Whatever Happened to SoCloMo? (CompTIA Volley)
Carolyn April: Hey everybody. Welcome to the latest edition of Volley. I'm Carolyn April. And as always, I'm looking for my good buddy Seth Robinson. How are you doing? I'm doing well. How are
you? I'm all right. And the summer here, got the kids back in school and weather's starting to change a little bit. So I'm liking that. Yeah, we've had cooler nights, but the stain of the days are still not a warm. So actually, that's nice for me, because I don't want somewhere to end in turn in the daytime. I like that
summer weather as we've discussed, but yeah, my, my loan child who has been home all summer, goes back to college next week. So she'll be on her merry way for her senior year, which is hard to believe. So that's that. That's a wrap. Yeah, after this year, so we're getting her settled. Next week. She's put getting all of her final work shifts in before she goes save up as much money as she can. And yeah, then on to on to no kids in the house life for a while.
Yeah, it's good. And you're all recovered from your travel adventures this past week? Oh, yeah, I'm recovered. Yet been, it was a bit of a crazy, I guess, the status quo for how travel goes. And I won't even go into gory details of flight mishaps and all of that. But yeah, I'm not recovered. Thank you.
Yeah, it does feel like everyone that's traveling has bad stories. I mean, the last time I traveled a couple months ago, it was perfectly smooth. I couldn't believe it. Yeah. I don't want to tempt fate by trying it again. Yeah, I know. You should just stay where you are now. Yeah, channel can't travel out to Vegas was fine for me. In but so you know, the irony being that longer travel was really easy for me.
But this little trip I took recently was just a nightmare. Just to go. It could have been I would have been better off driving. I would have gotten there. Yeah, with my sanity intact, hopefully, if nothing bad had happened on the road.
But yeah, it's not it travels very hit or miss these days. So you know, you just don't know what you're gonna get. Yeah, well, keeping your sanity intact should be a top priority.
Yes. All right. Well, we got a topic that I think is going to be kind of fun, hopefully, last year, we did an episode on kind of whatever happened to and we had picked out like three topics that used to be kind of big in the tech industry. And we talked about them. And you know, I had an idea here that, that maybe it
wasn't as big as any of those, I threw it at you. And you kind of almost didn't remember or recognize the name until we unpacked it a little bit more. But it's one thing that I think we can unpack into three different things. And you know,
anyone who's already seen the title knows what we're talking about. It's, it's a term that made the rounds, I don't know, for maybe about a year. So clo Mo, so the combination of social cloud and mobile and the thing that really got me thinking of it was all of the angst around Twitter, or x and then the new threads app that came out from meta. And people exploring that and kind of trying to figure out, you know, hey, this is what we want social to be. And that kind of made me think about how
long we've been talking about social, especially in an enterprise setting. And it made me think all the way back to when we used to try to lump these three things together, social cloud mobile, and call them so cloanto. And again, that didn't last maybe even long enough to be having a retrospective. Yeah.
