All that talk about the ‘consumerisation of technology’ is already out of date, if indeed it was ever particularly valid in the first place. It was originally an ever-so-slightly disparaging reaction to the arrival of social networking into business life and the proliferation of popular mobile and handheld devices. Facebook for business? A condescending curl of the lips was the initial corporate reaction from the ICT establishment although some of the world’s top vendors were very soon scrambling to catch up with the bandwagon. In the meantime, the ISPs and mobile telcos and data centres and Google and AppStore never cared who was buying what. Bucks per bit is ultimately their business model.
As for consumerisation, or at least the significant impact of consumer taste and product design on ICT, how quickly we forget. A quarter century ago, colour screen and colour printers were hardly a response to overwhelming business demand and neither were those tastefully designed desk phones. The still ubiquitous rodent was a simplistic alternative to codes and short cut keys, which were perfectly effective. The rot really started with the first marketing brochure to use ‘easy to use’, that all too easy to use phrase that has somehow resisted acronymisation. ETU? EtU?
But what has certainly turned the business world upside down is mobile working. It is today’s disruptive equivalent of personal computing. Sometime towards the end of the Noughties it segued almost imperceptibly from being just a version of remote working, with laptops and VPNs and all that, into a new world of Apps and iPhones, HTML and Android. Optimising for all sorts of devices became a scramble, with new critters appearing every month to merrily introduce new little quirks to put it up to the coders. That is where we still are, really, with an overlay of operating system market wars-iOS, Android, Chrome, Windows (No. 8 on the way) and, of course, Blackberry.
So what’s new? Some of us have been here before and watched Microsoft and Windows eventually muscle IBM O/S2 out of the market despite its generally conceded technical superiority. But that was back when a desktop PC in tasteful matt beige was the only option. Today we have a plethora in the agora with literally hundreds of devices from smart phones to tablets (and even e-book readers) to netbooks to laptops with bigger screens than most desks. From the point of view of CIOs and their IT departments under siege, it’s all gone way beyond the tail wagging the dog. We’re now at fleas wagging the hairs to wag the tail to wag the dog-a sort of butterfly effect with fleas, in a way.
Now the sheer volume, the tsunami of consumer devices with converged voice and data is driving all communications technology and much of computing. So how about a radical suggestion: let’s just walk away from it all. While we’re at it, how about junking LANs and indeed desktop PCs and all cabled devices? The ICT world is now in a position to get back to basics. Actually, it’s more a question of recognising the basics, which are not, and never were, hardware. No, we’re not dismissing the chip or the physical computer or the data centre-and neither are we advocating that tropospheric cumulonimbus thingy.
Elsewhere in this issue ComputerScope looks at Irish supercomputing and really high end computational tasks, which is real leading edge and forging a way forward. Today’s supercomputer is tomorrow’s smart phone or the next generation PDA , as NASA has proven, having landed men on the moon with primitive kit that would hardly run an electric cooker. So the hardware is critical, it will always be the platform, engine or whatever your metaphor. But, actually, it achieves nothing until it runs the software.
So for real life daily uses and users of ICT, the basics are the applications and the data. Everything else is just black boxes and connectivity. Maybe you should understand at least broadly how they work, but the Web has long since proven that you can use applications, do things, with no more than a screen and an input method. Access permission should probably be added, whether it is a PIN or voice/thumbprint or token or whatever. That is twin purpose: security certainly but also so that the service provider or host gets paid.
In order to do whatever I wish to do or have to do with ICT, I need access to the appropriate application and the screen display and input technology to do it. That input might be by keyboard or touch or gesture or voice. Only the individual cares. As for the screen, that ranges all the way from a 2" phone through 5" and 8" and 10" for today’s most common handheld devices and then on up to 20" for luggable laptops. Desk workers can often need even larger displays or multiple screens. Again, it only matters to the users and the nature of the work.
So that all too common market-speak phrase ‘Device of choice’ translates readily in fact to ‘screen of choice’. There are many things you cannot and do not expect to do on a device with a tiny screen, like even reading a spreadsheet, just as you do not actually need that 21" high-res display to read e-mail. In real life and work today, people are using at least two devices, smart phone and laptop. Both for business and personal use, tablets are increasingly replacing both laptops and netbooks for sheer portability and convenience. Quite a few still use a desktop PC if they are largely office-based, with the other two devices for travel and out of hours.
At least one tech hack uses a desktop with a really big screen for daily desk work, a 17" laptop for serious work away from base, a netbook for most travel and especially holidays and a smart phone for… well, mostly phone calls and texts. Oh, and a Kindle, also for travel and especially holidays. A colleague uses two mobile phones: smart one for e-mail on the move and a really tiny and rather out-dated phone for personal voice and text. Synching data is a real pain, but any employer can look after that centrally and more and more consumers can delegate such mundane chores to online service providers.
Now, for that BYOD debate again. First of all, it’s really more a question of Choose Your Own Screen (CYOS). What people want to be able to do, as both consumers and employees, is to use the appropriate or best available screen for the task in hand. In business and, more often than not, whether MD or van driver, summary information pushed or pulled to a smart phone screen is more than adequate for the moment. The drill-down or explanation can be done later.
On the other hand, what about those new Samsung and LG smart phones with built-in pico projector? Small screen all the time, enlarged projection as a substitute for a larger screen when needed. The point here is that the future is unpredictable, certainly in terms of consumer devices and technologies, so why waste corporate effort and resources in trying to anticipate it?
OK, so now what? It’s simple, retreat behind the firewall. Corporate IT should get back where it belongs. Distribute the access and the permissions and the functionality, as required. This is not a question either of just gaining better security or of compromising with the so-called BYOD movement. Arguably, that BYOD thing is a set of HR issues cloaked in technology. It would not even arise if there were not a tradition of employers supplying the kit. Traditional large organisation practice (with an undoubtedly military heritage) involved the minimum spec and uniformity for all except senior officers. When the company car was the fervent ambition of young executives, makes and models were always rank-appropriate. As for a ‘bring your own’ policy, that brought in the awkward issue of juniors buying Jags, clearly to be discouraged however old the model. Is there a lingering touch of that old employment world in some corporate reactions to the BYOD movement?
So now that we’re happily and securely back behind the firewall looking out, does it actually matter what our people use so long as it works? Can we deliver controlled access to data, as much application use and functionality as is required? Of course we can and every day we have more choices of channel and security technology and device-aware adaptive applications. When even a smart phone can have a separate corporate virtual machine (VM) that can be remotely wiped by the organisation, why worry?
Or rather worry away and it will always be a concern but it is, by an order of magnitude, a lesser challenge than owning and managing a fleet of high-powered corporate laptops loose in the wild. Today we can outsource a lot of the risk to the users and why not? Your phone was nicked? Your device is not allowed to log on because it’s riddled with electronic AIDS? Not our problem mate! When will you be ready to come back to work?
Back here at The Centre we can be snug and smug and secure. We have full control of a data centre, space in it, our own Virtual Private Data Centre and we are taking our time to assess the potential of The Cloud. It is a little disquieting, perhaps, to hear from the other side of The Firewall that a number of young people seem to believe that The Cloud is actually a huge CIA project, due for completion in 2014 and originally code-named ‘1984′!
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