ManageFusion Industry Experts’ Panel: The Consumerization of IT (part 1)

A growing tradition and a perpetual favorite at ManageFusion is the Industry Experts’ panel. This year’s line-up at the Vegas conference did not disappoint. Moderated by Stephen Brown, Symantec senior product manager, the experts included Michael Dortch, senior analyst for the Aberdeen Group; Tom Henderson, principal researcher for Extreme Labs; Linda Musthaler, principal analyst for Essential Solutions and columnist for Network World, and Peter Varhol, executive editor, Reviews, for Redmond Magazine.

As always, it was a lively debate. However, all four experts strongly agree that the consumerization of IT is upon us and one trend that IT practitioners cannot afford to ignore. The following are some of the perspectives they shared:

Tom Henderson: “You should care about the consumerization of IT because it’s your job. You probably have the same things in your computer bags that I do: five USB drives, an MP3 player, and a plethora of PDA devices and phones. Consumer devices have become a part of our very personalities. You’ll take them from our cold dying hands just before you fire us.”

Linda Musthaler: “You’ve got to care. Whether or not you want it to happen, these devices are coming into the organization. The CEO himself is handing his executives these devices and saying ‘Go play with this and find out what kind of innovative things you can bring back into our business.’ He is telling his executives what the iPod can do to increase their business. Then the devices come in and create issues with compliance, security, and corporate data going out of the door. You don’t’ have a choice. It’s your job to care about these things.”

Michael Dortch: “Two statistics from this morning’s keynote are ringing in my ears. Fifty percent of thumb drives have confidential data on them and 70 percent of corporate data is accessible to people who shouldn’t be able to get to it. All of these things together are full-time employment acts for IT.

“Also, what are your objectives? For our Aberdeen subscribers, their first priority is growth. Their fifth is cost containment. Your challenge is all about the business people who are now gaining the keys to the kingdom regarding how IT is selected, managed and deployed. That’s the real reason why everyone here should care about the consumerization of IT.”

Peter Varhol: “The social networking technologies are providing today’s businesses with a competitive advantage. Your marketing people are using You Tube as a focus group to test new ideas with new markets. It’s a fair bet your PR people are putting customer success stories up on You Tube as well. You might be able to prohibit your enterprise from getting to You Tube because it’s a security risk and a bandwidth hog, but you’re not doing your company a competitive favor by doing so. You should make the choices that help your company’s competitive position. You want to help retain talented and hardworking employees. Neither of those things will happen unless we let social networking into the enterprise and manage them appropriately. They are coming in whether you allow them or not. Work with users and senior management on the ways you can manage those technologies appropriately.”

Stephen: “What about having IT not provide the technology but just the services? Is that a reality?”

Tom: “Yes, it’s a reality today. At CEBIT in Berlin, there was a jaw dropping array of excellent devices that stimulate the imagination. Which ones deserve integration, and which ones deserve caution because of their ability to destroy security? It’s okay to evolve those systems but the potential for destruction is very dangerous.”

Michael: “Which is cheaper – giving everyone a laptop or telling everyone this is the set of requirements your system must comply with to work here? I submit that the greater is the latter approach. The implication for IT is that they’re going to have to learn to not make these decisions in a vacuum. They’ll have to sit down with (shudder) the business people to figure out what they have to support and to translate those standards to the devices.”

Peter: “You get criticized for being too rigid, yet if you lose data, you get blamed. That’s part and parcel of our role in life. You have to establish a vision as to where you want your organization to be from the standpoint of technology. Continue to focus on those standards and work with them within the organization.”

Linda: “Companies have business partners and suppliers. You need to remember that it’s the whole ecosystem. You’ve got to consider you’ve got contractors and vendors and suppliers that are critical to service and you’ve got to be able to bring those people in as well.”

Michael: “IT has always had problems and challenges prioritizing its tasks. What we’re seeing is users who aren’t even buying technology anymore. They go to the service provider and buy a service level agreement. The same type of internal process helps you decide how to decide what to do internally and to choose the next steps. The way you navigate is to understand the business requirements and translate those into business-centric, enterprise-specific standards and evolve them over time into a more open environment that is also still manageable and secure. The question you need to be asking is how can I deliver business value my CEO understands and expects? Can I manage it? Is it secure?”

Peter: “I would bet that no one here is doing much at all in the way of volume buys of laptops anymore. It’s pretty much becoming onesie/twosie decisions as new hires occur. There are a lot of different types of hardware you’re supporting. The happy medium might be to establish a preferred supplier. If you order your laptop or phone, you’ll get a 10% discount. As a company, we can encourage but we don’t require you to do that.”

Tom: “I have a brother who’s an integrator. He has a “Yeah, right” principle. How many of you swore you’d never have WiFi because it’s insecure? “Yeah, right!” That you’d never allow USB devices onto corporate computers. “Yeah, right!” That you’d never do VoIP because it sounds so insecure and unreliable? “Yeah, right!” Do you have VPN for remote users? “Yeah, right!” All of these things we swore we’d never do, we’re now having to accommodate. It’s incumbent upon IT to help answer these questions. You watch these technologies because it’s the business leaders as well as IT who need to help decide what flies. That will be more important than ever before. You’ll have to try to accommodate these needs while staying one step ahead.”

Peter: “And if you haven’t established the technologies Tom is talking about, you’re probably hurting yourself and putting your company at a competitive disadvantage.”

Read part 2 of this discussion here.