Page 477 - Using MIS

Q5 2025? 445

Finally, you have a responsibility to treat information systems professionals professionally.
Everyone works for the same company, everyone wants to succeed, and professionalism and
courtesy will go a long way on all sides. One form of professional behavior is to learn basic com-
puter skills so that you avoid reporting trivial problems.

Q5 2025?

Many changes and developments will have a major effect on the organizational management of
IS and IT resources in the next 10 years. Most organizations will move their internal hardware
infrastructure into the cloud. Sure, some companies will be concerned enough about security
that they’ll keep some data on their own, privately controlled servers, but vast amounts of hard-
ware infrastructure will migrate to the cloud. Running a computer center for anyone other than
a cloud vendor is not a promising career.
We will most certainly see the rise in the use of mobile devices at work. Mobile devices will
become cheaper, more powerful, with dynamic, maybe even game-like user experiences. They
will be ubiquitous. Organizations will develop BYOD policies that meet their needs and strate-
gies, and many will encourage employees to bring their own devices to work. Meanwhile, IoT
(the Internet of Things) will offer the opportunity for innovation in operations, manufacturing,
and supply chain management.
By 2025, organizations will use social media inside the organization in true Enterprise 2.0
style. Organizational knowledge management will be done using social media, and most proj-
ects will have a social media component, or perhaps that has it backward. Social media sites will
have a project component.
Meanwhile, organizations will continue to lose control, as summarized in the Security
Guide on pages 448–449, while mobile devices are becoming even more popular. When employ-
ees come to work with their own computing devices that are just as powerful as any computer
they have at work, and when those devices access networks that are paid for by the employees,
how will the IS department maintain control?
For a few years, organizations may be able to maintain some semblance of control with re-
strictive BYOD policies. That policy will work for a while, but ultimately it’s doomed. For one, at
some point that policy will put employees at a competitive disadvantage. Employees will want
to access the network using whatever hardware they have, wherever they happen to be. If they
can’t, their competitors will.
But there’s a second reason that limiting access to the corporate network won’t work.
Employees will move off the network! “Ah, we can’t access SharePoint from our iPads, so let’s
use my Google Drive instead of the corporate SharePoint site. I’ll share my folder with the whole
team, and then we can get to it using our own mobile devices. Here, I’ll copy the data from the
computer at work onto my Drive, and we can take it from there.” Or “Let’s create a Google+
circle.” Or . . .
Now, all the corporate data is out on someone’s Google Grid or Google+ account or some-
where else and has been shared with, well, who knows? Employee Jones made a mistake; in-
stead of sharing her Google+ circle with her teammates at work, she shared it on a public circle.
Now, anyone, or any crawler, that stumbles over that data has access to it.
By 2025, the most important change to the IS department in organizations will be cultural.
With the increasing IS sophistication of senior management, the CIO will become, finally, a full-
fledged member of the executive suite, and IS will be seen no longer as a hindrance on organi-
zational strategy and growth but as a key player for gaining competitive advantage. The ubiquity
of social media and mobile devices will focus attention on the role that IS can play in achieving
organizational goals.