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Why IT Needs To Change for Gen Z
An anonymous reader writes "Staff will routinely be bringing their own devices to work in five years time, according to IT industry experts in the UK. Some companies might already allow a few iPhones and iPads, but CIOs and businesses are not only going to have to support a general influx of consumer kits — they're going to need to get a whole lot more relaxed in general. 'Big businesses are going to have to become more flexible about how IT is provisioned and managed — to enable a new generation of workers who use consumer technologies to communicate and be productive.'"
Staff will routinely be bringing their own devices to work in five years time, according to IT industry experts in the UK
Not where I work. Seriously, a *LOT* would have to change - like a move away from Windows networks, and that's not going to happen (sorry).
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Bringing in non-managed hardware would be a security and support nightmare.
its one thing allowing a personal phone to hit your email server, ( since connecting to them often means you get some control, such as remote wipe and its no worse than offering webaccess to mail ) but its a far different issue letting people bring in their personal computers and expect to have them on the network.
No thanks.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, while I'm in charge, they can bring them alright but they can't plug them or use them for anything work related. Won't there be a capacity for company issued devices in five years time?
It SHOULD come down to a simple business decision.
Is the advantage of adding those devices going to bring in more revenue than the extra effort and lost/compromised data is going to cost?
Sorry, no matter what the generation, they should not be allowed to bring more attack vectors and security vulnerabilities in to the workplace.
They are not special snowflakes, and their personal devices are not necessary for productivity.
Businesses where mobile devices are useful and helpful should already have their infrastructures designed to handle it, so again Gen Z will make no difference.
It doesn't matter what generation anyone belongs to -- you'll do things the way the employer wants them done, or you won't be employed.
Now, are there some new technologies that are in common use in the consumer market that can be used effectively in the business environment? Probably, yes. And businesses will use them if it makes sense in their environment. But they won't use them because the pouty-faced punks with their newly-minted college degrees will throw a hissy-fit if the boss doesn't let them use their personal gadgets.
Business don't give a damn about their current employees, let alone potential future employees. You'll do as you're told if you want the money... and eating is such an addictive hobby.
Of course, young people just might start up their own businesses where everyone can stay focused on their iWhatevers all day, and if it's better than the old businesses than the young folks will win. I wouldn't put my money in their stock, though.
This will not happen in the US outside of some niche industries. Companies have too much legal exposure to take the risk some porn site malware is logging credit card info from all the customers the support people helped today.
I don't know the laws in the UK, but I suspect the same would apply.
True dat.
Keep your fucking cellphone in your pocket, or better yet, leave it at home.
Nothing worse than having an assistant or coworker who spends every free second texting everybody and their brother.
How the fuck are they supposed to stay focused at work?
Not only that, but C-Level executives are also the biggest security problem in a company. I am neither exaggerating nor is it the usual management-bashing.
Usually they will insist for no good (read: work related) reason on being exempt to content filtering and require local administration rights on their computers. Why? Beats me. Maybe an ego thing, how could that support tech grunt have more "power" over my machine than me? Personally, I had to be browbeat into accepting administrative rights on my machine. No rights - plausible deniability when something hits the fan.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because "gen Z" is even thicker than "gen Y"?
Yes, companies are way too uptight about security. After all, it's not like there have been a lot of breakins or anything.
BTW what comes after "Gen Z"? Oh. Wait. The Rapture was yesterday. Nevermind.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Hush, codemonkey.
I know well how much you want that 12 gig i7 rig to ... well, to do what? Save a second per compile? Learn to code and don't rely on the compiler and linker to find your glaring syntax errors! The next codemonkey that tells me it's too time consuming to compile on his "old" machine should be fired on the spot!
(well? How does it feel?)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And companies that support confidential or secure environments, like where I work, don't even allow cell phones with cameras (or other such devices). Some areas/places even require that one leave *all* their personal electronic devices offsite. Yes, the "real world" might be a shock to Gen Z...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
There aren't any "internal customers" because the concept of "customer" contains the element of "choice". If you don't like the service, you go to a different vendor. Internal departments do NOT have that option.
The implication being that those "new workers" will be worth the additional considerations. I'm sure you can find enough skilled workers who do not demand that you support their personal electronics.
