back to article BYOD trend could kill off role of CIO – SCC

The traditional role of the CIO is under threat as the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) phenomenon crosses into the mainstream. But the channel is set to feel the impact too, or so says reseller-cum-integrator SCC, whose CTO today delivered a keynote on 'Architecting Choice' to the CIO Connect Conference in London, identifying …

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  1. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. K
    Coffee/keyboard

    Holy sh*t

    Was this a press release that you just republished... it reminds of

    1) SaaS wouild put all IT Departments out of work

    2) Virtualisation would lead to mass lay offs because servers would be so consolidated

    3) Cloud would remove the need for businesses to have their own servers

    4) Tape was dead and D2D would rule the world

    Do you honestly believe this drivel? Please if you want to print it, at least put some reality into it!

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This will happen...

    Right up to the moment that massive amounts of company data gets lost. They byod than fine, it stays out of the office or at home. It isn't being used on the company network unless the company provides it and secures it as necessary.

  4. Spearchucker Jones
    WTF?

    Call me crazy but...

    I'd always thought the CIO's role was to ensure that IT capability (from, for example, information design, and HR, ERP and CRM to services and service integration, ending at Office and IM) supports the business, at a STARTEGIC level. And supported by enterprise architects.

    The actual implementation, i.e. selection, deployment and implementation/management of software, network and compute infrastructure, security and similar policies, is down to the CTO, supported by various solution architects and technical experts.

    Given that this article states that BYOD will kill the CIO role I'd love to understand what CIO really means in that (BOYD) context.

    1. Robert Sneddon
      Holmes

      Re: Call me crazy but...

      I note with interest that the bod who produced this pile of drivel is himself a CTO. It's possible he's hoping for a CIO post to open up in his own company and is taking this opportunity to, as the BOFH would say, grease the stairwell treads...

  5. Dave Perry
    Meh

    Erm

    Whilst the statement about BYOD being a BIG change for IT is fair, I always thought CIOs did more policy than implementation. And getting the policy right and practical seems to be the big issue at the moment, so I wouldn't write them off just yet

  6. keithpeter Silver badge
    Windows

    Architecting Choice

    "...delivered a keynote on 'Architecting Choice' to the CIO Connect Conference...."

    How can people give talks with titles like 'Architecting Choice'? I mean, can you actually imagine typing that phrase onto the title page of a presentation?

    Why does anyone go to talks with titles like this?

    Can someone explain? Have I missed a whole substratum of human activity here?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Architecting Choice

      It's a junket, right?

      Who cares what it's about, the title is just to convince somebody else that the company should pay for them to fly somewhere.

  7. Robert Grant
    FAIL

    How's this?

    So I worked onsite at a customer for a long time - a demanding, doesn't-suffer-fools-gladly customer. They kicked out several of our project managers, and the last one stayed around part-time but the customer wouldn't pay for him. He started bringing an iPad into work instead of a laptop, and - in between his slow peckings-out of short emails - rare would be the day you wouldn't hear the phrase, "Can I email you this contract to print?"

    BYOD - if it's a tablet, it's not for the productive (until maybe Surface?).

  8. taxman
    WTF?

    What title?

    "He said users taking their own tech into the office are defining their own productivity needs."

    Sack the CIO that allows this to happen in the first place!

    Why bother even locking the doors at night?

    1. Ru
      Paris Hilton

      Re: What title?

      'workers will "find ways to circumvent the rules"'

      The traditional response to this involves firing those workers. Why has it become acceptable to let employees flagrantly violate data security rules simply because they are paying for the devices that let them do so?

      The whole BYOD thing seems like madness.

      1. Ian Johnston Silver badge
        Thumb Down

        Re: What title?

        Perhaps there are more important things than sticking to IT department's rules? Perhaps the people circumventing the rules are making money for the company, unlike the IT departments which are spending it? May because IT departments should be there to support the company's mission and the productive workers who implement it, rather than to create byzantine rules and sit back smugly?

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

        2. Ru
          Meh

          Re: What title?

          "Perhaps the people circumventing the rules are making money for the company, unlike the IT departments which are spending it?"

          Well, there's a tricky situation. There's and endless parade of disasterous, expensive or embarassing security failures and information leaks by people who didn't want to jump through hoops; everything's easier if you just tell people the password to use, if you don't bother with encryption, if you just take a load of work home with you so you can get it all sorted before some deadline.

          In all these cases, if there were byzantine rules, there was no enforcement of them... they were purely discretionary.

