We’ve all heard about the horsemen of the IT revolution that we're living — mobile, consumerization and cloud — and the changes these trends will demand of IT organizations to deliver their benefits. It seems that companies have to meet the insatiable demands (and desires) of business users and employees, as well as those of external customers. Compounding the pressure are the Millennials, or the Connected Generation (Gen C), and concerns about their presence in the workforce.

In my view, this demographic — combined with the new technologies they covet — will require huge changes inside the IT organization. The Gen C individual isn't just an IT customer, but an integral part of it. At a fundamental level, it means that how you engage in the business of IT itself has to change along with the services that you offer. In other words, you have to start an IT revolution from inside the enterprise, starting with IT itself. Old ways won’t work with new generation staff, as this CA slidecast explains.

Supporting the Support Staff

Let's use a simple example: IT support. IT teams typically have some way to rotate engineers through an on-call schedule. It amazes me how many still rely on physically handing off a device — usually a BlackBerry and sometimes a pager — to the person who is on call. That engineer is supposed to walk around with this device, whose sole purpose is to act as the on-call "bat-phone," should he or she be needed. Consider how ridiculous this is in today’s consumer driven-IT environment. All Gen C employees in IT likely have their own smartphones, so why saddle them with a crusty BlackBerry just to "page" them? I bet this approach is mocked mercilessly internally and with outsiders, and it causes credibility problems for IT. (You want to avoid the perception of systems administrators shown below, after all!)

Clearly, IT should walk the walk and use consumer IT in its own shop before it can manage it throughout the organization. What happens when an IT team takes something simple in the everyday work process, such as updating a problem ticket, accessing a knowledge management system, approving a change or getting information from diagnostic tools, and puts a barrier between the engineers and the systems they need? Inefficiencies result. For instance, if access to your IT management tools requires calling the service desk or operations team, or else powering up a laptop, connecting to your corporate network VPN, and then launching a fat client to get a simple task done, you're guilty of making things unnecessarily difficult and inefficient. We all have our favorite productivity apps on our smartphones and tablets; why not use them on the job? Ease of access to IT tools is not something that’s nice to have; it's a Gen C expectation. 

If IT organizations don’t change the way they themselves operate, various staffing challenges and problems will result. Chief among these are an inability to attract and retain the best talent; IT people working around IT policies; and IT’s inability to fulfill the mission of supporting the business.

Many changes are not difficult to make, but they require you to commit to change and include younger workers in determining what parts of your IT processes are either broken or ripe for improvement. A simple formula to start with is:

• keep your people connected, mobile and engaged with the end users they support;
• offer them consumer-technology choices,
• and above all, keep it simple.

Taking these steps may not solve all of your staffing issues, but these policies will help establish a credible IT organization that can attract and retain strong IT people.

Additional reading and resources:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9224568/How_mobile_BYOD_and_younger_workers_are_reinventing_IT

http://pcrsbdc.org/2012/10-tips-for-managing-multiple-generations-in-the-work-force-%E2%80%93-february-2012/

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/weinschenk/it-departments-plan-for-millennials/?cs=49821

http://www.onlinegraduateprograms.com/millennials/

http://ozarksfirst.com/fulltext?nxd_id=511647

Today’s workforce is plugged into mobile devices and social media. For CIOs, that could be the best thing yet.

Here come the smartphones. Not to mention the tablets, the Facebook invitations and the Twitter tweets.

And there goes the CIO’s traditional role as controller of IT.

Instead, CIOs must empower end users to connect with enterprise data and applications from anywhere, using nearly any device.

I think this new role is the one CIOs were born to play.  At last, all your familiar goals — aligning IT with the business, enabling the business, creating competitive advantage with IT, etc. — have a real chance of coming to fruition. CIOs need to learn how to not only relinquish some control, but also seize the new opportunities presented by the rise of what we’re calling the Me Enterprise.

That’s also the headline of our lead feature in this, the 14th issue of Smart Enterprise magazine. The article explores how IT leaders at Hay Group, JetBlue Airways and elsewhere are learning to not only cope with the Me Enterprise, but also thrive.

As Ryan McCune, Director of Global Solutions at business technology services provider Avanade, puts it, “This is an area where CIOs can move from simply doing the plumbing to playing a high-value role for the business.”

Among the successes is Kaiser Permanente, a healthcare provider that runs 35 hospitals caring for 8.7 million people. As the Case Study “Taming the Consumerization of IT” shows, Kaiser Permanente CIO Phil Fasano sees the Me Enterprise as a new, bold opportunity.

Leading the Me Enterprise requires new management skills and techniques, as pointed out by George Fischer, Executive VP of  Worldwide Sales & Operations at CA Technologies, in his One True Thing column. CIOs, he says, must transform themselves into a new breed of Chief Information Orchestrators who can manage hybrid, federated environments while still delivering value to the business.

How about you? Are you changing roles in the Me Enterprise? As always, I welcome your feedback.

There are many new organizational pressures that CIOs have to address.

One is from the top level of the organization where CEOs often have only a basic understanding of IT — much like the ABCs: in this case, Apple, Bangalore and Cloud. In other words, CEOs want everything from IT to be as simple and intuitive as the stuff that Apple builds. Then, if there’s a problem or budgets are getting tighter, the solution is to “ship it all out to Bangalore; let’s get rid of this.” And lastly, since even airline magazines are writing about cloud computing, the CEO now knows that the business can not only outsource to India, but to the cloud as well.

Consumerization also is having a devastating effect on the IT department. Previously, IT was the place that dispensed the cool technology to people when they started work at a company: a notebook PC, a cell phone or some video capability. Nowadays, when Generation Y employees begin work on their first day and are handed their tools, they pull a face and say, “You expect me to use this old stuff?” In many cases, people have better hardware and better Internet access at home than at the office. They expect the IT department to follow all the latest trends and to keep up with every new hardware fad. And that’s the dilemma.

CIOs are clearly caught in the middle: Much as they want to meet these demands, they cannot always cater to everyone.

Recently, for example, I talked to the CIO of a temporary employment agency. The company boasts of a modern image and a CEO who requested that all employees in the company be provided with an iPad to show how cutting-edge the company was. “Oh, and while you’re at it, make sure they have iPhones, too,” the CEO reportedly said. Was that the same CEO who kept asking for budget cuts, the CIO wondered?

The CIO was unsure of what to do. On the one hand, he would have been glad to provide everyone with the latest technology. But the CIO had doubts over both the manageability and the security of the iPad in a corporate environment. And most of all, he was absolutely not sure the enterprise applications that he had spent so much time building were going to work properly on this platform. Same for the iPhone.

Should he give in to the demands from his users and the CEO? Or should he use his role as an IT leader to adhere to the strict standards he had set out for the company to ensure compliance on different levels?

I believe that it’s useless resisting the pull of emerging technology. Consumerization means employees will bring their iPads and iPhones to work whether the devices are sanctioned or not. And if they’re not able to use corporate applications on these devices, employees will grab some collaboration tools from the “cloud” and move massive amounts of corporate data onto these cloud-hosted applications.

It seems to me that the CIO really has no choice but to follow these whims from users and management and embrace new technologies as they emerge. At the same time, IT has to be prepared to stretch the current constraints on security and compliance to support the greater goals of the organization and its auditors. And that’s not as easy as ABC.

How do you cope with conflicting demands from internal and external stakeholders? Let me know here on Smart Enterprise Exchange.