The above diagram is an assertion of truth. It says that right now, for the average employee (cubicle dweller) there is more stuff of interest to them (professionally) that exists on the private networks hidden behind firewalls. It also asserts that in the future there will be more stuff of interest to your future employees (professionally) that exists outside the corporate firewall and on the public Internet.
Crazy talk? Perhaps. Perhaps not. If we look at some of the forces at play on the Internet at the moment we can see social networking applications, user generated content systems and distributed collaborative tools becoming common place. The current generation of business computer users didn’t start out using these tools, but the generation coming through did and they expect to have access to these tools, and they will use them to add value to their organisations whether someone gives them permission or not. These are free thinking, technically savvy "infovores".
The ultimate effect of this is a gradual shift of company information assets (interesting stuff) from inside the firewall to outside. Initially this may come in the form of explicit Internet hosted solutions which go that way for sound commercial reasons - but it is just the start of a greater rush to the comparative freedom of the Internet.
So why is this relevant to The Ultimate Escape? Well my gut feeling is that the growing number of remote workers will actually start to create the demand for Internet hosted solutions where their organisations actually find it easier to let them exist in the wilds of the Internet and grant them selective access to their already externally hosted systems. Once they are working on the Internet they will find it easier to link it to other ad-hoc data stores also hosted on the web, and before you know it - your business is just running off the web.
In short, there will be more interesting stuff outside the firewall because that is where the content will be created.
1 response so far ↓
1 David M. Williams // Apr 4, 2008 at 10:58 am
What you say is very interesting and I do fully agree that Internet services outside the firewall will become more important.
I don’t say this as a trite statement, I’m not talking about things like Facebook and the like. Rather, more and more serious business applications are showing up as Software as a Service models.
One of the leading CRM systems is SalesForce.com which is a vendor-hosted system.
Additionally, my company also is rapidly growing and we have taken up hosted services by some of our major software providers.
Initially I had reservations about storing our data outside the company environment but I am pleased to have gone this way. There were several compelling factors. One is that a hosted system allows for much faster deployment than managing it yourself. Another is that with our company planning to grow swiftly through acquisition we have no concerns about our hardware being scalable; we just pay an increasing fee to our providers and they move our data to larger and larger boxes that they own and run.
The upshot is my internal systems require less maintenance and patching, support, troubleshooting because the packages are hosted elsewhere - and therefore the Internet becomes far more important for genuine legitimate business use. And obviously these applications are accessible from anywhere provided you have an Internet connection; they don’t necessitate being in the office or being behind the office firewall via VPN.
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