The Mobile Apps Paradigm

written for       :

Got an opportunity to peek into the mobile app paradigm, interact , brainstorm and inhale the energy, restlessness and ambitions of various entities that form the ecosystem defining this landscape. I decided to take some time off and interact with minds that imagine and create. I found myself walking the corridors of Microsoft TechEd 2013. The energy was intoxicating, and infectious.

All the big names from TCSs , Infosys's and Wipro's of the world to small unheard of startups, were all there. A couple of 22-24 year olds proudly flashing their business cards carrying the names of their startups and their CEO designation starkly contrasting mature 35 year old project managers carrying equal amount of energy and enthusiasm. Almost everyone I met believed that as developers, they have the power to shape culture, influence behaviour  and redefine lifestyle ! They all said it in so many words.

I took some time out, sat in a corner to ponder on that statement. When I look at the Apple iphone  and ipad, the Android smartphones and tablets and now the windows 8 smartphones and tablets; the singular thing that strikes me is that, there was no real crying need for any of these devices from the any of the consumer community and nobody really asked for it as a solution to a problem. As a corporate citizen, I have always been moulded in the mindset that  innovation occurs when one is forced into a crisis or issues of significant criticality. Sometimes, in such situations, dramatically incremental changes pass off as innovations within an enterprise. Problem solving has always been the main corporate theme. Corporates work on opportunity creation when the existing set of revenue generating techniques run their course to stagnation and/or finally  become irrelevant. This happens because corporates invest in platforms and then refuse to make changes till they sweat the platform to maximize their return on investment. Having said this, there are a few forward looking ones who experiment to find new opportunities. These generally tend to be organizations in the hi-tech space ( where R&D is part of their platform) or family run businesses in the non hi-tech space.

The developers who were walking the corridors with me were of different mindset. These guys were dreaming of a space where things could be done differently, the difference being the cool factor. One of the guys showed me an app where the you rest a mobile phone on a table and once you invoke the app, the camera comes on, the phone vibrates and the vibration was programatically controlled to make the phone rotate 360 degrees in a 120 second window to capture a panoramic view of your surrounding. I was stumped, not because of the programmatic brilliance needed to achieve this( none needed actually), but was a little amazed on the need for the mind to come up with something like this. Who needs such a solution. What was the seed of this idea?  I asked her. She just shrugged and said, that every time her phone vibrated on silent mode, she always felt it would simply be cool to channelize the energy generated by the vibration to get the phone to move in a circular motion and capture the image. Then she developed a software that can help you look at this amazing complex picture render different parts of it in context and scale that gives you some amazing views. One her friends, smiled and said, sometimes when you are living your life, you miss all the wonderful things that are happening around you which are not in line of your sight ! 

Bottom-line, these guys are not in the problem solving mode. They are in the mode of creating things that people have not asked for, never imagined they might need it and might not even pay to use it. They want to infect people with their output and attempt redesign our lifestyle, influence our behavior and our culture. More power to the programming brains. Software developers have truely shaped our lifestyle and culture. I am devotee of shirdi Sai Baba and see my god and the aarti whenever my heart desires, thanks to the portal that webcasts live. I have got into the behaviour of seeking blessings live from shirdi before I get into something important, the first thing after I wake up in the morning and before I hit the sack! I go about travelling to places without planning at all, thanks to the gps based apps that map, find hotels and eating joints. I have various metrics at hand as I jog, from the num of kms to my heart rate and the music I need to keep me going.  From what I have seen and heard at TecEd, I foresee us swamped with apps that we would never ask for and that we can do without, but very soon our lives will start revolving around these. Apps of similar nature will find their way into education, healthcare, banking and also into our family life and our personal space.

New demands on CISO.

Consumer Technology is inside the perimeter. Its been an invasion of devices, apps and cloud services. Enterprise data has found an easy bridge to cross the perimeter and free itself. None of this is unknown to us, though have to admit its been a sensational development at a sensational pace and technology adoption and work style adaptation has happened with passion that has never been witnessed or experienced by an enterprise app or project. As a CIO one only hopes and wishes that these virtues be associated with enterprise IT initiatives we lead.  All of this has caught us off guard  as most of this is unplanned induction and some definitely see it as an intrusion.

The CISO's role is all the more critical against this backdrop. The CISO, to be really effective, will have to don a new avataar or rather add a few more facets to their personalities. While setting the ground rules and policing to ensure adherence to policies have been the only traits CISOs have shown, and while some have undertaken branding and advertising to ensure awareness, nobody has seriously stepped into the shoes of a educator and a protector. Every organization has policies around ownership, distribution and life-cycle management of all its enterprise assets; specially data. Data is all over the place - documents, data in the enterprise database, spreadsheets, scribbles and notes on note pads. Employees create data on the go.

Consumer Technology has placed in the hands of employee, tools and devices that come to their aid in doing their jobs effectively. In this process, enterprise data is not just passing thru these personal devices and cloud storage, it is actually being created on them and then , hopefully, getting into enterprise systems. There is ample scope for data theft and data leakage. While enterprise governance is all about checks and balances to safeguard corporate assets and contain risks, employees are all about productivity, speed, quality of service and delivering the wow factor with attitude in their deliveries. Governance need to ensure employees can bring all of that onto the table in a secure environment as employees find lot more exciting tools outside the secure environment. One way to get around this is to step up the act on awareness and education.

The CISO is in a fantastic position to map the spirit and the letter of the corporate policies to these consumer technology choices that are all around us and highlight, clearly, in simple language, with examples, the possible damage that could happen to the enterprise if some of these apps were used. I reached out to 12 senior CISOs in the industry before I penned this blog post and everyone thought that it was a good idea and some called it innovation. I was actually a bit miffed. I reminded them, that this had always been an expectation from their chair, but all that one got was policies and policing. CISOs need to be aware that they are here to support the employees conduct their business in a safe and secure environment. Along with education and awareness, the CISO needs to push the CIO's team to fund small labs that can discover the best way to leverage these consumer technology ideas within their enterprise to achieve business goals.

It would be nice to see CISOs bring out videos and literature that shows how enterprise data and hence the personal credibility of employees could be at risk by unabated and un-mentored use of apps like Dropbox and Evernote. At the same time the CISO should work with the CIO to figure out ways of accommodating such features and functionality within the enterprise. CISOs needs to bring their expertise on the table in a lot more ways than just policing. This happens when CISOs wed their agenda with business objectives beyond just securing the enterprise and extend their expertise to areas around employee productivity and morale enhancement by support agility in the employee personal productivity space. Everyone loves carrying and showing off not just cool devices, but how they use it to deliver value. Most of the the time, the wow factor created is targeted around their individual selves, no harm in supporting it, if it does result in value to the organization.