As can be said with most fads and bubbles. The question isn't whether it will be happening but whether it will be a new requirement. Or will it happen and then fade as the security issues become evident?
Who cares about the software? It's the data that is important?
It's about the data, not the software.
Losing credit card info is a problem.
Getting Excel running on your phone is not an issue.
That depends upon the situation. Do you have read-only access via a secured web site?
What does he REALLY want to accomplish?
He is the CEO. But that just means that he is the CEO.
You can always find a new job.
It's easier to find a new job while you're still working.
Rather than AFTER you're fired because the company hits the papers for losing credit card info because of how you put a hole into your security for the CEO.
And you know that it will be YOU who is fired first and blamed for not keeping the place secure enough.
The biggest entitlement problem with people and their own devices is they feel like they can use their work time for personal phone calls, tweeting, updating their facebook status, IMing, etc. The policy should be more like steal the company's time, your frickin' fired!
I work in IT security and I have been told in no uncertain terms what my job is by upper management.
They don't want to find themselves having to put something in the notes to the financials that our trade secrets have leaked, or that our competitors no our costs. They don't want to be embarrassed and have to apologize for leaking customer data. We are a manufacturing company we sell tools to professionals they expect us to be professions as well as look it. Management does not want to look like Sony.
I don't get off on saying "no" to people. I really don't but if I let a device be connected to the network I have to be able to know DLP policies are being followed. That means I probably have to have more control over your toys than you want me to have, or you have to settle less than great experiences. No you can't read e-mail on your IPhone APP, you can use Citrix to read it in Notes via your IPhone, and yes that probably is to painful to be worth while. We can't afford a large cached copy of your mail file to be sitting on a device you might lose which *may* be recoverable by its next possessor.
Your personal laptop, certainly if you let me put our full disk encryption software on it, and our endpoint policy enforcement tools and only IT Security gets root. You won't like that though, and I know it. Trouble is I don't have better solutions.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Agreed, it became a issue at my workplace with the guys on the warehouse floor, they are moving large heavy objects while operating forklifts while constantly texting. You cant get their attention cause its also jacked into their ears for MP3, and if you ask them a question they cant tell you what they did 5 seconds ago cause they are totally unfocused on their 1 simple task.
Starting Monday if we see a celphone on the floor your gone, period.
So true. My favorite exemption often demanded is the (already idiotic and not helpful to general security) policy of periodically changing passwords. We peons are expected to come up with a secure, non-duplicated and non-derivative password every 3-6 months that we can somehow remember, while the executives don't want to change theirs since it was already a stretch to remember their wife's birthday for their current password.
No, don't fuck them. You'll get disease. Take a long, sharpened pole and drive it through their soft, squishy, boneless bodies. Pin them to the ground, pour gasoline on them and set them on fire.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
Wake up!
You are a cost center.
You exist only to enable productive people to produce more efficiently.
You aren't in charge of anything.
You work for us.
Continue to annoy us and you will be replaced.
Just like the guy in the tool room that used to guard the pin gauges and the hammers like he owned them.
And the facilities guy who refused to add a 30 Amp circuit or run a Nitrogen line.
The IT support model that treats everyone like a serf doing word processing is over.
The design engineers need nonstandard hardware to do modeling. They might even need multiple computers.
In fact every individual user has specific and unusual needs that they understand better than you do.
And it's Not your call. Make it happen or go extinct. Computers aren't a new special thing anymore.
Many of us users understand every aspect of your network as well or better than you do,
we just have better things to do.
Things that are central to the business and make money.
Hey, this is your turf, and I understand that change is hard, and that you need to grumble, bitch, rant, whatever.
get it all out. It won't change anything though.
Exactly. And when the reporters come calling for quotes about how the crackers got the credit card numbers from us, it will NOT be the CEO who is fired for the security failure.
Not exactly. Someone else who CLAIMS that they can do it will be hired. What do I care? They'll be the one fired when the reporters come calling.
There will ALWAYS be SOMEONE who will claim to be able to do the impossible.
Remember that, people. The company will NOT waste a single moment firing you if it will protect the CEO. You don't owe the company a single moment of loyalty.
Do your job.
Collect your pay.
Advise them as best you can.
Move on when the situation calls for it.