I looked it up to see when it was coined. And I think Aberdeen the analyst group is who coined that acronym, acronym, or whatever, a mash up, I guess, is what you call it. But I think it's about 10 years old, maybe a little longer. Yeah, I think that's about right. And I think it felt I can
kind of remember in the moment, it felt like something because social cloud and mobile had all kind of come on the scene. And they were definitely changing things. And it all got lumped together. And I want to talk about the way that it was lumped together. And I think what was meant by getting it lumped together, and then we can maybe unpack each one and talk about them individually. But I think that when people lumped it
together when this guy from Aberdeen coined this phrase, or whatever, I think the general perception was, this is the way that it is going to run, you know, this notion of social cloud and mobile, it's changing the behavior of the IT function. And I think another way that people were kind of saying the same thing around the same time was, this was going to be the consumerization of IT. You know, social, Cloud Mobile ices, it gave people ways to create their own content, to talk to each other, to procure their own infrastructure and applications, and to bring in their own devices to run all this stuff. And so we were going to have consumers or employees kind of coming into companies and basically driving the IT function. And I don't think that's happened. And I think it'd be kind of interesting to explore why people thought it was going to happen and why it didn't happen. Yeah, um, it is interesting. I was thinking a lot about this
from a societal standpoint. And I'm wondering, like the just the concept of the consumerization of IT, given how consumers are used technologies, particularly social media, and mobility. And the way that we now view some of the downsides of some of those technologies may have put the brakes on it becoming so widespread as something that corporate America was going to adopt in the same way that consumers adopted now, you know, obviously, mobility, cloud and social are all part of the corporate fabric in some way. But to the extent that they become they became the way that the IT function was defined. There may be a little bit of hesitancy on the part of companies based on what they've seen in the consumer space.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we we talked several years ago about the the notion that some of these technologies and their rise to prominence came about because there was a shift in the way that technology was getting developed. It used to be the technology got developed for business, right, this was the only people that could afford it. And so that's where technology was getting developed for, and eventually there was kind of this trickle down effect. So through like the 70s and 80s, there started to be this trickle down effect from business or enterprise into the consumer space. And around 2000, you know, in the early aughts, mid aughts, I would say that shifted where some of the best technology was getting developed for the consumer space, I think mobile devices, smartphones are really the prime example of that. And I think that that's
what began to shift the perception that it was like, Oh, if all of this is getting developed for the consumer space, then they're going to be the driving function of bringing it into their company, or their place of business, and kind of telling the IT department, how things should be run. Right. And I think that that concept, and some of the other things that came along with it, like shadow it, you know, or, or bring it on device, all of those things, kind of underestimated how important it was for it to run at an enterprise level. And when I say enterprise, I don't just mean a large, huge company, I mean, any business that has some kind of controls that they need to put on it. And whatever equipment they're buying, or software they're buying or whatever, it has to have tighter security, greater liability, it has to have better standards than a lot of things that are getting developed in the consumer space. And the people that are bringing in the technology, they're not aware of those things. And so I think that that was kind of the the main thing that caused consumerization did not really take hold as much as a lot of people were thinking it was going to Yeah, I mean, you mentioned security, cybersecurity, and I think that, you know, that's probably the biggest hurdle to consumerization, taking on, you know, becoming sort of the widespread way that we run our IT function, I think it was sort of foolish to think that you could extract authorization from the IT department in 100%, and that they don't run things and that they don't make determinations about what sort of devices application solutions, whatever are used within an IT department, I do think we moved away from them being completely authoritarian and centralized. And that's been
a good thing. In that we you know, welcome users and and people within an organization to have the tools that they that they work best with themselves personally understand the best, but But there have to be some sort of safeguards around that. And I think that tension at the time, we first started talking about this. So Cuomo thing was, was lessening, and we were starting to think, oh, it's going to be a wild west and a free for all. And now we're pulling back, I think toward more of a reality where, you know, this may have to do you know, in some ways with the pandemic, and now we have this bizarre thing happened in the middle of this 10 year time when we first started talking about this consumerization thing, but I think the reality is set in that you certainly need to have more safeguards around all of these technologies that end those zip codes reside with an IT department. Yeah, yeah, I liked the way you put it. I think there has been a
big shift towards decentralization without having the full blown consumerization that I think people were expecting, I think we do see the technology function being much more collaborative. But I think that so many things like cybersecurity, or integration of systems, I think the final decisions on those things still reside with an IT department, a CIO, an IT director, you know, whatever it might be. And they might not control every single decision, like a lot of the procurement decisions might be bleeding into business units.
But I think that at this point in time, we can definitely see a clear purpose of the function of an IT department or a third party that's providing IT services. Whereas I think 10 years ago with this, so called over this consumerization notion, I think there were people that were saying, Oh, the IT departments probably just gonna go away, you know, everyone can bring in their own thing, and get their own software and do their thing. And and maybe they didn't fully believe that the IT department is completely going to disappear. But I think they thought it was going to diminish much more than it has. And I think we haven't seen that.
