As I sit back and think of some of the newer technologies we have looked at recently, I find myself wondering if IT is in the never ending cycle of re-inventing the wheel. What I mean by this is sometimes it seems as if we continue to try and re-engineer everything to make it fit our environment or how we think it should work. When viewing newer technologies, usage models and trying to pass data off to other groups the phrases I think I hear the most are, “That will never work in our environment,” or “If we can get them to change this, this and this, we may be able to use it here” or my favorite, “This will never be secure enough for us to use it as it exists”. While these may be valid assessments against the way we do things today, the big question is: should we be pushing ourselves to look for new ways of doing things? Five years ago, employees preferred to use their machines and software loads supplied by IT because they were more powerful or feature rich than anything they had at home. But in today’s society, people have higher end machines at home than IT supplies them. They also use newer technologies that are usually off limits or not supported by IT. Think of some of the tools we use today, such as this blog or even instant messaging. These technologies exist in our corporate environment because we saw people using them at home and brought them into our corporate environment. It wasn’t something that IT created and people took home to use. So with so many of these newer technologies out there, should we keep pushing to make them adapt to our IT world, or should we start pushing IT to start adapting to new models. We take umbrella approaches to everything today. Total security of the platform, instead of trying to reduce the footprint we have to manage. We look for solutions that will cover the majority of the users, versus what may be right for smaller enclaves. We place several management clients on the platform to perform numerous tasks instead of using native components or reducing some of the redundant requirements we have. Moving forward, the next generation of workers will expect businesses to offer familiar technology and won’t accept tradition as an excuse. IT shops need to provide workers with “cool” ways to work. If they don’t, they risk becoming obsolete.
