This document is intended to serve as a working document for IT Management talk coming up at the KickStart 2012 conference
Suhas Kelkar
IT Management Talk Theme: The Invisible IT / ii
IT Management Talk Theme: The Invisible IT
This document is intended to serve as a working document for IT Management talk coming up at the KickStart 2012 conference
Hi, I am Suhas and I am the Chief Technology Officer for APAC. I also run the global incubation team for BMC Software. As many of you know BMC Software is a recognized leader in the IT Management space and we have market-leading products such as Remedy and RemedyForce. We also contribute to ITIL standards and help with its evolution.
My role of running incubator team requires me to keep a pulse on changing trends and enterprise user behavior. We like a start up have the luxury to play with new technologies and trends and experiment in many directions. Like the start ups we may fail or maybe wrong in 9 out of 10 directions. So some of the things I am going to touch upon today may not materialize the way we currently envision it. However it is still very interesting to see what we are doing to push the envelope of IT Management.
There are many trends and I don’t have much time. So first I will just give a quick run through various areas we are currently looking at. Then I will go into one two of them in details.
First trend is that IT continues to get complicated. Various factors are responsible for making IT more complex. Because of technology such as virtualization/cloud, number of servers is increasing exponentially. We know that the amount of enterprise data is exploding. And Applications and Services are becoming more and more complex.
Mobile access is becoming a necessity for Enterprise apps. Mobile device management is becoming more and more important. So we are looking at that very closely. We have heard enough about BYOD and the security issues that it brings to the table. We are also looking very closely at Social Revolution and how it is seeping into enterprise at an alarming rate. And then there is Big Data and all the implications it has in terms of ability to do Sentiment Analysis. Things that enterprise had no way of doing earlier are now possible with some of these new technologies.
Once again due to lack of time, I am not going to spend any time of these trends. The one I do want to talk about is Gamification. Continuing on the trend that consumer behavior seeps into Enterprise user behavior, what can we learn from the success of Angry Birds and Farmville that we can leverage in enterprise apps?
Gamification is gaining lot of momentum. This is a google trend that shows that just an year ago this term was not around and now it is getting massive interest from around the globe. Gamification at the core is applying game mechanics to non game environments. To gain higher levels of engagement and to influence behavior. There is a definite science behind this that has proved that people like playing games, there is scientific evidence that shows that a chemical called dopamine is released in brain as you are playing video games and collecting those gold coins. This chemical is responsible for making you feel good. Well, how can we leverage this in enterprise systems? We at the BMC Incubator team are looking very closely at this and are experimenting with different use cases that will make enterprise applications fun and engaging.
Lastly I would like to touch upon a concept that once again we are simply experimenting with. This I like to call Invisible IT. Let me explain what I mean by that.
Running an IT of today is in many ways like flying an aircraft. There are hundreds of controls and levers and it requires specialized knowledge and expertise. However the passengers that are flying in that plane want very simple, on demand, rich user interface to services they desire. Wouldn’t IT be nice if the cockpit that we saw earlier evolves into more a dashboard of a car? That way you as an IT administrator are not having to look at 100s of controls and are able to run IT with minimal effort? At the same time we want to make the overall experience for the end user so seamless that they don’t even realize that there is an IT behind everything that they are consuming? This is what I call invisible IT, where for the end user IT is almost not there because things just seem to work like magic. And for IT Professional, IT is simplified and easier to run!
IT Management Talk Theme: The Invisible IT / 3