Where IT Leaders Share Ideas
The biggest vulnerability our businesses have are our people. Those creative, precious, innovative, unpredictable, and dangerous people. An errant hyperlink click here, an over-enthusiastic Send click there.
How can I help reduce that vulnerability and improve client relations at the same time?
The way organisations work is on the move again. Categorising people by traditional methods of department, function or geography is hamstringing innovation, and the operational structures behind these silos are not helping.
In most organisations, and by that I mean any type of collective where people come together to achieve a common goal, there is some form of internal organisation. This could be defined by department, discipline, function, client, location, and many others.
If you’ve handed the task of protecting your business from a DR event or incident to your head of IT, you’ve probably made a mistake. One that she or he won’t thank you for, and nor will the business.
As the turmoil around the Panama Papers leak wanes, our attention gradually starts to drift to other headlines. People of power and privilege were engaging in tax avoidance schemes? Has it ever been thus?
What surprised me, though, was how little attention was paid to the ‘how this happened’, in addition to the ‘what happened’. How was the largest data breach, in terms of data volume, enacted? Or are we now so inured to these events that one more is no longer newsworthy?
I think, though, that it’s worth focussing again on what occurred, and what lessons can be learned.
Risk is the potential of gaining or losing something of value. There are two parts to that statement, firstly potential, and the second, value. Sounds simple. And to translate these two components into something that actually means something, these abstract terms need to be made real. They need to resonate with each pair of eyes and ears.
Take one laptop, add a pinch of tablet (any flavour), smart phone and wearable, and simmer gently adding liberal sprinkle of home device as required. Serve on a bed of self-regulation, et voila; Trouble is served!
And so begins the normal route to what some would call a mobile strategy. Except this isn’t anything of the sort. It isn’t a strategy but rather a hotch-potch of technologies loosely cobbled together with no concept of the complete picture, nor what is actually being achieved.
Most modern enterprises have a need for varying numbers of their staff to be mobile. Presenting to clients, travelling to different offices, working from home, working on the move, as part of a flexible working program, present in a meeting room, working in a common space in the office or taking notes at a conference. The truism that ‘work is something we do, not someplace we go’ has never been more relevant.
There are many enablers for this trend, but the main one is that we are all being asked to do more, in the same amount of time, with a broader group of people, and with the traditional millstone of ‘place’ gradually being cut free.
