Chris Anderson @ HP Discover 2012

June 5th, 2012 by martin237

One of the presentations tonight was by Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine, he was talking about the challenge facing IT of managing expectations of what IT can deliver traditionally within the enterprise setting with those of what the end user can actually provision, request or use online, in the cloud or using open source technology – the gmail scenario.

This got me thinking about something dad had told me many years ago when I’d asked him about under investment in IT, and lack of interest and engagement (as I saw it) from the business when I first started out as a server guy all those years ago:

“IT is seen as facilities, like the lights and the air conditioning, it’s just something that should always be online always working, like the FT arriving on the desk on time. There is no excuse for failure, for outages, whatever justification there is, IT just has to work.

When a senior business executive was asked to rate the most important thing to him on a daily basis he replied that the FT arrived on time and that the desk has been cleaned, it was assumed that the IT would be online. Why wouldn’t it?”

This feeds back into the discussion about commercialization and commodity of IT, the challenge that with gmail I get 10GB of disk space, but internally I might only get 500MB, that Windows 2008 is certified but R2 isn’t because that component, hasn’t been tested yet. The expectations, the breadth of choice across the marketplace puts IT in a position where it has to manage or meet expectations, and be two steps ahead. Going back to a conversation with a project manager colleague about a month ago, “I had to get my Windows server rebuilt because the Windows team hadn’t certified the drivers, but they were willing to if my project paid the cost and took the time out”. The concept that IT is ‘having a day out’.

His top ten expectations of the next generation of IT users:

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