the onda

In the big companies just don't think category, Ned posted a ridiculous policy change at HP that curtails the ability to use phone bridges in order to save an insignificant amount of money on small groups making conference calls. It's a well balanced rant that will once again remind you that Scott Adams is more reporter than humorist when it comes to big company craziness.

The one ray of hope in all of this is that on the day that he posted it, I happened to attend two different events on enterprise software where bankers and analysts went to great pains to explain that along with virtualization and big data analytics, one of the big emerging trends in the world of big businesses is the "consumerization of enterprise IT."

Putting aside the butchering of the English language for a moment, the idea is simple: because worker bees carry an iPhone and use Facebook, Skype, Twitter, and YouTube at home, they've come to realize that they should expect more from IT. Apparently the way this story is playing out is that folks are coming into the office aware that byzantine IT practices to ration disk space with mailbox quotas are no longer supported by reality and either vigorously complaining, or better still, importing more modern technologies on the sly (along with all of the potential data security issues).

Having spent two years at HP in an environment where it was always 1997 when it came to anything to do with your computer, I am at best optimistically skeptical about the trend. Until someone comes up with a productivity metric that is as concrete as the ones around cost savings currently getting CIOs their big bonuses, it is hard to see how executives at the top will respond to this growing dissatisfaction (it was Hewlett after all who said "what gets measured gets done.")

If the peasant revolt does work though, there are going to be a pretty interesting opportunities bringing all sorts of modern technology offerings into the enterprise; from tying them into legacy systems to trying to understand how all of these web 2.0 "consumer" patterns of communication and collaboration can be put to productive purposes.

For the sake of all of the Neds out there, let's hope it works.