Yeah, there's been a lot of like prognostications, like that proclamations you've heard you know, how many times we've been to an event where we've been told that the channel is we know it is dead, or you know, Nick, just plug in your thing is going to die. And it gets, it makes you think about, you know, how little things actually radically change in a short period of time. I think. Bill Gates said something along those lines, and I can't really quote him, and I won't. But a lot of these very major proclamations about what's going to happen technology wise, don't always come true. But a kernel of them does, or maybe a little bit more than a colonel of them does. And sometimes that's
that's the good middle that we need to be at. Right. And I think we did that with a little bit with what we're seeing here with the consumerization of IT. I never was fully sold on that idea. Yeah, that's happening.
Yeah, so so that we can probably start pulling these things apart now and look at them individually. Yeah. And I think when we look at the first one, which is social, I think that this is one area where the other main hurdle for this was the behavior of the workforce, right, and just how people work and the fact that they probably do feel differently about their work life, and they behave differently and want to act differently than they would in a consumer space. Right. And so I think, the notion of social, I think a lot of marketing departments are still very focused on social media. Yeah, and getting their messaging out there and doing some brand awareness and different things like that. I think that at the
time that this term came up, and we were talking about consumerization of IT, we weren't really talking about the marketing aspect of social, I think we were talking about trying to bring social type technology into the workforce and letting an internal workforce have tools like Facebook or Twitter that would help them communicate with each other. And I think we definitely have something like, you know, Slack, or Microsoft Teams, I think that has changed the communication. But I feel like it's still stopped short of social communication, where there's content being created, there are algorithms that are kind of monitoring that content and helping push it around. There's different search capability, I view slack and Microsoft Teams is something different than social tools. So I feel like social never really
caught on internally in the way that a lot of people were expecting. And I think that's because of behavior more than anything else. I agree. I mean, when I think about social tools, I think about personalization. And I don't see that in the tools you just you know, brought up you know, Slack and teams, yes, you can set up your little account profile page, and, but it's pretty static, it just sort of defines who you are, and your title and your pictures and stuff. It's not the same sort of
usage that you see with people's personal social profiles and how they interact with one another. And, I mean, maybe I need to go work at some other places, but I don't see that paradigm work. You know, having found its way into, you know, the to Facebook paradigm or whatever social media that you want to talk about. Other than marketing being used as a tool, it is a
very valid tool for marketing. I just thought the the Affer mentioned event or I had the bad travel experience, there was a marketing person who got up and gave a fantastic presentation about the efficacy of social and how to make it work for you in marketing. And I was sort of like, Ooh, this is kind of cool, and it was real, but to your point, social being used the way social is used as consumers putting that in the corporate marketplace for you. I don't See that? I haven't seen that happening. And it may just be I think it's more like a human
behavior thing, like you said, is that people don't want to bleed so much of their personal illness into their corporate lives, at least digitally? I don't think Yeah, yeah, they get to choose their friends, you know, who you're gonna, you know, yeah, as opposed to making it sort of a company wide thing. You know, the other the other area that I will point out where social has had some traction is in the HR function. In terms of hiring and recruiting. I know HR people and recruiters do use social pretty extensively to find candidates so that there's some saying, Yeah, which, again, is externally facing, you know, it's not really dealing with internal workflow and process, which, you know, it's probably another thing that is sort of a more of a business requirement, where it's like, This communication is all meant to be funneling towards an objective, right? Not just a free for all having fun doing doing whatever we want. It's meant to be funneling towards something. And so if that intention is there, then all of a sudden, you need to have a little bit more oversight than you would on maybe a pure social platform. Yeah, I would agree. So for going in order of impact, I think the next one, and I think it's a big jump into the next one, I think the I think there has been a lot of impact for both mobile and cloud, but I would say mobile would be the next one on my list where many, most companies are deploying mobile technology, you know, they're outfitting their workforce with smartphones, maybe tablets, I would say, it's not nearly as much BYOD, as I think people were expecting, I think that companies found that if they could offer, you know, top of the line equipment, right, and they're not, you know, coming along with some kind of a, you know, second grade device, when people really want, you know, top of the line Android or an iPhone or whatever, if they, if they can offer those top of the line devices, then it actually is in their best interest to also control those devices, and to have them be corporately owned devices. Rather than try to push all of that to the user, and let
