Boring

Chris Anderson, having spoken at a conference of Chief Information Officers, reflects on the dim future facing the CIOs of the world:

In fairness, the CIOs have a pretty tough job. Nobody thanks them when the network works and the data is backed up, but they get fired when things go wrong. No surprise that they’re so risk-adverse and conservative. The pesky users keep trying to, you know, do new things. This causes unpredictable outcomes. Which must be avoided.

The consequence of this is that many CIOs are now just one step above Building Maintenance. They have the unpleasant job of mopping up data spills when they happen, along with enforcing draconian data retention policies sent down from the legal department. They respond to trouble tickets and disable user permissions. They practice saying “No”, not “What if…” And they block the ports used by the most popular services, from Skype to Second Life, which always reminds me of the old joke about the English shopkeeper who, when asked what happened to a certain product, answered “We don’t stock it anymore. It kept selling out.”

The most dramatic example of this is on college campuses, where a generation raised on Google and MySpace meets its first IT department. Needless to say, the kids want nothing to do with “disk storage allocations” and “acceptable use policies”. The life of a university CIO is like the life of a telco CEO, fast forwarded by about five years. The users want a dumb pipe, preferably at gigabit speed. They neither need or want the university to administer their email, wikis, blogs, video storage or discussion groups. They want it to simply get out of their way.

I don’t think the university model is especially representative of the problems facing IT departments in the typical workplace. If a student wants to use an online word processing tool to store their thesis then that’s their problem, just as it is if they store it on their laptop. The consequences of losing that data, or having it corrupted by a virus, primarily affect the individual, and as long as their chosen tool can output a file in whatever format the university demands they use to submit essays and the like their choice to use systems beyond the university’s control is neither here nor there.

In the average work environment that isn’t at all the case. I spent a couple of hours this morning preparing a spreadsheet myself and my colleagues will be using to record and summarise information about a forthcoming event we’re organising, and I did it using the spreadsheet my employer’s IT department supports and stored the sheet on a shared drive on our network that’s automatically backed up overnight. If I’d created that sheet using an online spreadsheet tool and stored it somewhere beyond the reach of our backup routines, or if I just stored the file under a user name or password on some online system that effectively kept it out of my colleagues’ sight if I wasn’t around, my employer would quite rightly be very unhappy when it turned out that I was holding their data to ransom. Similarly, my email and my calendar are stored on our corporate system, where they can be shared with and accessed by my colleagues by use of a system that my employer’s IT department controls and supports; in what way would my employer benefit if I used a Gmail or Hotmail account to store my work emails?

Another point is that the average CIO’s worries about users are inspired not so much by the notion that the users might want to “do new things” as by the proposition that the “new things” the users want to do might result in data losses or incompatibility between one user’s data and his or her colleague’s data. I accept that twentysomethings grew up with the internet and are typically much less scared of IT than my contemporaries, but in my experience there’s still a scary gap between those who understand the pros and cons of designing a suite of linked spreadsheets and those whose Excel expertise barely extends beyond knowing which icon to click in the Excel toolbar to sum a column of numbers, or how to format that column of numbers to display figures with two decimal places and a currency sign. Mandating the use of a corporate IT system may not make your users any more IT-literate, but it does make it easier to share and recover the company’s data should disaster strike and allows for the option of organising training in the proper use of whatever tools you’ve standardised on.

No doubt Chris Anderson would observe that my sort of employment - being an office drone, spending virtually all my working days in the office, tethered to a desk talking on the phone and toiling away at spreadsheets, word processor documents, emails and doing a bit of database work - is doomed anyway, be it by way of automation or outsourcing, and that the next generation of knowledge workers operating as semi-independent contractors will come to take responsibility for organising their own backups and will find better ways to share their data with the people they collaborate with where necessary. Perhaps, but until that happy day arrives it seems to me that companies are probably right to rely on the services of a boring Corporate Information Officer to make sure the company’s information remains accessible and properly backed up.

[I do believe I’ve just outed myself as a CIO-wannabe. So be it…]