Kicking and screaming: Will IT survive social media?

At the beginning of the last decade I joined a little telecom company based here in Kansas City called Sprint. I had been dedicated to web development and graphic design for a number of years and considered myself to be pretty well versed in software. Until that time though, I had never experienced a ‘locked-down’ desktop. Until that time – and still today – I thought of IT as the heroes of information technology, advancing the cause of truth, freedom and the Interwebz superhighway but I had not yet encountered the soulless, faceless entity know only as; Corporate IT.

My first encounters with Corporate IT were fairly innocuous. This surly bunch of night stalkers could be seen wandering the halls of our tiny office building mumbling under their breath about Swingline’s and bad robots. They would never smile and could rarely hold eye contact with anyone outside their tribe (and certainly not anyone of the opposite sex). If they were required by the job to speak to you they would wait patiently until you were sitting down to ensure they could tower over you, breathlessly appearing outside your desk like some asthmatic Lurch character.

‘Did you open a help ticket?’ they would question with a wheeze. You could try to turn to face them but universally they had perfected the art of lurking at exactly the right angle over the back of your chair so that you never had more than the faintest sense of a shadowy presence accompanied by a disdaining voice.
Eventually after trying desperately to reassure them that you weren’t a garden variety idiot they would reluctantly agree to help you. The help consisted of barking orders delivered with geek-rage ferocity. ‘No! Not that button’. ‘What are you, new?’, ‘Is this your first trip to the internet?’ and of course the dreaded (giant sigh) ‘…ugh, just, just….scoot over!’

Now, granted, I had just returned from a three year adventure living on a sunny beach in Mexico where people smiled all day - most likely because they were drunk or high but nonetheless I was surrounded by very happy people - so I may have been a little hypersensitive to the prison guard attitudes of Corporate IT.
To make matters worse at the time I was evangelizing a new-to-market product called Flash. I believed that Flash had the potential to finally enable distance learning to be more than a call bridge or a book in the mail.

Unfortunately Corporate and I didn’t exactly see eye to eye. Again and again they said ‘NO’ when asked to authorize the distribution of Flash based content across the networks via a web browser. ‘No’ they would shout and waggle their collective finger. ‘That is an unsupported platform’ or ‘it has all kinds of security vulnerabilities.’

What it really came down to however were two things. One; Flash content required the installation of the Flash player, an installation that required administrative rights and, two; their completely unfounded belief that because Flash developers were also publishing games and silly animations that granting access to the player would be akin to letting an atheist loose in the vaults of the Vatican i.e. all hell would break loose. They were convinced even Sprint created content would poison the network (and apparently blacken the souls) of the ‘normal user’.

Weighing all the factors, circumstances and attitudes our department soon arrived at a solution.
Ignore Corporate IT.

The battle raged for years, occasional icy stares were shot across crowded conference rooms by both sides and many a verbal backstab was heard behind closed doors. Eventually Corporate surrendered the now legendary ‘War of the Swf’ by admitting that they may have misjudged the importance of the technology about the same time that the Flash player peaked at 97% global adoption.

The whole lesson comes down to a simple wag the dog scenario. Corporate IT staff typically determines the value of business user technology by three measures; cost, support and risk before making a decision to approve or deny the adoption. All obviously very important but rarely is another important question asked ‘What are the business benefits?’

Fast forward ten years, replace the term ‘Social Media’ with the word Flash and surprise surprise surprise it’s exactly the same conversation.

Away from the Numbers

A few weeks ago Jason Hiner of Tech Republic wrote a great article titled ‘CIOs say IT should not block social media sites’ that sparked a great discussion here at Centriq Training. We have dozens of CIOs and hundreds of the brightest minds in IT every month here on campus. We decided to go further down the rabbit hole how IT really views social media and also test how in line their perceptions are with their companies.

The results

The Social Media train has left the station and IT wasn’t invited to board.

Our first question asked if IT should block access to all social media sites. 65% responded that, in their opinion, yes – IT should block all access. But wait, 77% of respondents also believe that Sales should have access to LinkedIn, 61% believe that Marketing should have access to Facebook and 58% believe that HR should have access to YouTube.

This confirms a trend that we identified at the end of last year that IT is moving towards an application exception policy bases on roles. Arguably, this may also indicate that IT isn’t entirely clear on the definition of social media in absence of brand names but then again not many people are clear.

Other interesting trends include the reaction of the poll takers to responsibility and inclusion. Overwhelmingly (100%) answered that IT should be included in defining the architecture, compliance, security and training plan for social media. Yet less than half (43%) feel that IT should be responsible for creating, enforcing or monitoring Social Media policy.

So, will IT survive Social Media?

Yes, but not as it is defined in the organization today. The numbers above were gathered from individuals in widely varied roles (server admins, network admins, CIOs, EC hackers, DBAs, CTOs …) and the one conversation they can universally agree on is that this thing called ‘Social Media’ is still too young to police as an industry.

IT must take the lead role in this march. The interface of today is already out of date, Enterprise software is a dinosaur and the cloud is coming – ready or not. The traditional role of IT as the organizations handcuffs must be reexamined and the pace of adoption must mirror the increasing pace of business. IT must add its voice and support to the business goals of their companies. To accomplish this IT must first recognize that not all new is all bad. The business use of these applications requires a unified information strategy that IT has the intelligence to architect. Today’s brand name applications are easy to use but the next generation I’m beta testing are highly complex and require more personal data to be pushed into even more widely distributed private networks. No longer will IT own the database, IT will own the path to databases.

To get started today look internally for a social media policy. If you don’t have one, create one immediately. Educate your IT teams on the basics of known security holes – especially social engineering – and offer to support your sales and marketing teams with whatever they need.

IT is one of the most critical components to any successful company, it’s time to get on board or continue to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.