Will Millennials and BYOD Change the Role of IT?

In this Industry Buzz podcast, the UCStrategies experts debate the impact of millennials, or Generation Y, in the workplace; particularly the demands this places upon IT departments. The discussion is moderated by Michael Finneran, who is joined by UCStrategies experts Blair Pleasant, Kevin Kieller, Marty Parker, Don Van Doren, Art Rosenberg, Dave Michels, and Steve Leaden.

Michael Finneran: Hello everyone, this is Michael Finneran and I am here with a group of the UCStrategies experts to talk about the impact of millennials in the workplace, and particularily what the repercussions for the enterprise, for UC and for social networking tools. What inspired this was an article by Ryan Faas that showed up in Computerworld titled, How Mobile BYOD in Younger Workers ARE Reinventing IT.

Basically, it talks about the forces that are bringing about that change and particularily recommendations to IT professionals about how they should respond. "Annie bar the door" is not one of the options that is presented.

Of course, like many of you I grew up in the "command and control" mentality of IT. When I started, every desk got a PBX station, the model and number of buttons were determined by your job title; we had a 3270 terminal with access to a set of mainframe applications, later replaced by a fully managed PC or laptop. But now with the arrival of the millennials, we are seeing a completely new flavor and work. This is the first generation to grow up with broadband internet, mobile phones, and Facebook, and while highly motivated self-starters, they are starting to develop their own solutions independent of IT. So the question I am putting forth to our UCStrategies experts is, are we over the old Jimmie Fallon skit on Saturday night live, Nick Burns, your company's computer guy? That is, what should IT professionals be looking to do to support this new environment, and is this good or bad news for the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, and the other purveyors of enterprise UC solutions? Are they going to be a part of this picture or is the world going to be moving away from them? The first one of our experts who has a comment is Blair Pleasant, who has some observations from what she has seen at Cisco. Blair?

Blair Pleasant: One thing I see happening is, there is a big impact on how users are forming communities to support each other and the products that they are using. For example, I love the Cisco example of how Cisco and their IT department, they do not formally support the use of Macintosh computers and Apple computers. But if you walk around the Cisco campus or you go to conferences where there are Cisco people, you see tons of MacBooks and other Apple computers, and they do this by using social software and communities to support these devices. So IT does not support these Mac users, but the users support each other by using forums and Wiki's and social software communites. This takes some of the burden off IT and lets workers use the tools that they prefer to use. I think we are going to be seeing a lot more of this, and I think it is a great direction. I also like the idea that was pointed out in the article that users want to use other media channels for support rather than just calling the help desk. So as someone who follows the contact center and the multi-channel contact center, I think we are going to be seeing a lot more use of things like web chat and IM, SMS, and other media channels being used in the contact center.

I think in addition to the IT departments having to gear up for this, the contact center vendors also have to be cognizant of some of the changes that are going on, and really tie in these other channels that some of these workers are going to want to be using. So I think in a way it is actually going to make the job of the IT manager easier in some ways, but obviously also a lot harder in other ways.

Michael Finneran: Thank you Blair, there is quite an emphasis on social networking tools, but I know we have Kevin Keeler with us today, and Kevin does not see that big of a change in the role of IT. Kevin, how do you see this shaping up?

Kevin Kieller: Well thank you, Michael. I don't believe that the role of IT is changing. The writer concludes in the last paragraph of the article that the most difficult challenge is "accepting that the way IT has operated for more than a generation is ending," and I don't believe this. When we saw mainframes become PC and then the PC's became laptops, the role of IT didn't change. While mobile devices and tablets today are fantastic and bring your own device or bring your friend's device or bring your spouse's device are interesting approaches, none of these changes require a well executing IT department to change its roles. At best, I think the article does remind IT of several things that have always been the case. The author talks about the millennials seeking out and bringing their own technical solutions, this really is not a new phenomenon. There has always been shadow IT groups in larger organizations, and many departments, marketing, HR, finance, have gone outside the organization's IT group and brought in external expertise when they needed business solutions and they needed them now. For over 20 years, I have argued that it really is the role of IT to lead and manage not to control, and really, this is still the case today.