the user deal with support and all of that, again, you know, all of these things are meant to serve an objective. And I think many companies have found that they're best served by owning the device and having it or some kind of technology function to do the oversight there. So I think there's definitely been mobile device deployment, I think that has made the workforce more productive. I would say that even after all this time, I think there are a lot of companies that are maybe struggling to really optimize the software and the applications that they're using and their workflow, I would say that there are companies that are not even where they should be in terms of web enabled workflow, much less mobile optimized workflow. So you know, as much as people have jumped on
the device, and I think that they've got that under control, and it's definitely making an impact. I think there's still a lot of room for improvement in the mobile space. Yeah, well speaking is an n of one here, I don't my mobile device, I is primarily a communication tool, when it comes to work. It's not somewhere where I get work done
necessarily, it's not part of the workflow for me of the things that I do in my everyday. And I think that's true for most people. And I think that, but that's not to discount the importance of having mobile devices that your, you know, your company issues used as communications tools. I think that's been an amazing thing, that we're no longer tethered to desks. And you can find, you know, I mean, some people will argue with me, you can be found at any time, but I mean, it's a way for you to keep on top of what's going on at work, it's a way for you to be in touch or and, and I think that aspect of it is is you know, absolutely priceless. But as far as you
know, to your point, I think the sophistication of most companies in terms of what they do from a workflow process Actual work going on on mobile devices is now it's still in its infancy, if it's ever going to go anywhere. Maybe that's not what mobile devices will be meant for. Yeah, I so much of it depends on the work, you know, like the type of work that you and I do, it'd be pretty hard to be, you know, building and writing reports, you know, on a phone challenge. I think that there actually still is something there that it's kind of like, how would you begin to break apart that workflow so that you know, if you are out on the go and something needs to be moved along? You know, is there a part that can be broken out so that you can you can advance that or work on it a little bit on your phone? Even if you can't do you know, the full activity? Yeah, I think perceiving and hearing and re architecture that goes into that type of work, and maybe the payoff would never be there. But I think you're right that so much work is still tethered to a desktop environment, with the mobile devices being there kind of for connectivity, communicate. Since availability, very simple things,
yeah, I would agree there. And you're right, it does, it does depend on the type of work. I mean, you know, I can see people in the field like sales reps who have to enter, you know, purchase orders or whatever, that sort of that is a piece of workflow and, and having a mobile device to be able to do that, and have it work well could be invaluable for that type of job. So clearly, it's not just Yeah, I if you see me writing a report on a cell phone, you have a talk with me, there's something going on? Oh, I'll congratulate you. That's, that's really,
I can really send a text message without having a backspace at times to get the spelling correct. So that's so the the last one is cloud, I think cloud has had the biggest impact, but maybe not in the way that people thought. I mean, I think they're, I think that people expected that cloud infrastructure and cloud applications, were going to enable lines of business to just really be choosing their own and doing a lot of their own procurement. And I do think a
lot of that is happening, I think that has been a relatively significant impact on its own. But I think there's been an even bigger impact within the IT department, you know, as they continue to be responsible for the underlying architecture and the comprehensive architecture of a business and keeping everything stitched together and connected and working with each other. I think they have found a lot of benefits with cloud systems in terms of flexibility, and resiliency. And they're also learning a lot about how to optimize those systems that as they shift from capex to OPEX, there's a lot of new types of muscles that have to get built in order to run that efficiently. And keep an eye on things so that you don't have a lot of sprawl and your applications, and you're securing everything properly. And a lot of companies, I think, are still going through that optimization phase, they might have multiple different cloud providers, they might be running a private cloud, they might be just running some standard typical on prem type of instances, and trying to get all of that work together is still something that a lot of IT departments are working on. But it really has changed their
approach to building architecture and supporting the business and becoming a lot more flexible. In terms of technology driving objectives. Yeah, the adoption of cloud and the optimization phase that you talk about here has been a long slog, I mean, it I think we, we all thought that this would be a little bit quicker than that, or maybe we didn't all think that. But I think we've been talking
about this for a very long time. And I think it's been a very incremental journey with some steps backwards, as we've talked about in the past, as people realize, you know, this isn't working are we kind of like gotten over our skis here, and we need to pull it in a little bit, I think with the use of fin ops becoming kind of a thing where you can sort of measure, you know, the cost effectiveness of putting certain workloads in the cloud versus having things on prem, is kind of established for a lot of IT departments and a lot of channel providers, people that are providing services to, to end customers that, you know, we can't, we're going to live in a hybrid world and be constantly evaluating and optimizing what works best for our organization, whether some of it is on premise equipment and on premise applications. And some of it belongs in the cloud. And it depends on what industry we work in. And it depends a lot about some of the cybersecurity or compliance considerations that our industry has. And I think it's just going to be one of those ongoing, constant value raishin type processes that never comes to an endpoint.
