There’s a report published by Ernst and Young that I’ve just being reading coverage on CIO.co.uk which, quite frankly, has depressed me. The headline is that CIOs are “struggling with cloud computing, social media and mobile risks”, and the paragraph that has particularly got to me reads:
Use of social media in business is prevalent, but 38% of the CIOs and CISOs surveyed say they don’t have a coordinated approach to address risks, such as defending the organization’s brand or determining how employees use work time to engage in social media.
Any organisation that thinks it’s the CIO’s role to manage those risks in an organisation today, quite frankly, gets all it deserves.
Whilst the CIO is certainly ultimately responsible for what his or her staff do with social media, outside of the IT department the issue is a general management issue (and I’d even include the brand issues in that too – see more on the potentially withering role of the CMO in a socially-networked world).
It’s something I’ve spoken about before, but I’m increasingly convinced that in a world where (with a few exceptions like GCHQ) there is no monopoly of technology supply that can be exerted any longer by companies on their employees, there is a need for a radical overhaul of the nature of management and indeed leadership of technology within firms. Management by control will not suffice when the majority of employees are walking around with more computing power and connectivity in their back pockets than exists on their desktops.
mmitII 