Today I was at a relatives house who needed to get their heating boiler fixed, so we called them a service engineer from one of the large utility companies here in the UK.
Due to the particular circumstances they came out quickly and started to take the boiler apart.
Unfortunately the boiler needed a part which the service engineer didn’t have.
The corporate ordering system would get him one by the next day, but he wanted to get it fixed before that, so what could he do?
That’s where the consumer technology came in.
The service engineers who work in this particular area of the UK had a WhatApp group so they could help each other out: “Give me a few minutes and I’ll check the group to see if anyone else has one of these parts so we can get it fixed today.”
In just a few minutes it was clear that no-one else had the part and we’d have to wait for the morning, but at least he tried.
I have no idea whether this was a company sanctioned way of working or whether this was something the engineers had decided to do, but it showed how deeply consumer technology has ingrained itself into the way that we work and play.
We talk about Shadow IT which I recently heard someone describe as “an abomination”, I don’t see it that way. Consumer technology will always move ahead of what a corporate IT organisation can, and should, do. Corporate IT needs to move to be the broker that enables people to get access to the tools they need to best do their job, where that needs to be something regulated then fine, but when there’s no value to be added corporate IT organisations should get out of the way.
Graham Chastney 