If there’s one thing that us system administrators loathe more than dealing with users its dealing with users who have a bit of IT smarts around them. On the surface they’re the perfect user, being able to articulate their problems and requirements aptly so we have to spend considerably less time fulfilling their requests. However more often than not they’re also the ones attempting to circumvent safeguards and policies in order to get a system to work the way they want it to. They’re also the ones who will push for much more radical changes to systems since they will have already experimented with such things at home and will again want to replicate that in their work environment.
Collectively such people are known as shadow IT departments.
Such departments are a recent phenomena with a lot of credit (or blame) being levelled at those of my generation, the first to grow up as digital natives. Since the vast majority of us have used computers and the Internet from an early age we’ve come to expect certain things to be available to us when using them and don’t appreciate it when they are taken away. This doesn’t gel too well with the corporate world of IT where lock downs and restrictions are the norm, even if they’re for the user’s benefit, and thus they seek to circumvent such problems causing endless headaches for their system administrators. Still they’re a powerful force for driving change in the work place, enough so that I believe these shadow IT departments are shaping the future of corporate environments and the technologies that support them.
Most recently I’ve seen this occurring with mobility solutions, a fancy way of saying tablets and phones that users want to use on the corporate network. Now it’s hard to argue with a user that doing such a thing isn’t technically feasible but in the corporate IT world bringing in uncontrolled devices onto your network is akin to throwing a cat into a chicken coup (I.E. no one but the cat benefits and you’re left with an awful mess to clean up). Still all it takes is one of the higher ups to request such a thing for it to become a mandate for the IT department to implement. Unfortunately for us IT guys the technology du jour doesn’t lend itself well to being tightly controlled by a central authority so most resort to hacks and work arounds in order to make them work as required.
As the old saying goes the unreasonable person is the one who changes the world to suit themselves and therefore much of the change in the corporate IT world is being made by these shadow IT departments. At the head of these movements are my fellow Gen Y and Zers who are struggling with the idea that what they do at home can’t be replicated at work:
“The big challenge for the enterprise space is that people will expect to bring their own devices and connect in to the office networks and systems,” Henderson said. “That change is probably coming a lot quicker than just five years’ time. I think it will be a lot sooner than that.”
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Dr Keiichi Nakata, reader in social informatics at Henley Business School at the University of Reading, who was also at the roundtable, said the university has heard feedback from students who have met companies for interviews and been “very surprised” that technologies they use every day are not being utilised inside those businesses.
It’s true that the corporate IT world is a slow moving beast when compared to the fast paced consumer market and companies aren’t usually willing to wear the risk of adopting new technologies until they’ve proven themselves. Right now any administrator being asked to do something like “bring your own computer” will likely tell you its impossible, lest you open yourselves up to being breached. However technologies like virtualization are making it possible to create a standard work environment that runs practically everywhere and I think this is where a bring your own device world could be possible.
Of course this shifts the problem from the IT department to the virtualization product developer but companies like VMware and CITRIX have both already demonstrated the ability to run full virtual desktop environments on smart phone level hardware. Using such technologies then users would be able to bring in almost any device that would then be loaded with a secure working environment, enabling them to complete the work they are required to do with the device they choose. This would also allow IT departments to become a lot more flexible with their offerings since they wouldn’t have to spend so much time providing support to the underlying infrastructure. Of course there are many other issues to consider (like asset life cycles, platform vetting, etc) but a future where your work environment is independent of the hardware is not so far fetched after all.
The disjunct between what’s possible with IT and what is the norm in computer environments has been one of those frustrating curiosities that has plagued my IT career. Of course I understand that the latest isn’t always the greatest, especially if you’re looking for stability, but the lack of innovation in the corporate space has always been one of pet peeves. With more and more digital natives joining the ranks however the future looks bright for a corporate IT world that’s not too unlike the consumer one that we’re all used to, possibly one that even innovates ahead of it.
