The real world is dynamic and complex and IT infrastructures are in a state of constant change. In the past couple of years IT teams have attempted to manage change with a variety ofstrategies ranging from rollout of the ITIL Frameworks for incident, problem & change management to ever harsher lockdown policies with each successive Operating System release. IT Frameworks help everyone know where everything should be but suffer from complex and long rollout schedules. As a Business User if you have a problem you typically need a fix more than you need to know whether a similar issue has been previously recorded in the problem management system. Similarly, no one wants to hear that they can’t solve a known problem because their security profile doesn’t allow that… this is most often heard when a Business User is installing a print driver.
Between the natural push and pull of IT & Business Teams, a new force has emerged which looks to tip things in favor of the Business Users, until IT learns to embrace it. The Consumerization of the IT Landscape as recently reported by Ingrid Lunden in TechCrunch is this new force. This is where each of us as Business Users has had a better IT or technology experience in our home or personal lives then at the office.
Let’s look a simple example, you host a team meeting and you decide to record the meeting with a collaboration tool; GoToMeeting, JoinMe or something similar. You think it will be helpful to share the recording with your team but where do you store the 115Mb compressed file. Your company uses Microsoft SharePoint, so hey that will work! Your first upload attempt fails without an error message, you try again, and again. On your third attempt you call the IT Helpdesk and while on hold you remember the family photos that you shared using Dropbox, that might work for this. In the time that it takes for you be escalated from Level 1 to the SharePoint specialized helpdesk team you have uploaded the 115Mb file to your Dropbox account, copied the email address of your team from Outlook and sent them all a notification email from Dropbox and each of them is on their way to being a happy Dropbox customer. You later learn from the IT Helpdesk that the limit for the file upload feature in SharePoint is 100Mb and no one configured the error page failed uploads…
Here Dropbox.com has made you the hero, but from file sharing to collaboration applications like Chatter.com to cloud-based stables like Salesforce.com the goal of getting it done is trumping the need to do it all in-house by one IT Team. These examples and those reported by TechCrunch show the rise of the Enterprise Startup and how many are making the jump from consumer applications inside the firewall successfully. As TechCrunch reports these companies are focused and quickly adopting new features to support key business use cases.
Here at xOverTime we see ourselves as part of this Enterprise Startup trend, where today IT teams struggle on how best to mitigate the risk of enterprise data managed in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that walks out the door unsecured on laptops every night. We believe we can improve an organization’s ability to work with spreadsheets in a more secure and collaborative manner while improving analysis, presentation, and system integration capabilities. Come back soon to learn more as we get closer to releasing our v1.0!
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Source: Tech Crunch
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