Love triangles can be complicated and messy affairs. They are tricky to manage and a lack of alignment has the potential to cause long standing rifts between partners. This is no less true in business. Perhaps more than anybody else, it is the CIO who understands the difficulties that these complex relationships can cause in an organisation.
This is because an often unstated, yet critical role of the CIO is to ensure that the triangle of competing interests that exists between the business, the end user and the IT team, is harmonized. As part of our new research commissioned through Freeform Dynamics, we were keen to understand exactly how end user computing interests are evolving.
Three sets of interests clearly emerge, and as every CIO understands, to benefit fully, safely and economically from the latest end-user technology, it is necessary to balance each:
A delicate balancing act:
Today this balancing act, whereby all parties are kept happy, is not happening as it should be. Stand-offs between impassioned end-users/employees driven by personal desire and over-zealous IT department staff who wish to exert excessive control are still commonplace. Take a typical everyday scenario, in which an employee gets agitated after seeing an executive using an iPad that is connected to the corporate network, when they themselves have not been allowed to do the same. Or when executives respond to pressure from employees and business units by granting them similar freedom to bypass IT policy and process, for example.
Balancing a growing array of end user demands, cultural differences and internal pressures is tricky and all too often, relationships within this triangle of competing interests can deteriorate, rather than being maintained. If left alone, this has the potential to create a "butterfly effect", where small agitations and irritations grow out of all proportion and can have serious ramifications for the wider performance, competitiveness and growth prospects of the organisation. In fact, our research tells us that that scenarios like this are playing out today in many businesses, across multiple industry sectors and organisation sizes.
It found that the end user voice is growing the loudest when it comes to the influences shaping end user computing and the employee workspace in the organisation. More than 50% of IT and business professionals stated that user preference and desires are getting stronger in determining what decisions are made. In fact, more than 80% report examples of business units and/or individual users making technology decisions independently of the IT department. The combination of both overbearing end user demands and a board-led desire to hold onto an ageing IT infrastructure will severely limit a CIO’s bid to make value propositions more competitive and infrastructure more dynamic.
Practical solutions:
CIOs are often guilty of erring on the side of caution, even blocking potentially innovative new activity for fear of escalating costs and potential increased risk. Thankfully there are a range of technologies and techniques available today that can enable greater user freedom without the escalation of cost and risk. By solving the apparent paradox of how to give end-users more freedom whilst at the same time allowing greater security and IT control, desktop transformation can encourage a radical change in mindset, and enable a secure virtual workspace to be delivered, used and managed by the end-users themselves. This allows for seamless access to apps and data via a mobile workspace portal with a single sign-on capability, leaving all parties within the triangle happy and content.
A new and more dynamic model for end-user computing is another option, one that enables seamless movement from desktop, to laptop, to tablet, to phone, to car with applications, content and devices coming to life anywhere, anyplace, anytime. When tensions arise in the corporate triangle, the easy mistake is to immediately regard this as an IT problem. It’s not. An effective outcome can only be achieved if senior managers take responsibility for end user computing as a key business enabler: after all, a greater diversity of endpoint devices and applications, along with a higher degree of end user choice and flexibility are all inevitable parts of how end user computing will develop over time.
Ultimately, this is not just about satisfying ever more assertive and demanding end users, or justifying expenditure to the board, this is about ensuring the correct infrastructure and processes are in place so that the corporate triangle of competing interests is aligned. Organisations of all sizes need an IT infrastructure that can scale up and down to meet business and end user business demand. It is the role of any CIO to deliver this, aligning all parties by ensuring the correct IT infrastructure is in place to help drive innovation and stay ahead of the competition. Maintaining the status quo is not an option but in reality, a death knell.
The challenges currently associated with managing the corporate IT love triangle will only continue to grow, but it has to be recognised that these same demands are helping to push the business in the right direction, and it’s here that IT leaders have a crucial role to play. Employees using technology devices to do their jobs across all levels are looking to find the best way of working: it was this very mindset that led to the inevitable decline of the floppy disk and encouraged the growth of memory sticks and sites like Dropbox.com for example. Each offered an inherently better way of working than existed before.
By addressing individual end user demands today, IT leaders have the opportunity to make sound IT investments that will benefit the wider business and generate significant ROI, effectively satisfying all members of the corporate IT love triangle.
By Alistair Wildman, Managing Director, End User Computing, Mobile and Social EMEA, VMware EMEA.