In organizations, the HR group implements policies. For instance, perhaps you get two weeks of vacation per year. Finance implements policies: you may be able to only expense up to $60 in meals per day when traveling. Similarly, the role of IT and the CIO is to define and implement policies that align with the overall business objectives. Just because you are a millennial doesn't mean you can take as much vacation as you want or incur hundreds of dollars of meal expenses per day or arbitrarily ignore IT policies. You can and, like everyone else, you should question IT policies you feel are not supporting the business objectives, this questioning and subsequent discussion may in fact cause the policies to be changed and this is a good process. Similarly in the article, many of the trends mentioned I do not see as really new, but they do serve as a good reminder. For example, one trend noted where users taking ownership of their processes and technology. The truth is business has always been the driver for a successful IT department and successful CIO's. Technology for the sake of technology is often what has caused failed projects. Not a new trend, but definitely a good reminder. And then the article goes on to provide what I consider some very generic advice: "maintain positive experiences in interactions with all users." Who can argue with that? And I would like to add also, eat your fruits and vegetables. "Be willing to listen to and truly consider users suggestions." Once again, sure, I hope this is not new to anybody and it is very good but very generic advice.

But then in fact interspersed there is some questionable advice. There was some suggestion that you should develop solutions that are platform independent or equivalent solutions for major platforms in use. I totally disagree with this. Supporting multiple platforms always requires additional investment. What you need to do is support the platforms that are required by the business, no more, no less. Another suggestion was, expand beyond help desk phones as the primary communication method. Once again, only if in your organization this improves the business process. I would say, don't fall into the trap of thinking you need to use IM or Facebook or Twitter for support just because some millennials use these tools. Match the solutions with the business requirements, demand measurable objectives and outcomes from any technology solution.

The first sentence of the Computer World article begins, "despite big changes in technology over the past couple of decades, IT departments and the duties of their staff have stayed pretty consistent." This is stated as if it is a bad thing; I would argue that for well-run IT shops, staying consistent was and is a good thing. For poorly run IT shops, whether the millennials appear or not you have some work to do. I don't see the role of IT changing, however, let's send it back to you Michael and hear from some brighter and certainly better-looking UCStrategies colleagues.

Michael Finneran: Thank you, Kevin. You mentioned those important transitions in the past from mainframes to PC's and now to BYOD initiatives, of course, in many cases we found that IT was taking a "bar the door" mentality back in those days. But I do like your advice about matching the solution to the problem rather than following the crowd. I know Marty, you come down much on the same side as Kevin on this.

Marty Parker: I am not going to start with the brighter or more handsome comment, I will just go on from what Kevin had to say that I think it has been highlighted already - that the article tends to make this out as an either/or situation. The article is way too black and white, and what the article touches on but does not develop very clearly is that this calls for proactive communication and education. So as Kevin says, there is a need to communicate the policies: "why are we doing what we do? Why do we have to encrypt things, why do we not let private company data or personal data on mobile devices?" Let people understand this in some briefings and maybe these briefings need to be mandatory in order to have your job. There are employee orientation briefings that are refreshed once a year just like other compliance policies might, because done wrong, this self service, and I will say self-serving behavior by overly enthusiastic employees, no matter what their age, can expose the company to embarrassment, to lawsuits, to fines or worse. So it's a business management challenge that has to be addressed and I think that Kevin said some good things about that.

