Technological Agnosticism

Imagine a city where the roads are filled with the same car. This city only allows one manufacturer and one model of car to be driven on its roads but they will allow you to choose your own paint colour, air freshener and interior trim. Would you want to live here?

The city council say they employ such draconian measures for your safety and convenience. They want to ensure that all cars meet their safety requirements and that you have no problems changing your oil, obtaining spare parts or training your sons and daughters. It’s a standardized world and there are substantial benefits to restricting your choices.

Now look at your IT infrastructure, see any similarities?

Most corporate IT environments look much like our standardized cityscape. Our desktop, laptop, tablet and server computers are standardized. Our software is installed the same way, we only provide support for ‘authorized’ software and lock everything down to stop people personalizing their technological space … but we’ll let you change your desktop because we’re nice.

The consumerization of IT is happening right now and it’s presenting a lot of tough challenges to people like me. Our staff have become accustomed to their user-friendly iPads and iPhones and want them in their office. They don’t want to be use our software or conform to our ways any more. They don’t want to carry two laptops or two phones in the office, they want to use just one. We need to change; ‘we’ being the IT professionals.

Just as the world doesn’t dictate what type of car you drive, there are policies you must comply with such as emissions standards, traffic laws and driving etiquette. Some of these are black and white rules, some are grey, some are optional. Some rules are simply open-ended ranges such as maximum speed limits or minimum emissions standards. There is no reason we can’t define IT infrastructure in a similar way.

With desktop virtualization technologies it’s now easy to package corporate applications and a corporate OS together and deliver them to a range of platforms. This makes a bring-your-own-computing policy more practicable. Software-as-a-Service and Cloud-based providers provide other opportunities to lessen the infrastructure footprint we work with but all of this flexibility comes at a cost. We have to re-tool, ‘we’ being the IT professionals again.

We need to develop our skills, we need to look at alternative technologies and be less focussed on the tool and more focussed on the outcome and the business requirements we’re trying to meet.

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