James McMahon is Domain Manager for the Adaptive Workplace offering within the global portfolio management team and also a member of Atos scientific community. His role is focused on the development of the future desktop and workplace products for Atos clients, providing services and solutions that enabling new and future work styles and innovative solutions that embrace cloud, consummerisation, social networking and collaboration. He strongly believes in a people centric approach to IT and has a real passion for the human side of the workplace, how technology can bring people together, enhancing the lives of us all. He has been in the IT industry for 11 years and has been involved in the delivery of a number of large and complex IT transformation programmes across different industries.
For many of us living in democracy means being able to do what we like, when we like and where we like, within reason. There are rules to follow for the wellbeing of ourselves, our possessions and others and, as an adult in society, we are expected to follow these rules, whether we agree with them or not and of course failure to follow rules can have repercussions. read more
TweetWith the Olympics upon us my personal levels of excitement are about to go through the roof. In particular Triathlon is a sport I will be watching very closely. Whilst it is a relatively new Olympic sport (introduced in Sydney 2000). On top of this team GB (sorry to be so patriotic) have a great chance of medals in both men’s and women’s events. All this thinking got me thinking about how combining 3 individual disciplines (swim, bike, run) seamlessly could teach us some lessons about the adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) schemes today. read more
TweetBring Your Own (BYO) device is one of the hot topics of 2012. I have friends and family (who mostly don’t work in IT), asking me about this BYO idea that they have heard about via the coverage it has had on mainstream news sites (good and bad). Then they tell me how they can get their email or access to work files or applications from their own device. read more
TweetComparison of size is nothing new and it’s well-known that ‘size isn’t everything…’ a phrase said by every man at some stage in life, often when talking about a multitude of things. One of the big IT trends for the next 3 years is Big Data. But for me it’s not about the size and ‘Small Data’ is more important to users today and in the short term having a greater impact on the way we consume IT.
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“#Consumerization vs Corporate IT Round 2 – Cloud comes to the party”
I read about Guy Lidbetter’s shiny Ultrabook in his blog here and definitely felt a tiny wave of envy rush over me, but then I went back to my own tablet device and remembered why I find it so very convenient when I’m on the road. Whilst it’s not great for typing and producing digital content it is great for consuming information on the go. The upshot of carrying multiple devices is that I can get through a day on the move with my phone/laptop/iPad combo without the need for a power supply and that hunt for a plug socket (they do hide them well in airports, maybe there needs to be an app to locate them – a bit like the ones that show you the best seats on planes, or where to eat?).
Devices are stealing the limelight at the moment and we are awash with trade shows, as the press move from CES, to the Mobile World Congress (MWC), then Cebit and then the inevitable product announcement from Apple, (“New iPad” launched on 7th March) everything seems to focus on the device… The thing about consumerization is that it’s not just about devices; they are just the start point. It is easy to understand the concept of bringing your own device, but ‘BYO’ devices are just the container ship bringing the full potential and choice of consumerization to an office near you soon, if of course, you are a user or IT department who wants to embrace and ‘opt in’.
What do I mean by this? I mean the services that originate in the consumer world and end up in the corporate one are having a far more profound effect on the way we work than the device ever will, and perhaps without you realising. Until now this had been happening under the radar, with the IT department spending significant time and money blocking access to services or trying to identify secure solutions which tick the corporate security box, but at the expense of functionality resulting in limited adoption. This disruption, at a time where budgets are tighter than ever, which means the head in the sand approach is also not uncommon in IT departments today. These challenges are new for us all and the solutions not always straight forward or immediately obvious.
As part of the change consumerization introduces a whole new set of verbs into the working environment. How we request and consume services such as installing an ‘app’, how we share content by ‘dropping’ it casually somewhere (hopefully secure), ‘posting’ a question on a wall, how we ‘check-in’ somewhere and ‘link up’ with someone with a common interest, who happens to be nearby, or even searching public data for trending topics or ‘#hashtagging’ information for all to see. It’s time for IT to work with the business to identify how this new way of work can boost the bottom line.
Of course change isn’t without it’s challenges and it would be churlish to pretend there are none to overcome, especially the non-technical ones, but the opportunity and benefits to individuals and business are beginning to make themselves clear to see. It’s not a cool fad; it is in fact much more, with benefits potentially much greater. In future allowing users to choose the applications they want to use (a concept we are calling choose your own or ‘CYO’) can bring new benefits to businesses in many interesting areas (to be explored at a later date). That said, the focus remains on the BYO debate, and this doesn’t seem to be about to change for the time being…
So why does the combination of cloud and consumerization really put pressure on Corporate IT and why will it drive change faster and more widely in the next 2 years? My wife and I are fortunate enough to be expecting our second child in 2012 and a colleague of mine (thanks Thomas) gave me this wise advice in preparation for the new arrival; he said that having 2 children doesn’t double the fun/challenge but it in fact square’s it… It is the same for consumerization and cloud, individually they are exciting, pushing the boundaries all of the time, but together they are far more powerful and can create a whole new world for the user. For the IT department and business a pragmatic approach is required and the business alike…
Sent from my laptop (File started on my ipad, created and securely stored in the cloud, then sync’d to my phone for review on the train and then sync’d to my pc to be finalised before sharing it).
TweetAs one of the younger members of the scientific community I remember fondly my teenage years better than some of my peers! I sit here reminiscing about good memories, glossing over some of the pain and angst of being a teenager. As a teenager things change rapidly and new experiences (good and bad) happen, sometimes on a daily basis.
Some of these events can be explained and put down to a lack of experience or insight, some are because of a lack of planning and thought, typically a bullish attempt to do something quickly, so you can move onto interesting things like sport rather than the mundane aspects of everyday life like tidying your room. Things get broken; you are clumsy but can’t explain it and more often than not you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, or feel out of place in normal situations and times the peer pressure is too much to handle. It feels like the world is on your back all the time… At the same time they tell you, you are the future of your country, the world, the universe…
Cloud is the adolescent teenager of 2011. It has been growing steadily under different guises and without too much visibility and suddenly things have begun to change at a rapid pace, encountering events, never encountered before. It is like a celebrity teenager; growing rapidly and dealing with change at the same time, but very publically. Many ‘adolescent’ events have been well published in mainstream press, regarding outages impacting major service providers including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and in the past days RIM with their services for Blackberry users. No one is immune from growing up, but at the same time, adolescent teenager or not, there is a level of accountability for events that take place.
So what do you do with an adolescent teenager? Firstly you must always ensure they understand cause and effect, what is the impact of what they have done, intentionally or not (aka a failed change or an act of god) and make sure they learn lessons and improve themselves as a result. In the context of cloud it can be more important to define service levels for how you recover, both time to recovery and potential data loss (RTO RPO, instead of just thinking service availability). Secondly you give teenagers responsibility and treat them like adults, but don’t give a work experience teenager in a hospital the knife in heart surgery. It’s the same with cloud, try with services such as test and development first, or services that aren’t business critical. Thirdly and finally, ensure they are encouraged to grow, learn and try new things, after all they are our future… the same can be said of cloud services, explore the new opportunities, try different services and options, but make sure you plan, learn and prepare for the unexpected along the way.
The peer pressure teenagers feel is akin to the market demand forcing cloud providers to rush services to market, as a result always do your homework before making a decision. Before you know it, cloud will be common place, your services will be running in one form of cloud or another and those clumsy adolescent teenagers will be the brilliant new colleagues adding spark to your business…
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Posted in Strategy & Innovation, Technology, Trends, Wellbeing @ Work