The second thing I would say is that IT... the article doesn't say and let me put it out here for consideration... IT should be part of the user community; best practices show this in many of our UniComm Consulting clients. Many of our healthcare IT organizations have staff members that do rounds just as doctors do rounds in the various wings and wards and clinics. They do rounds of their users each day or once a week to see, how are you doing, where are you having problems? What screens do you not understand? Are you having any problems with delays or system performance? They are part of that community. Well, if that community starts to adopt IM or Chat or social communities as Blair pointed out, great, be part of that community, be in that community so you can help the people get their job done. We see this in insurance with IT representatives in the different lines of business and I think it's going to be true in many, many, corporations and public or private enterprises and by using these communities, they can be both a blessing and a risk. A community without any IT support for it just on their own, kind of as Blair provides, runs the risk of having someone you've hired as senior engineer to create a new product turning into being the smartest guy in the community and becoming a help desk manager. That's not what you want; what you want is a help desk person to be part of that community so they can help solve the problem without taking the engineer's eye or mind off of their work.

As to the roles in IT, they are constantly evolving and here in communications, unified communications, and telecommunications, we are seeing this in spades. It used to be that a PBX was an all-inclusive product - that just isn't true anymore. The infrastructure is no longer part of the PBX, it has been broken out into gateways and routers and switches. The application software is no longer running in the PBX, it is running in a virtual machine somewhere in the enterprise, a cloud, private cloud or somewhere out in the public cloud, and it's managed by different people than those people who manage the infrastructure. And finally what used to be a telecom team that took care of phones on the desk is merging into the desktop help desk because guess what, an IP phone is basically a computer with a black frame around it. It's still a computer and it still looks like an IP endpoint so most of our clients are merging those two departments together. They don't have two, one for telecom, one for PC's, it's a desktop team and often that desktop team is responsible for the user experience with the applications like I mentioned in healthcare doing the rounds. Because the application platforms are run by database administrators, but the user experience, how their iPad works with that application platform, is a user experience that the help desk team cares for. We posted an article, it's still on our site at unicomconsulting.com about this about three years ago, four years ago. About six months later Gartner came out and did a similar article about the evolution of the IT organization. We both make the same point that it's layering out especially in the communications industry just like it is layered out in other applications in the past. So the article is a wonderful service to us because it caused us to have this conversation, but I don't think it is as black and white as they depict.

Michael Finneran: Very good, Marty. Thank you. Like Kevin, you also alluded to the shadow IT. It is one of the disturbing things I have seen particularly in the mobile space with BYOD, one of the big savings that IT departments were talking about involved abdicating support, basically making it the user's problem. I had actually written a blog on that on NoJitter a few weeks back titled, Head in the Sand, Career in the Toilet, which basically made the point that this is the most important thing that is going on - you still need to engage with the users. But certainly security and compliance are going to be a big issue when we are still waiting for the security bomb to go off. I know Don, you see some real opportunities in this.

Don Van Doren: Well I do, Michael, thank you very much. I would like to start out by saying that in my view, helping line of business employees better understand how to use innovative technology tools has been an important and a growing important job for the IT department for the last couple of decades. I think what we have seen, frankly, is that history shows that there has really been a series of missed opportunities. Marty and I happen to go back to the voicemail days and there is a really good example of how voicemail became just a telephone answering service as opposed to a really innovative way to have a proactive two-way messaging capability. But there are lots of these kinds of examples and I think traditionally the problem has been two-fold. On one hand, people in the middle layers of the IT department have tended to stay in their own comfortable sort-of "technology cocoons" where they are. They don't understand how business gets done, how a company earns money, how technology can improve those processes, and so that's been, I think, a real part of the problem.

On the other hand, business managers don't really understand how innovative technology could change how work gets done; they tend to stay within their known world. After all, they are "Managers" and they manage with the tools that they are comfortable with and familiar with, and too often they are disinterested in trying new things because they have got something that works and they are reluctant to try something else. Clearly what's needed here is some kind of a bridge, and while I think the article didn't really focus as much on that particular issue, I think that has been a growing problem over the last couple of decades. As Marty pointed out we are starting to see some companies that really are doing a good job of this. Marty mentioned insurance, an insurance client of ours actually, that has IT people directly embedded within some of the line of business organizations. Similar things (are) in the healthcare industry. So we are seeing a lot of this kind of bridging happen and I think the millennials can help in all this. They welcome new ideas, they are usually willing partners with IT initiatives to find these kinds of innovation solutions. I think that whether it's a new role for IT or not, Kevin argues no it's not, I think that it is a different kind of a focus, at a minimum. It is not about policy, it is not about just setting policy, it is much more about how do we get engaged with the end users? How do we help them discover what the use cases are? How do we understand where these kinds of opportunities can really be assisted by some of the new capabilities that are coming? This kind of partnership I think is going to be really important going forward. Back to you, Michael.

