Frank Kenney

And no I don’t mean the US Armed forces mandate on homosexuality, I mean something more related to IT and specificially how many CIO’s and IT governance policies are enacted and enforced. 

Obi Wan Doing His Thing

I just attended a compelling presentation delivered by Tom “Obi Wan” Austin, entitled, “Exploiting Consumerisation, Technology Democratization and User Responsibility”. Oh snap. In 45 minutes, and this is one of those cases where we NEEDED to hear Tom talk more, he lays out the genesis for the thinking around the Consumerisation of IT, then he produced excellent survey data around what was really happening in the world. Here are a few nuggets that I’d like to share with you-

• The buzzword “The Cloud” is a manifestation of the evolution of Gartner’s thinking which included “On Demand”, “GRID” and “SaaS” – Yeah! Finally it’s been said VERY LOUDLY.
• Why doesn’t Microsoft Word or Google Chrome recognize the word “Consumerisation”?
• Demographics are sometimes destiny… 60 year olds want their secretaries back and 17 year olds are completely adapted to the next wave of technologies. – I sorta agree, but there are still deep social divides. For instance I know a white grandfather who enjoys using his Slingbox (Google it) over his Motorola Q and a black senior in high school that solely uses her $1600 Dell laptop for Solitaire and MySpace. We need to address the divide.
• Everyone send an email to Tom right now asking him to go through the BP case study on end user responsibility. Its worth the email and the call

I can’t help but noodle on Tom’s great point about end user responsibility. Today we received a friendly reminder that we needed to update our iPhone firmware to 2.1. While this is something that I have done for my own personal security, it makes sense to be a corporate citizen and do the right thing for the job. If we want to continue to enjoy the blossoming freedom of our own devices and processes we have to step up to the responsibilities.

Oh by the way Tom… let’s retire the bear!

-f