Social Media Round-Up [July, 2019]

Skimming through photos taken at this year’s HPE Discover event in Las Vegas, I came across this snapshot. At a gathering HPE hosted for those who HPE considered Tech Experts, and somehow I managed to get an invite, we were asked to nominate our “untold story” – one that interested us. Of course, there is always a lot of back and forth banter at gatherings like this when you assemble a number of social media content providers. All things considered, my observation generated lots of interesting comments. In case you cannot make out my handwriting, I wrote of, “The end of the uniqueness of IT: IT is finished as a separately addressable organization.”

When you consider that a room full of bloggers is mostly interested in making a beeline for the nearest bar, it is worth noting that HPE did a good job of keeping us all engaged. Initial comments that were made had a lot to do with “what are you talking about” as well as “did you stop by the bar on you way to this gathering?” However, the sentiment here was a reflection of what was beginning to creep into many social media posts of late, that being fuzzy lines between what was traditionally thought of as the EDP, MIS or IT groups and the rest of the organization. “One of the most important decisions an organization will need to make is how to get work done,” said one blogger. “Work specialization, sometimes called a division of labor, refers to the degree to which an organization divides individual tasks into separate jobs.”

It is necessary for me to go back to the conversations that preceded me writing this note. Earlier discussions had focused on the move to combine Operational Technology (OT) with IT. The combination of OT / IT being necessary as we came to better understand the requirements organizations were having in dealing with the “Intelligent Edge”. It struck me that as a group of bloggers we may have missed the obvious – the move to combine OT / IT didn’t mean building a greater IT group, but rather ensuring everyone had a better knowledge of IT with more than a passing grade on IT principles and methodologies. Why, everyone should be able to “assemble” the processing “code” necessary to complete a task – surely, it’s not that difficult!

After posting the above on LinkedIn, one social media response that arrived not long after the posting made the following observation (below) after agreeing with the assumption:

Much of this was ad hoc “solutions” out of need as we “bootstrapped” an all-digital culture. This is giving way to high commonality non unique mass solutions / derivations that increasingly “bundle” support / integration as part of the whole.
Evolution in action?

Now, my observation wasn’t meant to be a diversion. Not in the least; but increasingly, you get the sense whether it’s on LinkedIn, Twitter or even Facebook that IT is no longer an elitist group as it was once viewed, but rather, a collaboration between well informed individuals tasked with deploying automation, setting criteria for analytics and monitoring security. Many other tasks and duties are involved, but over time, there are signs beginning to appear that suggest a separate IT group will become unnecessary. With all employees tasked with being focused on responses to actionable information and where data is the new currency, surely every employee is part of IT? Too simplistic? Perhaps not! There were whole departments doing nothing but cranking through numbers on adding machines but today, we have spreadsheets and calculators present on almost every device – we are all part of the “numbers crunching” group!

The power of social media has been communication and the value it provides is commensurate with the topics you follow. For the NonStop community, there is now a rich choice of sites to visit with any number of commentators worth following. Not because they are publishing opinions and commentaries in isolation, but rather, there is some incident that has triggered a post. On one site I recently visited, I came across the following, “Opinions are so cheap because there is almost an infinite supply of them; almost everyone has an opinion about almost everything; when offered an opportunity most of us readily share these opinions.”

And if all we were to read was just one opinion then the danger signs would start flashing, wouldn’t they! However, with social media channels, the NonStop community has access to many opinions such that reading just a couple of them can quickly alert to you as to the general direction in which the topic is headed and in most instances, can provide information otherwise out of sight of the reader. Diversions? Yes, no question we have all gone down rabbit holes on occasion but when it comes to IT, and the prevailing wisdom of the day, it’s not easy to dismiss the notion that perhaps, following the passage of just a few short years, IT will be as “legacy” as the systems IT oversaw!

Obviously, the next question to arise then would be with whom would our sales teams work now? We cannot sell to an audience of “everyone,” I can hear the response even now coming from those tasked with ensuring we are all knowledgeable about the latest new widget. And yet, as IT infiltrates all of the organization, what we have considered as computing through the decades simply becomes an adjunct to a device so it will be those looking to upgrade devices that will be the target of future sales endeavors. Just think how our purchasing models have been disrupted by smartphones and tablets, but a NonStop system becoming part of a device, surely not? If you haven’t been following the work done already by some within the NonStop group, you may have missed NonStop already making a statement about being part of the edge. So, what’s to stop NonStop (nothing more than a collection of virtual machines that are getting tinier by the day) becoming a check-box item of even the crudest of appliance?

As has already been commented on by others active on social media; when it comes to “whereto NonStop” the simple answer must surely be, “Everywhere!”

Thank you.

@RichardKBuckle
#HPEblogger
#NonStopRocks
#Fools4NonStop