From: David Leach, ICT director, Orbit Group
Sir – Do my customers need my head in the clouds or feet on the ground?
The ‘cloud’ is apparently going to solve my infrastructure challenges. It will allow me to flex on demand, pay for what I use, give access to anything from anywhere and all while delivering rich functionality in a secure way.
Apple is redefining the user interface, with simplicity the key focus, served by an App Store so vast that it can give applications away free or charge a nominal fee, and others have recognised the opportunity and now sector-specific apps are appearing… there go my developers.
I also feel sorry for commercial landlords as office space is a thing of the past as we are now a mobile society – my clouds and apps are available anywhere and 4G will give me broadband speeds regardless of my location.
I guess the IT service desk is still needed, but to do what? PCs have gone and tablets are just ‘wiped’ and restored back to the factory settings. Infrastructures are owned by others, apps are built by others and installed automatically and printers are now almost disposable… it’s always nice to talk to someone though.
Users are customers and they want to own their destiny. They download apps at home, have multi-function printers and PCs so powerful they could go to the moon and they video-call their friends and families from all over the place. Why can’t they do this when they get to these offices that are being phased out?
The above is tongue in cheek, but the context is valid. So what’s the future role of the IT department? I say it’s one of driving transformation within the businesses we serve. It’s about partnering on innovation and using our holistic view of the organisation to join up ideas and create the 2+2 = 10 scenarios that truly transform the services we deliver to our residents.
If not, I need to start learning meteorology.
