deliver new, innovative services at the speed of business. Cloud computing offers the opportunity to bridge the gap, but with consumer-friendly social and cloud apps that help users bypass IT controls, companies need to respond quickly to the emerging trend. And they need an IT infrastructure that provides the business agility to do so—all without losing sight of a core tenet that’s pressured most IT shops since the recession: “Do more with less.” Here’s the good news. These industry forces do not pose insurmountable...

Bricks and clicks is one way to describe traditional IT infrastructures and future technologies. I have borrowed this term from Mike McNamara, CIO, Tesco, who was using the social media tool, ‘YouthTube’ (as I like to sometimes call it), to describe the in-store innovations that Tesco has created for its employees and customers, such as scan as you shop, QR codes and click & collect; Broccoli Cam, smart badges and electronic shelf edge labels. The future role of the CIO has been a trending topic in recent months and there is an increasing need to look at how much a CIO needs to own and be responsible for, in terms of conventional IT foundations vs. future end point devices. There is a strong argument that from a traditional IT infrastructure...

Last week Cloud Commons sponsored a tweetchat on “Rogue IT,” featuring a great discussion about why employees go “rogue,” what the risks are, and what IT should be doing about it. (See HERE for the transcript.) One theme was the opportunity for IT to take advantage of rogue IT. Users can be a great source of innovation – they often are the first to know about emergent technologies and they know what they need to be productive that IT isn’t providing. While some users may view IT as irrelevant, IT can only do a better job if they know what is happening across the organization. IT should consider surveying users to find out what apps and tools they are using and why – as long as employees are assured that there will not be penalties if they participate...

There is a tremendous amount of software development going on in large enterprises today. Customers often joke that they have more developers on staff than Oracle or Microsoft. But none of this software is developed in isolation. Ask developers, and they’ll tell you that the infrastructure they have to deal with is more complex and interdependent than ever before. In truth, much of software development is in fact an integration effort. IT development teams are building for myriad front-end web and mobile platforms, while also bringing along everything else the company has ever done. Enterprise development today relies on an increasing number of continually changing apps, data sources, everything as a service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, etc.), and integration...

$1B is the astonishing amount Facebook is paying for Instagram , making Kevin Systrom a multi-millionaire (full disclosure: my daughter was classmates with Kevin and graduated with him from The Middlesex School – she commented that all her classmates can now relax because the race for the “most successful” in her class is officially over!). What I found most fascinating is the instant backlash from loyal users about Instagram becoming part of the “evil empire”, i.e. Facebook. In fact, many Instagram users of my daughter’s age have long since abandoned Facebook as a photo-sharing site or even as their social network of choice, leaving it to us aging Baby Boomers. This must be pretty sobering to IT. While many IT departments are still wrestling...

As an IT organization, are you being beaten down daily and told that you are not nimble, agile or delivering solutions that the business perceives as valuable at the correct level of risk? I got to thinking about this and recalled a situation that a major financial organisation recently shared with me. The business had a situation where one of their primary customer interaction systems crashed. The incident was raised, escalated to high severity and after two days IT resolved the outage and the system was restored. Whilst the outage was in play a recent graduate quickly developed a Tablet App that could be used to interface with the client. Predictably, the app proliferated through the team, as did tablets themselves, and they were all expensed...

Even the IRS has an app! Read the comic on a: • PC • Tablet • Smartphone • Feature phone Keeping you laughing from ALL devices. Read more about the new era of consumer driven IT at: www.ca.com/cdit . Cartoon is under Creative Commons license (Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works)

As the hype about the benefits of cloud computing continues to flow, an obvious question relates to why the adoption rate isn’t higher than it is projected to be over the next couple of years. There is a widely accepted view that the lack of control that is inherent in cloud computing creates security challenges and is a primary factor in the modest cloud adoption rate. This trend appears to be consistent across industries, including the public sector – here’s some results relating to the Federal government adoption of cloud. And, some surveys have quantified more specifically what these specific security concerns generally are. On our website ( www.ca.com ) , we often conduct simple, quick surveys to measure the views of our visitors, generally...

While I agree with many of the points that Galen Gruman makes below about “millennial myths” (particularly ones that give us Baby Boomers credit where credit is due!), it remains a fact that there are statistically significant differences in attitudes and habits of the millennials versus older workers when it comes to social collaboration, use of public cloud services, and activities done from smartphones. For proof, take a quick look at our three-page sum mary of research results on How the Milennials are Accelerating Consumer Driven IT. Here’s what else was in the IT consumerization news in the last two weeks: April 3 : Offices in the Cloud by Dr. Stephen Turner via CloudComputing 80% of workers may be working remotely by 2020, and flexible...

I keep hearing how cloud computing will kill the CIO. Articles, posts, and tweets claim "the CIO is dead," done in by SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, virtualization, and the increasing commoditization of IT resources. IT budgets are being cut (again!), but IT spending overall is going up , according to both IDC and Gartner . IT is denied budget because the business units themselves are getting the budgets. Marketing is controlling social media, not IT. Sales are controlling Salesforce.com, not IT. The business units have the budget to establish mobile solutions using cloud services, not IT. Moreover, users are increasingly opting for free or low-cost solutions (such as Google Docs, Dropbox, Skype, etc.) that are easy to use, play well with mobile...