Michael Finneran: Well thank you, Don. It seems we are coming back to a central theme here, which is while IT might not be changing; certainly there is this view toward IT engaging with end users and delving into business processes. I know Art, this is a topic that is right down your alley, what would you have to add?

Art Rosenberg: I am definitely in agreement with everything that has been said before but I think I would like to just clarify something that wasn't mentioned in that article, especially with BYOD. That is, the whole concept of a single device, a Smartphone or a tablet whatever, and BYOD policies but that that device really has more than one persona. That's where the problem has been. IT is responsible for the enterprise persona, the business persona; they are not responsible for anything else that the end user might do with that device, and that is what is happening. People are saying I am bringing my own device and guess what - I want to use it for everything. Where do you draw the line and how do you do that? I think that that is going to be the key missing link. Here is the domain that IT, business IT, has got to take responsibility for in all the ways that you all have mentioned already, help them expand it and use it for mobile applications or whatever, and making it two-way and so on. But it has got to be able to work comfortably on the same device that that end user is going to use for whatever else they want to use it for. That is not the responsibility of the enterprise, and so you have (to have) policies for the enterprise portion persona, if you will. And then you have whatever else that that user is using it for and there is going to be someone else, maybe it is a service provider, maybe it is another company, whatever, that is going to be responsible for that domain of usage.

I think I just want to highlight that, because there are so many different areas that IT can take added responsibility to work with from a technology perspective in terms of, if it is not hardware, it is software, so it's virtualization, which means who knows where it is? It maybe used hosted and cloud based services applications that they just have to manage, but they do not develop it themselves... Then there is the whole area of the contact center in terms of who people are trying to contact. It is not necessarily customers contacting the business, it's really anybody contacting anyone involved with the business process within an organization and outside the organization, business partners as well as customers. So there is an expansion going to go on, but it has got to be organized and structured - not just in terms of the flexibility of the technology but also the domain management and who is responsible for what and how do you encourage all the new stuff and take charge of things that break or go wrong. So that is it in a nutshell is what I have been trying to add in here.

Michael Finneran: Thanks very much, Art. When you were talking about the dual persona capability, it reminded me of a conversation I had with a VP of marketing of a company that specializes in mobile application security and much to the point we have been making here. He related a story talking to one CIO whose comment was, he was simply waiting for the security bomb to go off to bring everyone's attention to the exposures we have been creating here. Now I know Dave Michels also has something to add to this. Dave, where do you come down on this?

Dave Michels: Thanks, Michael. I've been biting my tongue because all of you have everything wrong on this particular podcast. None of you have it more wrong than Kevin really, all except for the part where he referred to all of us as, "brighter and better looking." The main thing that I object to with Kevin is that he is saying the role of IT is to lead and manage, and I disagree with that. There are various parts of the company that need to lead and manage the technology infrastructure and that certainly falls into the CIO's realm. But generally speaking, IT is chartered with operations, security and data integrity. To manage that environment in a supportable way often involves saying no to minimize variation, and IT has gotten a bad rap over the years. Now all of a sudden, "no" doesn't seem to hold up so well because there are so many readily available options that just take a web browser and a credit card. It is liberating many organizations to do what they want. This is creating a key challenge for IT around operations, security, and integrity, as well as of course, supportability.

