How wonderful it is to be here in Cannes under a blinding sun in order to participate to the opening plenary session of IT Meetings at le Palais des Festivals. With LD (CEO), PF (CEO & Founder) & DV (Deputy MD Finance, Public Purchasing, IT & Telecoms).
The theme of this plenary session was:
“IP, mobility, Cloud, Big Data, IT: a new genetic for our jobs”
Subjects of high interest but quite difficult to deal with efficiently in 45′ with 3 other speakers. Eric Montagne, whom I’d like to thank again for inviting me to this event, is kind enough to let me open fire, at the time I really thought it was a good idea…I start with refocusing the debate on what I consider to be the underlying revolution of all these new technologies: the users are taking the lead and the IT Dept. hasn’t got it yet, or is even dead against it, is destined for dying out.
The IT user takes their destiny in hand in order to become a driving force (favourite managers’ sentence whatever their level of responsibilities) and find the flexibility required in their everyday working lives. The 3 or 4 latest weighty trends (Cloud / Mobility / BYOD / Big Data) on the IT market are part of this approach. You still do not see the link? same for most of the 50 people attending this event…Let me give you further details on my point of view.
The maturity of the numerical networks & Internet great power of attraction with technologies offering easy-to-use applications software, and easy-to-deploy ones (SaaS/PaaS/IaaS = Cloud) allowing you to outsource both the infrastructure and IT services and access them as on-demand services.
Nowadays you have access to bespoke offerings which fit to the just-need and just-in-time, with more functionalities, quickly available and moreover in our world of on demand services the ability to transform any business model of any trade.
The IT user is a happy bunny. He feels at home seating on the sofa, remote control in one hand switching from one program to another according his desires & needs without wondering if he is compatible with his high-tech TV or he’ll be able to carry on watching it on his Samrtphone or PC…in other words Mobility.
Which reminds me of a meeting I had in 2009 with one of the big guns of the French N°1 telecom operator. I told him that to me the Cloud endpoint would be for the user to be able to pick applications & infrastructure elements he needs on an online portal, based on your TV package model and invoiced on consumption. The forward-thinking man replied : “pure Sci-Fi…”
Back in Cannes, can we, IT players, imagine solutions answering the boom of our mobility urge, the thrust of home office, the convergence of IT & telecoms. Which one of my PC, tablet or Smartphone is my workstation? Being able to access your data 24/7 provided any worker with the ability to react and accelerate like never before in your work environment.
All the more since all your mobile devices offer state-of-the-art embedded technology (GPS, cameras, sync. of both calendars & directories, voice assisted-navigation, 3D augmented reality,…) which offer a very large number of actions both on premises and remotely.
At last but not the least, the major element to me is the societal evolution : on the one hand, the “Y” generation craves for services and no longer for IT or telecoms, on the second hand co-workers communicate via affinities & competencies social networks, whilst everyone try to reconcile their private & professional lives while taking in stride that the frontier between pro & private is becoming fuzzier. Which partly explains the BYOD phenomenon.
We’re dealing with more & more data, needless to say a humongous number of untapped ones. Hence the BIG DATA which is an approach and set tools that give meaning to raw data structured or not in order to, for example, anticipate one customer going to a competitor, the evolution of products & services consumption mode, or to understand more in-depth the impact of a multi-channels advertising campaign on the overall sales of a designated product.
All theses evolutions have a direct impact on the day to day of the IT Dept. whose/which role moves from CIO to Conductor of the numerical strategy of all trades within the organisation and their ecosystem.
I wish this will be for the best, but this is no easy turn.
The IT Dept. has to deal with a number of large infrastructures & solutions providers but no longer to a myriad of small, medium & large services providers. Therefore they meet new challenges, such as: contracting policy, SLA, reversibility, portability, authentification systems & BYOD… The revolution is underway for all the IT players all the way from the user to the provider through the internal IT team.
Convinced yet?
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