Manish Choksi
Chief-Corporate Strategy & CIO, Asian Paints
Manish Choksi is Chief-Corporate Strategy & CIO, Asian Paints
Today, social media and the consumerization of IT are invading enterprises like never before. Although these technologies are still in the initial stages of enterprise penetration, potentially they can bring about sweeping changes to the enterprise IT landscape. And they are throwing up a host of opportunities and challenges before organizations. For the first time, they will give enterprise IT the potential to link enterprise applications and human interactions to IT platforms.
In terms of security and control, social media and mobility will create a new set of paradigms for managements. Enterprises will need to devise effective ways to regulate something which is by definition viral. One of the things that organizations need to comprehend in this new paradigm is that a straitjacket security model will not deliver.
Enterprises will also have to fundamentally re-architect their security infrastructure to manage mobility devices. It calls for a lot of self-regulation and self-policing. I think the biggest impact of all this is going to be that in other parts of enterprise IT: End users will start to expect the same paradigm of transparency, self-regulation, and self-policing.
Social media and mobility will open up new frontiers. From an internal perspective, mobility will bring productivity gains by providing employees access to corporate resources outside the office and beyond work hours.
The trend will fuel new expectations from enterprise users. The IT department will have to take on the onus of managing these mobility devices. End users will expect applications to be available on their mobility devices. This will require additional effort in terms of designing user interfaces. To meet this requirement, CIOs will have to recruit user interface specialists or hire an outsourced service.
The consumerization of IT will change the status quo of enterprise IT. It will expand the scope of corporate IT. It will increase the awareness of new-age technologies among end users, making it easier to push newer generation solutions to enterprise users.
I believe that the role of senior management is fairly critical in the adoption of both these technologies. Senior management should be the proponents of these technologies. There is not greater advertisement than having a CEO access a BI application on a mobility device as he travels the country. It’s a clear indication to the salesforce about the efficacy of these platforms.
"Social media and mobility are sweeping across corporate IT promising to bring tectonic shifts in the way IT is consumed."
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