          So now you want to make this situation even more difficult for your IT staff, who you apparently view as the enemy. Now they not only have to trust that regular money-making valuable employees will not make any mistakes (and history has shown that this is often a bad idea) but now they also have to trust that the devices they bring in run up-to-date, secure operating systems and applications. They have to trust that the OS devs will release timely patches, and that the mobile network operators will push these patches out, and that the users will install them. History has shown that this isn't a great assumption either.

          If your IT staff don't realise they're performing a service for the rest of the company, then the company management and HR have made poor recruitment decisions. If you think that data security rules are a pointless obstruction to your valuable work, then I'd say that your management and HR have made another poor recruitment decision, and I rather hope that you're not ever responsible for my personal data and the financial wellbeing of companies in which I have invested.

  9. hmmm

    Some idiot with an iPhone and Dropbox thinks he can run a business off it? Let him off.

  10. Colin Millar
    Boffin

    Glossary

    Can we have a standard glossary for interpreting rehashed press releases from marketing firms

    Here are my suggestions

    Reseller-cum-integrator = someone who sells the same old stuff as everyone else but calls it "cloud-based" cos it can do wifi/3g connections or XXXX ready cos it won't do XXXX but the next version might.

    Analyst = stock brokers fluffer - AKA pump and dump operator

    Channel - no semantic value detected

  11. JustinST
    WTF?

    Utter drivel

    Surely the role of Chief INFORMATION Officer become rather more significant if a company decides to implement a policy of allowing company INFORMATION to be saved on personal devices.

  12. Dare to Think
    IT Angle

    What a waste of time....

    It appears ElReg needs to fill the website. I mean, BYOD is a real threat to CIO activities, such as service strategy and design, IT architectural frameworks, strategic platform consolidation et cetera. I mean, with BOYD those employees will bring their own Oracle RAC with dataguard replication implementation on a bunch of really cheapo M5000s, correctly partitioned and PA-DSS compliant. BOYD will also solve data architecture, strong encryption, HSM farms and LMK key creation - the employees do this in the morning between two sips of coffee! Never mind that Citrix and VNC cluster which enables...BOYD. Maybe BOYD will implode into oblivion because of BOYD?

  13. Gordon 10
    Mushroom

    Right conclusion wrong reasons

    The CIO/CTO is an endangered species but nothing to do with BYOD. Its more to do with the CFO realising that up to 25% (or more) of a companies expenses are IT, and the corresponding desire to control those expenses (and the budget) that goes with it. Cue a decade of embarrising data leakage and high profile technical failures until they realise why they need an IT SME at Cxx level.

  14. Peter 39

    Think of the savings !!

    CIO's are tired of being beaten up over IT budgets and see BYOD as a way of solving the problem. The consequent expenses ... well, they'll come later.

    For those of you too young to remember, this is similar to the "movement" in the 70's towards departmental minicomputers (think, DEC and similar). Departments were unable to get work done because the mainframe-based IT folks took years to do anything. So the departments just started doing it themselves. The "PC revolution" was, in fact, less of a revolution than the minicomputer one.

    BYOD is another turn of the wheel. So, read your history to see where this is going. Look especially at (1) what IBM does today and, (2) what DEC does.

  15. Christian Berger

    It's the 1990s all over again

    When companies binned their Unix servers and Terminals for unconnected PCs, then built little Novel then Windows servers with separate networks. That's _still_ the main cause of headaches for sysadmins today.

    So remember, the most important part of IT is to not follow short term trends. Whenever a new technology comes along look at how you can use it wisely and choose only the technologies which are beneficial.

    1. The Godfather
      Meh

      Re: It's the 1990s all over again

      Amen, but don't rubbish other people's idea's and visions. Edison was thought of as a freak....

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It's the 1990s all over again

        And we know now he was a thief and a liar. The analogy stands, I think...

  16. Sirius Lee

    The Register keeps pushing this nonsense

    Please provide a peer reviewed piece of independent research involving a statistically significant number of companies wanting to pursue BYOD and which shows how the CIO/CEO/CFOs are going to manage their responsibilities to shareholders with this tactic. I'd love to know and in the meantime, it ain't happening in my company.

    BYOD is a fantasy of the hardware device manufacturers and Apple who want to find a way to have their products, which are not enterprise ready, in the enterprise by the back door. It is staggering to me that the register keeps pumping this message. I can only assume there is some reward for not just binning each of these articles.

    Maybe the belief is that if its said often enough it will become reality. Wake up! You're dreaming again.

    1. K
      Pint

      It is staggering to me that the register keeps pumping this message

      Amen... El-Reg, wake up and smell the coffee..

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The real reason this won't happen

    The CIO is on the board. The board's main job is to look after each other. The board are not going to allow the implementation of any technology that will cost one of them their job.

    Or am I just being a bit cynical?

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