A CIOs Christmas Gift Wish List To Santa

Its the time of the year where I act like a 10 year old with glee and hope in my eyes, as I draw up a gift list hoping Santa will deliver them. As a CIO I absolutely would love any kind of divine intervention to help me out as I deal with various issues. 

My wish list goes as follows:

Dear Santa,

My list is as follows:

1. I want Google to make up their mind, whether they want to remain a consumer services organization or they want to be an enterprise solution company as well. If they decide to get into the enterprise space as well, I want them to price their services in a manner they can sustain enterprise offerings, build a team that can understand and manage enterprises and commit resources to mould a part of Google that is compatible with the way enterprises want to run their IT.
2. No man is an island, and technology is here to serve mankind. No technology can stay relevant if it operates in isolation. Its funny that everyone talks of collaboration, team work and productivity while Apple, Google and Microsoft have built walls around their proprietary platforms. Dear Santa, I want you to give a contract to Leonardo DiCaprio to go back in time and invade the minds of Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt and Steve Ballmer and plant the thought of creating a standard for interoperability between iOS, Windows 8 and android mobile platforms, helping enterprises to carry more effectively and efficiently a safe , secure and sustainable mobility strategy with heterogeneity as an integral feature.
3. I wish for divine intervention to clear up the mobility space and drive clarity. If some need to die, please make it quick and painless (for everyone). Please bestow sustenance for the existing virtues of creativity, sense of purpose, social relevance and enterprise adaptability with all the players in the mobility space.
4. Dear Santa, please give Leanardo DiCaprio a second contract to invade the dreams of all cloud service providers, planting the thought of creating a standard for interoperability and data exchange between clouds and for creating a standard framework and template for shifting data and workloads across clouds.
5. I wish for the gift of the ability to quickly unlearn and sit in a discussion without carrying the burden of having to accept or reject everything being; for my team and me and for the world at large. I wish this for all politicians specifically.
6. I want CISOs to get more business friendly and find ways to support adoption of new invasive initiatives rather than fight it!
7. I wish for Microsoft to realize that mail, messaging and collaboration is availably free of cost thru social networking sites and get off their high horse and find a way to have more meaningful dialogue with the enterprise. I hope Microsoft's global leadership realizes this and re-structure their organization to operate more meaningfully in the current context and become pace setters in time to come.
8. Dear Santa, please help me understand why I feel so hollow for Windows 8 as the next enterprise desktop computing platform. I am not able to analyse this hollowness in me effectively!
9. I wish apple store infrastructure becomes available to the enterprises as a service enabling deliver enterprise app stores to our customers, partners and employees riding on apples creation.
10. The last wish is a more personal one. Santa, I wish for the next new apple offering to be a personal device that can transport people across time and space. I , for once, want to say beam me up Scotty and experience it happen before I die. I also wish for the world to be free of guns (specially US and UP) , children to be safe, polar ice caps to stop melting and last but not the least , both Cameroon Diaz and me get 5 years younger each year for the next two years and then stop ageing!

Santa, some logistics. If you are flying around India, collecting the wish lists, your 3G might not work effectively everywhere and hence you might not be able to access this blog. To make it easier, I will hang a sock on the christmas tree with the wish list in it. Not too complicated a list, I am sure. For a hi-flier like you, this is easily do-able. Santa, you now operate in a world that is performance oriented, goal driven and results oriented. I will soon email you the balance scorecard based on which you will be appraised. You will get a 5/5 if you just manage to deliver to my last wish. You will get a special performance incentive bonus, if you manage to make any three of my first 9 wishes happen. No pressure buddy. Just do it!

Merry  Christmas and a happy holiday season to one and all. Hope your families and you have a blast bringing in the new year later this month. Wishing your families and you a fantastic 2013 filled with peace, prosperity, good health and happiness.
Cheers.

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.