The tools an enterprise offers its employees are supposed to help, not hinder. So why are so many people working around enterprise systems?
True story.
I was setting up a conference call with a VP and suggested we Skype each other.
He replied: “Skype? Can’t do that. It’s free and it works. We have to use our in-house solution, which is expensive, and doesn’t work well. Sorry.”
We agreed to talk in the evening, so that he could use his home computer, which (unlike his office machine) could access Skype.
The moral of the story:
Busy, highly effective people will get around governance systems. Always. They’ll do it early, and they’ll do it often. More
Dispelling the myths of consumerization
There is understandable resistance to the consumerization of IT. But, in our opinion, too much is based on myths.
Of course, security has to be ensured. But security vendors already have answers to many of the issues that Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) creates. Whether businesses defend their networks at the edges or in endpoint devices, this is not an insurmountable problem.
Support is another issue that comes up often. Supporting these devices is both simpler and more complex depending on the business. Many companies that allow employees to use their own devices simply refuse to support them, making that the employee’s responsibility as part of the deal. However, there must be some provision to allow employees a fallback to corporate equipment if everything goes wrong on their shiny new tablet. And for those where devices are an unofficial management perk, the pressure to fix them when they go wrong may be irresistible. More
Illustration by Brett Ryder for The Economist magazine
How much information is too much? Well, it depends. If the information in question is timely, accurate and helps you solve a problem, chances are there’s no such thing as too much. However, as we all know, this isn’t how it works in the real world.
Rather than being enlightened by information, we are plagued by it. From the hundreds of websites and emails we see every day to the reports we have to read to the FYIs that have nothing to do with us, modern business is a study in data chaos.
The here and now of data overload
A 2011 article in the Economist (Too much information) examined what information overload means for today’s workers. They boiled the consequences down to three main effects: More
The consumerization of IT is very much on the agenda for CIOs right now. We present a two-part series on this topic: How are CIOs addressing this issue? And what kinds of advice are they getting?
For some CIOs it’s a cause for celebration. They see a world where staff support their own tools, where costs are reduced and where innovation can happen at a faster pace.
For others it’s yet another cause for concern. Unsecured data, lost devices, additional support burden (no matter what the hype says); for them, the list goes on.
Of course, the reality sits somewhere in the middle. This presents the CIO with a dilemma: whether to ban these devices and enforce control or to embrace them and hang on for the ride. As Martin Atherton points out in the Register: More
We at VirtualWorks think we’ve staked out a major problem facing businesses of all shapes and sizes today – data sprawl, and we’re fast developing products to help solve it.
But like all large problems, there’s a lot of confusion and change at the start. The best way to come to grips with the problem, how it’s changing and how it’s affecting businesses is to talk openly about it.
That’s the point of this blog: We want to talk about how data sprawl is impacting businesses, and how the responses to data sprawl will change how businesses work. More
