Home > Over The Top > Issue 1 > The SocialITe
As end user organisations are driven to embrace new IT delivery models and working practices, they bring with them a host of IT challenges. The ‘social enterprise’ therefore is a great opportunity for resellers to get involved with, and dangerous to overlook.
Every organisation is becoming a ‘social enterprise’, with every user increasingly exercising their individual preferences for social networking communications, choice of personal smart device, and location/patterns of work. This is at a time when maturing delivery models for IT such as cloud, SaaS and virtualisation present new operational and policy challenges, while tightening opex pressures, compliance concerns, and ‘information inflation’ provoke CIOs and IT managers to explore greater automation of IT processes and better granularity of IT reporting. It’s very exciting to be in IT at this time, and VADition is in the vanguard of charting and capitalising upon this trend.
Much has been made recently about data privacy and the issues of having personal information available for public consumption. Google, Apple and Facebook have all been in the news because of their abilities to collect, store and share private information. While personal users worry about their privacy, we are all guilty of using these platforms (and others) to generate and broadcast more information about ourselves than was conceivable just a few years ago. Why? Well, not only are we eager to take advantage of the benefits of sharing information on a personal level, but we also increasingly depend on web-based social networking applications for business purposes. Indeed, successive reports and predictions from leading analysts like Gartner highlight the importance of these platforms to procurement and other critical business processes, and this adoption can only increase with each new wave of ‘digital natives’ reaching adulthood and joining the ranks of employees at UK plc.
Except for students and pensioners, there‘s no such thing as a user whose ‘personal information’ belongs 100% to them anyway. Where are your boundaries between work and personal IT activity, or have they all faded away? From a purely ‘information’ perspective, businesses need to be as open as possible in order to prosper as ‘social enterprises’, though how to stay open for business and keep information secure is a tightrope walk.
Watch this space when we return again to the issues around the social enterprise in future editions of Over The Top.
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