IT management gets personal
IT management gets personal
Here I am at the Symantec Vision user conference in Las Vegas. This morning we were treated to the keynote pitch “Ten Oxymorons of IT management”, its ironic that shortly after the Veritas acquisition (which I wasn’t fully happy about, from the enterprise perspective) I believed that the very term “Symantec Vision” was itself an oxymoron. I’m pleased to report that this view is changing, however.
Symantec has been viewed as a company that talks like an enterprise IT company, but acts like a consumer IT company. When I put this point to the CTO, Mark Bregman, he made the rather good point that it was increasingly important for the company to balance the needs of both sides. It makes sense: for security as with other areas of IT, our actions as individuals (i.e. “consumers”) can often have a profound impact on our IT capabilities as an organisation. It could be that we choose to complete a report on our home computer, or plug the iPod into the corporate desktop, or treat our personal mobile phone as a business tool – clearly, we need to marry consumer with corporate technologies if we are going to minimse the risks of such combinations.
It’s not just about avoiding the problems. During an animated lunchtime discussion, some of the potential benefits of marrying individual tools with corporate capabilities became clear. At the table were several Yankee Group analysts, Simon Robinson from The 451 Group, yours truly and Mark B. A conversation around data classification technologies (think: clever software that can work out what the data is for, and make decisions about it accordingly) moved onto the social networking technique of tagging (think: people labelling data according to what it really is for, avoiding the need to second guess) – would it be out of this world, for example, to imagine the backup software making backup decisions based on specific, user-assigned tags?
This raises several questions – not least, might the human factor introduce the potential for error, and might this increase the risks rather than reducing them? The answer to be frank is, I don’t know, but it would be a very useful conversation to define where people might be able to make individual decisions about their data, and how these decisions might be of benefit. Expecting humans to be perfect is not the answer, so introducing the human factor should not be treated lightly. However, the alternative – to expect a future, fully autonomic IT environment to be able to make all the decisions – is probably not the answer either. As said Andrew Jaquith of The Yankee Group, “humans are sloppy, but perhaps we should be embracing sloppiness.” With all the caveats of not leaping before we look, personally, I agree with him – and if Symantec can marry the best of humanity with the best of automation, good luck to them.