Serving IT with a Side of Hash Browns
Jim Harris in Sponsored Blog Posts tagged Enterprise CIO Forum, HP, IT Monday, March 26, 2012 at 5:00PM This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.
Since it’s where I started my career, I often ponder what it would be like to work in the IT department today. This morning, instead of sitting in a cubicle with no window view other than the one Bill Gates gave us, I’m sitting in a booth by a real window, albeit one with a partially obstructed view of the parking lot, at a diner eating a two-egg omelette with a side of hash browns.
But nowadays, it’s possible that I’m still sitting amongst my fellow IT workers. Perhaps the older gentleman to my left is verifying last night’s database load using his laptop. Maybe the younger woman to my right is talking into her Bluetooth earpiece with a business analyst working on an ad hoc report. And the couple in the corner could be struggling to understand the technology requirements of the C-level executive they’re meeting with, who’s now vocalizing his displeasure about sitting in the high chair.
It’s possible that everyone thinks I am updating the status of an IT support ticket on my tablet based on the mobile text alert I just received. Of course, it’s also possible that all of us are just eating breakfast while I’m also writing this blog post about IT.
However, as Joel Dobbs recently blogged, the IT times are a-changin’ — and faster than ever before since, thanks to the two-egg IT omelette of mobile technologies and cloud providers, IT no longer only happens in the IT department. IT is everywhere now.
“There is a tendency to compartmentalize various types of IT,” Bruce Guptill recently blogged, “in order to make them more understandable and conform to budgeting practices. But the core concept/theme/result of mobility really is ubiquity of IT — the same technology, services, and capabilities regardless of user and asset location.”
Regardless of how much you have embraced the consumerization of IT, some of your IT happens outside of your IT department, and some IT tasks are performed by people who not only don’t work in IT, but possibly don’t even work for your organization.
“While systems integration was once the big concern,” Judy Redman recently blogged, “today’s CIOs need to look to services integration. Companies today need to obtain services from multiple vendors so that they can get best-of-breed solutions, cost efficiencies, and the flexibility needed to meet ever-changing and ever-more-demanding business needs.”
With its increasingly service-oriented and ubiquitous nature, it’s not too far-fetched to imagine that in the near future of IT, the patrons of a Wi-Fi-enabled diner could be your organization’s new IT department, serving your IT with a side of hash browns.
This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.
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Reader Comments (3)
The cloud has made so much possible. Who knows who is doing what, where, why, and with which tools?
Clearly, it's time to move IT out of a discrete, defined department and out into the field, even more than already. Likewise, solutions used to power an organization need to do the same thing.
Problem is, though, that it's easy to say that embedding IT makes sense (it does), but there's little experience with managing it (like reporting and measurement). Services integration is a goal, but cross-department, cross-business unit integration remains a thorn in the side of many attempts.
(By the way, I'm serving this commentary with a side of rigatoni, chicken, and broccoli at Bertuccis)
-- Paul Calento
(Note: I work on projects sponsored by Enterprise CIO Forum and HP Instant-On Enterprise)
Thanks for your comments, Phil and Paul.
@Phil — Yes, indeed, the cloud, especially combined with mobility, has made so much possible these days that it’s becoming impossible to tell what people are doing simply based on their current location in time and space (e.g., business is no longer something you only conduct at the office on a desktop computer in a cubicle between the hours of 9am and 5pm). I plan on blogging about some of the downsides of this new reality in a future post.
@Paul — Yes, embedding IT does make sense, and not only is it easier said than done, let alone done well, but part of the problem within many organizations is that IT become partially self-embedded within business units while the traditional IT department was resisting the early waves of the consumerization of IT. And now these business units are resisting the efforts of the redefined IT function because they fear losing the IT capabilities that consumerization has already given them.
Best Regards,
Jim