IT people are the guys who keep the baddies out of the COMPANY network, the one that you want to connect all your little toys to. They're the ones who are charged with producing the most stuff from the least money, which requires common standards so they don't have to spend hours or days trying to work out why some manager didn't/couldn't read the 1-page of instructions with his/her latest trinket and set it up wrong.
The point is, we all work for the shareholders and they don't care if you want to use your latest little phone to access stuff. They want the lowest cost of operation, the fewest number of lawsuits for data loss and data thefts and they don't want different individuals craching their company on a daily basis just so they can show off some new status symbol.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You get 3 months between password changes? 'til I started in our company we had a MONTH between changes, with the usual "let your cat jump on the keyboard" PW requirements. Net result? People tacked post-its to their screens. Or into their drawers, when auditors complained about it.
This is not adding to security, it's reducing security. A friend of mine had a pretty neat idea how to keep PWs secure and at the same time get people to use secure PWs, without even having a PW policy. Ok, he has one policy: You cannot use the same password for at least 20 changes.
What he did is he wrote a program that continuously tried to crack passwords. If yours was cracked, you had to change it. People very quickly decided it's less hassle to actually use secure passwords (they came and ASKED how to keep the damn system from having to change every other day). Of course, this only works with people who actually need their computers every day so it becomes enough of a nuisance for them to adapt and have an interest in having a secure password.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Funny. I once worked for a company that did exactly the opposite: Do what you want, when you want, how you want. If you don't get your work done, you're fired.
This of course requires a boss who knows exactly what to (sensibly) expect from his workers. Something quite rare in management to be honest, but in this one company it actually worked. You got your assignment and a fairly reasonable deadline. Sure, sometimes projects run longer and you get an extension. Do it all the time and start looking for a new job.
They really didn't care too much when I came to work or went home, my weekly hours fluctuated between 20 and 80 hours, depending on workload and how I felt about work. There was no need to be there if all your projects are on hold because you're waiting for something, so I simply took a day off, on the other hand, 15 hours a day and more became necessary when a critical milestone had to be met.
This can work well if you have a very good management that has a very good idea how much time what tasks take, and can actually produce sensible project plans, can plan around blocks and can parallelize sensibly. Luckily, we had that. It can end in a complete disaster (and usually it does, as many here can certainly vouch for) if management has no idea what production times are reasonable and how to avoid blocking milestones.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My observation has been in the last 5 years security has become tighter and that there has been increased security. I use to be able to plug in my own laptop most places I worked. No longer. I use to be able to use social network sites and external email. Not for a few years now. Everything is getting locked down from SVN repositories to databases. Development environments including. Even developers are losing admin access on their own machines. If anything this trend is accelerating. I don't know what the person writing the article is smoking.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
In five years time, I'd expect people to go back to the way things ran in the 80's, only far nicer and more graphical.
Use my own computer, at home, connect to the office network, get the equivalent of a virtual desktop of a virtual "work computer" ... do work.
Why the heck would I, as a developer, database administrator, whatever, need to be in the physical office? It's 2011, right now I wonder why I go to my office in KC, when I'm either working on web apps being deployed to our hosting facility in California or am troubleshooting accounting issues on our Citrix farm somewhere on the east coast ... I don't even know what state the farm is housed in, I don't need to, it's a computer on the net, why would I even care?
I think the only reason I go to the office now is because the baby boomer bosses like to walk around the halls once a week and see people at their desks ...
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
jacks0n may have been overly harsh, but he makes a good point. A friend of mine was in a certain air force, and his officer once addressed the group. Paraphrased, he said that their only job is to deliver missiles, and if you're not delivering missiles you better be making it easier for somebody to do that. IT is the same: your job is to enable by default, and disable only when you absolutely must. Now, when it's your job to answer for breaches, everything looks like a threat, yet while that's an understandable and useful frame of mind, it needs to be balanced with getting real work (remember, delivering missiles) done efficiently. Safety standards are useful, but there's a reason combat aircraft turn off anti-collision lights on missions.
In this case, I don't see portable electronics going away. In fact, I see them become more powerful, more highly-personal, and more popular, so IT Departments would be wise to find a way to keep them useful without compromising too much in security. Calling them "toys" or "whiz-bang gadgets" is a rather poor attitude for a geek who's supposed to see their uses better than the unwashed masses.
