As I read more and more about 2014 being the era of "the personal cloud," I can't help think that it, like BYOD, is really nothing new. Employees have used personal cloud services in a work capacity for a good few years, if not longer; with DropBox, Evernote, and Google great examples. The difference is that the corporate IT organization might not have evidenced the use or have blocked it on the corporate network.
But, IMO, the real driver for personal cloud is more important than the facility itself — employees are using non-corporate IT services, often at their own expense, not because they want to use sexy "personal cloud" services but because they just want to get their jobs done.
Days of future past
History often repeats itself. In my last real corporate IT role in the mid-2000s some of my end-users were buying personal Blackberrys or smartphones and forwarding their corporate email to a personal email account so they could access it on the move. IT had failed to deliver against employee expectations and their new consumer technology was making their lives easier; and, for sales people, their pay-packets fuller.
The same is true for "Shadow IT" — while many press articles talk of Shadow IT as the enemy of corporate IT department they conveniently overlook the fact that it's just evidence of unfilled demand for IT services. But who likes to upset their readers or the hand that feeds?
Unfortunately, corporate IT organizations need to understand that just because they are providing "supply" it doesn't automatically mean that they are actually meeting "demand."
So is personal cloud coming in 2014? Wrong question, it's already here
I'd be surprised if less than nine out of ten "knowledge worker"-type employees aren't already using at least one non-corporate cloud services even beyond the oft-quoted storage-type offerings such as DropBox, Google, iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, and even Evernote.
Personally I ignore my corporate Box account (unless I have to use it) and instead use my personally-paid-for DropBox account to work between devices. It's just easier to use in my opinion, although Box does have some nice features.
The same is true for the apps, or services, I need to help me to do my job. Trello is another great example — it just works and again across all my devices. Although I'm not sure that I have a corporately-provided alternative (yet*).
The command-and-control IT reaction: "Let's block the use of personal cloud"
I really hope you don't hear this statement in your IT organization.
Remember in the early 2000s when enterprises, or the corporate IT organization and maybe HR, blocked or denied employee workplace access to the internet? I was there. And then to social media? It didn't work; all it did was force employees to use their imagination (and their personal devices).
There are still probably line managers who see this modern technology as an evilness sent to prevent employees from working rather than something that can actually facilitate their work lives. Over ten years ago I had to keep explaining that if someone isn't doing their job because of technology distractions then it's a line management issue rather than an IT issue. Pre-IT the same disengaged employee would have found other ways not to work, not least the proverbial "paper shuffling."
Personal cloud also involves HR
Unfortunately there is this larger-than-IT issue that still needs to be addressed called "people management." To acknowledge that using personal IT (and personal cloud services) is something that needs to be managed not prevented. To ensure that employees know the risks involved and the consequences of putting their employer at risk by their personal decisions.
So get HR involved and embrace rather than fight against the needs of employees. Such that the corporate IT organization can return to what it was originally created for — to improve business process and employee productivity, and for the more enlightened organization improve profitability through an improved customer experience.
CIOs and their people need to rethink IT service delivery and not just because of personal cloud
IMO there are a number of strategic and management tendrils to be tackled. A CIO and their team need to:
- Finally realize that the corporate IT organization no longer has a monopoly on the technology used in the workplace (from personal use, through SaaS applications and cloud service providers, to outsourced services). And consider whether the corporate IT organization "no" is actually heard as "please find a third party to provide what you need" these days.
- Realize that employee and customer expectations have changed forever — call it consumerization or something else; the corporate IT game has to be upped across services/apps, devices, speed of change, support, business understanding, etc.
- Understand that the corporate IT organization no longer has the power it had in the 1990s (nor is the CIO still necessarily considered the IT innovator, they might be the "maintainer of legacy IT" now). And then stop acting like it's 1999.
- Flip IT's thinking to start with the customer/consumer use case not the technological capability.
With these in mind, there then has to be a new approach to:
- Understanding business needs.
- Application design and delivery — especially ease of use.
- Delivery channels — any device, any time, any place, anywhere (to steal from the old Martini advert).
- Increased speed of change or new app/service introduction.
- Greater customer/consumer involvement in design and day-to-day operations.
- Taking a best solution approach to employee and business needs — actually creating the solution might not be the best, timely, and most appropriate solution.
- Measuring IT success — measuring success at the point of IT (service) consumption not at the point of IT creation.
Now this might all be Mickey Mouse advice, covered in other blogs and articles, but I thought it worth using personal cloud as a launchpad to pull all of these tendrils together. To talk to the fact that the technology (personal cloud in this instance) isn't the issue, that instead how the IT organization thinks and works is probably the issue.
So what are you doing to block, encourage, or offer suitable corporate alternatives to personal cloud?
* ServiceNow adds Visual Task Boards in the Eureka release.
Image source: https://accounts-flickr.yahoo.com/photos/funcrush/
