Much ado about pretty much everything

Boundaries between work and personal IT activity are fading and resellers overlook this at their peril, argues Barrie Desmond

We are living in interesting times. Tightening Opex pressures, compliance concerns and ‘information inflation' are all driving IT decision-makers to look hard at the benefits of automated IT.

Alongside, end users are expressing a desire to bring their chosen smart devices into work, or work remotely, while developments in cloud, Software-as-a-Service and virtualisation are giving organisations management and control headaches.

In this sense, the channel is mirroring a larger national debate. It is trying to do as much, if not more, with static or shrinking resources, while the world carries on.

Something's got to give – the old ways have to change.

In fairness, a lot of organisations have cottoned on to the idea that they are now ‘social enterprises', with employees having a say in what devices they want to work with and, to some extent, from where they would like to work.

However, many still struggle to grasp how to translate the vision of a simpler, more organic, way of working to their networks. Freeing up complex structures and administrative hoops sounds lovely. A pity about those pesky cybercriminals trying to steal your intellectual property or the most up-to-date customer database. The latest alleged Sony data breach is a terrific example of how damaging such events can be.

But let's not single out Sony: Google, Apple and Facebook have all been in the news recently because of issues around collecting, storing and sharing information.

While personal users worry about their privacy and large companies rush to show public penitence, the truth is we are all guilty of using these platforms (and others) to generate and broadcast more information about ourselves than was conceivable just a few years ago.

Not only are we eager to benefit from sharing information on a personal level, we also increasingly depend on web-based social networking applications for business purposes.

Indeed, successive reports and predictions I have read highlight the importance of these platforms to procurement and other critical business processes, and this can only increase with digital natives entering the workforce.

With the exception of perhaps students and pensioners, there is no such thing as a user whose personal information belongs 100 per cent to them any longer. Many of us can now log on to a social network platform during our lunch break, and many of us have passed on information from an acquaintance from LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook to our colleagues for whatever reason.

Such phenomena is mostly welcomed by forward-thinking organisations looking to gain a competitive advantage. Resellers take note.

Barrie Desmond is business development and marketing director at Vadition