In my last post I wrote about renegade IT efforts. Increasingly one can buy a lot of online business infrastructure that can be used to completely bypass traditional IT departments. Is this a good thing? Should one use them to get the job done? What are the boundaries that make this reasonable? I also posted it to the LinkedBloggers group over on Yahoo Groups.
Then it hit me. This is nearly the exact same thing that happened when PC’s came out so many years ago. Those who were sick and tired of going to the Data Processing people could now buy a cheap computer, some software, and have the ability to do the processing themselves.
The DP people reacted in different ways. Some attacked the new computers. Some embraced them. Some ignored them. You can guess who’s survived.
With modern network infrastructures, combined with modern IT management, you have largely the same situation. In many companies users are not given access to their own machines. They are forbidden to add new software of their own, and in many cases cannot even change the settings on the software they do use. But if they have an internet connection, they can access a growing array of online software.
Will we see a repeat of the PC revolution?
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“Will we see a repeat of the PC revolution?”
I think it depends on the application and the data you need access to.
If you need to work with corporate data stores, the IT department will probably scrutinize your tools pretty closely. If you need heavy duty data processing or application functionality, just getting a separate PC may not help you much.
On the other hand, if all you need is smart remote terminal that can run an office suite locally or remotely, the company may be happy to let you buy your own equipment.
But sooner or later the beancounters are going to notice something like, “hey, if we could get all these personally owned PC’s under a central maintenance agreement, instead of letting evryobody expense their annual support contracts with a zillion different suppliers, we could save Big Bucks every year.”
And that puts us back where we started.
Dennis D. McDonald (http://ddmcd.squarespace.com)
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