There are two key shifts that are happening now - certainly mobility and BYOD that we talk a lot about here on UCStrategies. And these are both good things, but it is stressing dramatically the security and integrity capabilities of IT. And then the second component is that all these new services are dramatically much simpler than they used to be before. The complexity of IT is disappearing and doesn't require lab-coated technicians to set things up any more. The iPhone has more computing power than the Apollo spacecraft did, and of course, the Apollo spacecraft was managed by rocket scientists. This lowers the bar dramatically and is making IT accessible, which is good in many ways, but again further stresses with IT's responsibility around security and data integrity.

We have all kinds of issues. We have had clear Supreme Court rulings that say, for example, information on a corporate computer belongs to the corporation. And it is not clear now when you put that same information on a personal mobile device (BYOD device), who that information belongs to. That is creating significant challenges for IT. We want to make the data available and accessible and we want to use the BYOD models, because it makes financial sense, but it is unchartered territory. We have all kinds of issues coming up as a result of these changes. And the article talked about these different rules that are strengthening and emerging and what they talked about is that "business liaison," at the end of the article, is exactly the role that is to lead and manage.

I think that role is becoming much more important. It is almost ironic, because as IT is becoming simpler for IT professionals, it's actually becoming more complex. Setting up a Novell server was actually no big deal, an NT server was no big deal. Setting up an EC2 instance with high availability and dynamic storage is trickier and requires some new skills. It's actually forcing IT to become more vertical in depth, as opposed to horizontal across the business units, which is creating an opportunity for the business liaison role so that they can bridge that gap and lead and manage.

So those are my thoughts on it. Back to you, Michael.

Michael Finneran: Dave thank you very much as always. Steve Leaden?

Steve Leaden: Thank you Michael. I found this article very interesting. I have, personally, three Gen Y sons and I could very much relate to the topic and the article a lot of what our colleague, Ryan Faas, was saying here. I think the changes here really are inevitable; these are truly market shifts, and when they become market shifts it's a matter of, do you adopt to it, or do you get left behind? So we'll have to see where that goes.

In my opinion, the "new" reinvented IT requires real forward-thinking CIOs who want to really embrace these technologies. And in my opinion these forward-thinking CIOs need to consider the BYOD adoption, they need to be looking at short and long-term strategies around these gen y'ers, and these new policies and procedures that supports and responds to this market shift.

So let's keep in mind that these are market forces are eventual and really not at the individual discretion of the CIO. So really in my opinion it's time to consider looking at tools that these Gen Yers have already adopted on the consumer side of the market. It always starts with consumers and then expands into the commercial space.

Things as Ryan was referring to, such as texting, IM/chat, presence, videoconferencing, as just four examples of the UC tools available, are being used on a daily basis by these gen y'ers. To me it's just a matter of time before it becomes a "have to" in the commercial space.

We're going to see significant growth in UC with this new generation, really it's going to be ingrained in the next few years as part of the telecom and IT landscapes. It will become a have-to. Like all market and cultural shifts, anything like this will take time, in my opinion, before it's fully loaded and fully ramped-up, another 36, maybe even up to another 60 months.

One last thought here is that help desk functions within IT need really need to have SLAs attached to them, just like VARs have SLAs, and some departments have done that, and using tools such as e-mail, chat, texting, and other tools really helps reinforce and confirm these SLAs just as is being done by the vendor community.

So let's see what happens, but I'm a real believer that this is a cultural shift, and I'm really seeing this taking place, especially in those who are close to me. And again, in my opinion, this is a market shift - not just a one-off that you can just purely think about. Back to you, Michael.

Michael Finneran: Thanks, Steve. So this is a challenging topic and one that is open to a variety of opinions as we have seen here from our UCStrategies experts. To wrap it up, IT clearly is not going away, and there are still important responsibilities and forward-thinking IT organizations taking these matters into account but not jettisoning their core responsibilities within the organization. So with that I would like to thank all the UCStrategies experts who participated today, hope you found this interesting and we will talk to you again next week. Take care.