CTO Blog
There’s a famous Douglas Adams quote along the lines of ‘Technology’s a word that describes something that doesn’t quite work yet’. For me, it’s been one of those quotes that was nice and gentle on the mind at first and then has proceeded to burrow its way slowly into the deep recesses, where it’s now made itself and home and is starting to throw up some interesting perspectives. Perhaps it’s taken a leaf from Adams’ own creation, the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster (“The effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.”)
In this guest post colleague Chris Yapp provides both a slice of lemon and a brick on what most of us find straightforward to use at home but remains to this day as one of the single biggest corporate IT issues. The PC.
What does externalisation really mean? – guest post by Chris Yapp
One of the things that IT folk are often accused of is talking in big terms such as “a trend to externalisation”, which actually is happening, believe me. Making it real for the market can often be the challenge without losing sight of the link between the idea and its delivery.
I was musing with colleagues on what externalisation means for corporate IT in the medium term and one of the cameos we came to seems compelling. I’d welcome your thoughts on this.
Let’s go back, to look forward.
Thirty years ago, company car schemes would be quite restrictive. Typically there might be a preferred supplier. Sales reps might get a Cavalier and support staff an Astra. Today, many organisations have flexible employment packages. They have outsourced fleet management. The schemes offered allow for the wide variety of family sizes and structures. Also, individuals can choose to supply their own cars, usually with stipulations about age and suitability. Flexible employment schemes now cover Health, dental, holiday, life assurance and many other factors. For instance, I know of schemes for pet insurance. These flexibilities are seen as needed to attract and retain talent.
The thought is that mobile phones and IT will in time move from company supplied to this kind of flexible arrangement.
People will either be able to join a company scheme or supply their own. How many of us today carry two mobile phones, one for work and one for friends and family?
Of course restrictions will be needed such as anti virus packages and other security arrangements.
However, for the MAC, Vista or Linux zealot, as standards develop, the need for the organisations they work in to run user IT (laptop and the like) and Mobile devices on a restricted basis will diminish with time. Giving the user greater flexibility makes sense. Talking to a final year student a little while ago, I was told “I will never work for an organisation that won’t let me use my MAC!”
In the short term when recruitment is stalled and many organisations are downsizing, this might seem unnecessary. However, look 2-5 years out with the ageing population and things will change. Skill shortages and the difficulty in recruitment will make growth difficult in many sectors.
I won’t call the upturn, but when it comes flexibility will be the key in securing the needed talent. In fact, the downturn is resulting in a rise in people being more flexible in their working habits. So the thought is that in the medium term, the key driver of externalisation may well be HR. That wasn’t what we initially expected.
What do you think?
About the author
luckily at Capgemini Netherlands, they have realized this already with the mobile phones and PDAs. we get a budget to buy the phone we want and just get the sim card from the company. quite like it
and i do REALLY hope that one day we also get a budget to buy a laptop ourselves, which would be a mac then …
The issue that has to be resolved is the handling of confidential information in the corporate situation. In the standard view, there must be technical controls put in place to segment company information from personal information and control its movement as it may be ‘lost’ to the benefit of other entities. In today’s world, all company information is assessed as confidential and therefore equally controlled. Companies today do not have well managed ideas of what level of classification a document or piece of information is.
This control focus also ignores the fact that this information generally leaves the business every night and periodically also leaves the business completely – in the head of the employee.
Also whilst there is some truly confidential information, this is in the minority in a real sense. The vast bulk of information managed by the business is of no real consequence and is in actual fact trafficked between different legal entities over the Internet unencrypted anyway. If this is correctly assessed by businesses, then externalisation could actually take place with the truly confidential material managed by virtualisation, thin client mechanisms or standardised encryption controls, along with an innovative idea – trusting the employee to manage things correctly (with the right information management training of course)
Lee – I hope for that day too!
Ian – excellent points – I think we are truly missing the mark at the moment and a back to basics business perspective on what is confidential and what is not would be a big step forward in reducing cost, improving compliance and increasing collaboration – and therefore business potential. And I love the innovation – trust the employee!
Citrix Project Independence (http://community.citrix.com/display/xd/independence)is clearly playing to this trend. The idea is that you bring your own laptop to work and use a virtual desktop. Independence uses a type-1 hypervisor (one that runs on the bare metal) to provide you your own VM and the one for work. This seems a little invasive to me, but it is going in the right direction.
Personally, I think the end point of externalisation is that the entire user interface leaves the enterprise. Instead of running a work desktop, we interact with the enterprise through our social networking environments. This could be a simple email/portal such as iGoogle or Yahoo or a more complete environment such as Facebook or Second Life. Or their successors.
The first move, especially if companies are looking to reduce IT cost, it to turn off the exchange servers. Any company that thinks a 40mb limit on the inbox is reasonable should give up trying to run an email server. This is a good example of a cottage industry that will be overwhelmed by industrialisation leading to externalisation. See http://lwn.net/Articles/237924/ which describes the 3% failure rate Google experiences on 100,000 hard drives (that is, 3000 fail a year or 10 a day).
John Schlesinger
On the question of documents, the issue of confidentiality is very important, but as most companies provide email with external access and no encryption or even signature, this is mainly a red herring.
If an enterprise were, however, to take security seriously, then there is a need to distinguish between documents and record keeping. These are often referred to as unstructured and structured information. Documents include: emails; taped phone calls; SMS texts; photos; graphics; videos; office documents (word and powerpoint); and other text. The enterprise needs to provide a secure document store and the ability for an employee to put anything there that is significant to the enterprise. This might include a cc: destination for email (with a special one for attachments) and SMS for instance. This does indeed make it the employee’s job to decide what is significant to the enterprise and provide a security classification for the document.
The important thing is that the enterprise links the documents to the record keeping. This is done by sending an event to the enterprise every time a document is added. This includes the URL of the document and metadata describing it (such as Dublin Core metadata). This means the document is available wherever needed in the record keeping systems without clogging up (or should that be CLOBbing up) the data stores.
A side effect of storing documents with unique enterprise URLs is that documents can be shared within the enterprise by URL thereby freeing up bandwidth and disk from multiple copies of the same document.
John Schlesinger