“Similarly, the key to the next 20 years of enterprise IT is not to provide more and more technology, but to manage a platform that enables any application to exist in your environment.”
via Operate Like Airbnb and Uber with the New DNA for IT – The CIO Report – WSJ.
Thanks, Pat Brady. To paraphrase a source I can’t locate, I think you’ve got “the beginnings of the kernel of an idea somewhere in here”. I’d summarize your suggestion for Future IT as: “Manage a platform that enables“. But without more details for this hopelessly generic message to CIOs, some will probably figure they understand and use the slogan to promote bold initiatives to house traveling employees at Airbnb locations, and get to their destinations using Uber. Your “new” IT will enable users by “allowing” those apps on their mobile devices.
The “DNA” is “Awareness”, “Identity”, “Integration”, and “Insight”.
What? What are you saying? What “Awareness”? Really. This non-specific mumbo-jumbo is just a tease! You’d never get away with this kind of writing at the New York Times. But okay, maybe I’m missing something here…maybe this is just a “concept piece”, you’re talking to CIOs. They don’t want to be bothered with details.
Let me translate. Guys and Gals, you want your people to be more productive, creative, efficient. You want them to like the tools they use for work. You want the tools to work well together. You don’t want to waste your resources managing a bug-riddled platform with a swiss-cheese of security holes that performs like an exhausted dull-eyed old mule struggling on the trail up the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. My advice? Buy Macs. Use Evernote. Support iOS. And please find a way to keep that stuff from being hamstrung by your old legacy data and security infrastructure. If you can’t do that, then go ahead, you might as well promote Uber and AirBnB. Cause that’s all you’ve got left.
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