I’ve spoken and written in the past about how the general expectations that we have as consumers of technology these days are going to place increasing pressure onto IT departments as people rise up against the controls and constraints of traditional “systems”. I thought it worth exploring a bit from the other perspective – how does a traditional IT management mindset view the world of consumer devices and services?
At the core, I feel that there are two dimensions that are worth exploring: firstly data processing versus communications and secondly constraining consumption versus generating demand.
The history of IT, and particularly of computing, is in the processing of data. Data processing can be used to do interesting things: cracking codes (think Colossus at Bletchley Park); paying people and suppliers (think LEO at Lyons) through to all sorts of modern day wonders from the WWW to sequencing the human genome to analysing the purchasing behaviours of shoppers and beyond.
With increasing network connectivity, central processing power and audio and video capabilities, the last 15 years have also seen a rise in the use of this data processing to enable real time and asynchronous communication between people. Today I have dozens of tools available to me, corporately provided and from the wider Web, to enable communication by voice, by sharing screens and by video with anyone similarly equipped anywhere in the world. IT, I would argue, has struggled to catch up with this revolution – not least because telecoms for many organisations used to be owned by facilities management rather than by IT.
But it’s not just organisational structures that make this a challenge – it’s that IT management has been used to technology in which people talk to the system, not to each other. A tool that enable you to talk directly to someone else is viewed in very different ways to one in which the system itself is the primary target.
The second dimension – a history of IT being about constraining demand – is going to be put under severe strain in the next few years. For example, traditional IT lifecycles are in terms of years – whether the operational lifetime of a system or service, or of a device. An average PC used to be budgeted to last for three years, and many in recent years have been sweated out for five, six or even more.
Compare that with the average Smartphone. Operating systems will be updated every 12-18 months. Hardware will be made obsolete potentially every year. Devices without replaceable parts (particularly batteries) have obsolescence built in. And most of the smart device operating systems have extensive channels for purchasing content and software (and that software increasingly is built to also encourage purchasing within). In sum – the consumer device world is one built to encourage further consumption by end consumers (they’re called consumers for a reason!).
It’s going to be interesting to see how this pans out in the coming years: will IT try to lock consumer devices in ways to make them more controlled (and what will be the impact on the people using those devices in the end)? My hunch is that what we will probably see is the privatisation of devices: increasingly organisations will expect the people working for them to provide their own kit, with sensitive information kept within browsers or virtualised environments locked off in large part from the devices on which they operate.
Today, most people buy their own work clothes: it might be that people with work-provided devices and work-provided uniforms will have a significant correlation in the future.
mmitII 