Yeah, yeah, I think we still have a ways to go with that one. And with the other two, there's still places where they may eventually have more of an impact than they're having today. And we may see them continue to change the way that it does things. But you know, this maybe was a little bit of a trip down memory lane to go back to that, you know, term of SoLoMo. But I think it was fun to kind of look at it, as it was originally being positioned. And then the way that it's kind of
unpacked into these three separate components. So yeah, I see it's cleaved, it's not so much of a mash up anymore. There's really they're interrelated, but but a lot of this stands on its own and is and is its it is going on its own on its own journey, each of those pieces. Yeah. Yeah. We wanted to end the show on a little bit of a high note. Thank you thinking about some of the you know, wildfires in Maui. That's not the high note, you know, some of the
other things that have happened but I think that that highlights you know how much you know, good needs to be done in the world and our producer Andrew McMillan is got an opportunity coming up where she'll be doing some good So Andrew, do you want to fill us in on what you're doing? Hi, yeah, hey, yes, I am running the Chicago Marathon. So I'm very excited. I'm running with this group called Team World Vision. And they are providing clean water and access to water.
And so this isn't my first marathon, but it's certainly my first for great cause. So very excited to run with them and raise some funds for them. And so I'm currently in training mode, everything hurts. I'm always tired. But I'm certainly getting in those messages and trying to make sure that I'm, I'm ready for the race in October. Yeah, I was very proud of you in channel con in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, when you were out doing your training run and you know, ridiculous heat. And I thought go Andrea, she's seriously doing this thing. So props to you. As someone who's run some of those
miles, it's not easy, and I would never do it in the heat. You did it in the other day, so good for you. Thank you. I know after channel con party, Angel Pinedo and I were the only two who got up that next morning at like six in the morning. Oh my god. And we still got that trading mileage. And because it's just so important this time of year. So
yeah. So will you be running the whole thing? Or is this one of those team things where it's like a relay? No, we're all running the whole thing. So full 26.2 miles, and I'm definitely on the slower pace. So my goal is like the six hour time Mark, which I think is actually pretty still impressive. Hunting straight.
Now, do you have it? So do you have some teammates who are in your pace area? So you guys run together? Or how does that work? There, most of the people in our group are pretty seasoned, and they're there faster. So they're going to start earlier corrals, but there are certainly people in my certain corral group. But usually it's kind of like everybody's on their own thing, doing your own pace just trying to get through and then we meet up before and then after. Well, it's a really good cause. And we wish you the best of
luck. Yeah, definitely a great cause I'm involved with another organization that focuses on clean water and it's just so foundational for a lot of communities for the health of the community for even economic viability. So it's really important it's something that you know, I think we hear and us take for granted. So yeah, always not to you for taking
care of yourself and for doing something good. Thank you. Thanks, guys. I'm trying to catch up with April here. She's the season runner in the group Geralyn Carolyn Yeah. All right. Thanks, guys. All right. Well, yeah, good luck to you, Andrea and Carolyn. I
will catch you on the next episode. Sounds good.
2023-08-25 11:57