In my experience the biggest problem with corporate IT is risk aversion. Process is a substitute for trusted personnel, because it is hard to have the latter in a large organization, and it is easy to have the former.
If there is a massive security breach, the head of IT is likely to get fired over it (or maybe somebody one level down/etc). However, just about anybody in IT is capable of leaving open a door that would allow such a breach. So, there are tons of rules to try to prevent this, and tons of checks to make sure the rules are followed. Of course, a security breach is just one thing that can get messed up, and there are a million other bad things that can happen, and a bunch of rules to go along with each of them.
In a smaller company you hire people you trust, and actually invest in them. Sadly, that seems to be something lacking in most corporate IT departments. If you can't trust your employees, then you try to control them instead. It sort-of works, but it tends to prevent anything good from happening in the same way that it tends to prevent anything bad from happening. Mostly it is about having somebody else to blame when an underling turns out to be fallible.
You give the person a Civic to drive. It's quiet, sedate, cheap, and boring.
You don't want a delivery employee playing Formula 1 while on the job. It makes them, late for deliveries because they get targeted by the cops and pulled over for driving a sports car (see "Ticket for LOOKING fast")
Their antics cause a crash and hurt someone? Lawsuit.
They crash the car on company time, they (and their insurance) expect the company to pay out for repair/replacement. Repairs on a Maserati cost more than BUYING a new Civic.
At the heart, this is about control of one's network.
If I say a device doesn't get on the network, it doesn't get on. Period.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
1. Not all organizations have the same security needs
2. For many people there aren't neat lines between work life and personal life
3. Turning this into a turf war doesn't do anyone any good.
I hope item 1 is self explanatory. There are places where I'd certainly hope that any type of personal device would be barred from connecting to the network. By the same token, there are organizations where it may not be nearly as important.
As far as item 2 goes my life isn't easily separated into work and personal. I'm sure I'm not alone. Policy at work is that company provided mobile phones cannot be used to make personal calls. They'll look the other way if it's a matter of a phone call here and there. Further a company mobile phone can be taken from me at any time. My calls can be tracked. Any data on the phone, no matter how personal, is available to them any time they want it. A calendar on my phone that only has my work schedule on it isn't adequate, but do I really want to have my marriage counseling appointments on there too?
Given that reality with a company provided mobile phone, who can blame an employee for wanting to use their own phone instead? As much as we IT folks see allowing personal phones to access our networks and house corporate data as a huge security risk, we have to understand that the desire to do so has a lot of legitimacy. Turning it into a turf war and just saying "No" isn't going to be good enough, even if we are certain it's in the company's best interest.
Far too often we in IT treat our users in a condescending manner and we move too slow. I overheard a sysadmin guy tell one of our Mac developers that he wouldn't get admin access to his own machine because we had to "protect him from himself". That's pretty much a direct quote. Never mind that the developer in question is far more qualified at configuring and maintaining a Mac than anyone on our sysadmin staff is. It's also very frustrating for staff to wait days or weeks for IT to get around to something that they themselves could take care of in a few minutes. So again, just saying "No" isn't good enough. Reasonable alternatives have to be considered and creative solutions are needed.
However, that doesn't make good TV, hence the table-thumping. Some of these kids are in for a surprise when they grow up.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
At my work, yes, we would definitely support your needs if that's what we require of you.
I'm actually a web developer too (with admin/network management as backup to the other guys), and while I don't have quite as many platforms to develop for as you, all my needs are met to support what I do need to develop for. It's what I was hired to do, so the tools I need to perform that job are provided. If tomorrow we have more needs that I'll have to develop for, the tools I require to do that will be budgeted for as part of that need.
You could definitely manage yourself... the IT department can't be expected to know every piece of software or hardware inside and out. That's part of my/your job. But we definitely don't expect anyone to pay for and bring in their own equipment. We'd make sure you had those 5 mobile devices, those 4 tablets, purchase all that software, give you your various environments (either through physical systems or VMs or a combination of both, and you may be expected to manage those environments as part of the skills you bring to the job), and send you for any required training on any of it so that you have what you need to do what we hired you to do.