Who Owns Your Infrastructure?
A couple of things in the hopper that caught my eye …
- Recently, a kidnapped teen outsmarted her captor by using his cell phone to send a text message for help.
- Most 10-year-olds have mobile phones, according to The Register.
- An 18-year old recently graduated college in one year (with a double major in Math and Physics).
- A professor at North Carolina State University was asked to remove podcasts of his lectures from a for-profit download service.
First and foremost, I am very glad that this poor girl was so clever and was able to free herself, and that most 10 year olds (at least in the UK) have a safety valve in the case of an emergency. Second, this college professor has NOTHING to do with kidnapping, so please don’t infer that from their inclusion on the same list.
When combined, these stories point me towards the ownership issues that are springing up around intellectual property, organizations, and infrastructure. Each of these begs the question, “Who really owns your infrastructure?” In a disconnected, paper-based world, it is easy to resolve these types of issues. Clearly, if you paid for it then it is yours. However, this is becoming more and more of an issue in our highly networked universe. The prevalence of appliances, mashups, and web services make it incredibly easy for people to connect the right people and things. It is (and will continue to be) easy to create things that hadn’t even been considered in the initial design of your infrastructure. So, if your best and brightest users are building things on top of your information architecture and using it to create new and useful things, are they the owners?
The addition of millenials makes this question a lot more interesting. Digital natives don’t have the same kind of ownership issues that are prevalent in today’s IT world. A progressive workplace is going to have to deal with these type of issues if they want to hire the best and brightest in order to be successful.
