Evolving technology is allowing work and personal life to become more interspersed, Templeton said. What was once two separate activities is becoming one, and technology is playing a key role in this fundamental change.
But to make this possible, Templeton said, technology must enable seamless changeover between work and personal use, particularly on mobile devices, on which employees do work tasks and use the technology for social and personal purposes.
Templeton called this intermingling of tasks “work slicing.” Government already is beginning to embrace this concept, he said.
Because some government employees and private-sector personnel are working flexible hours, it’s crucial for them to have the mobile capability to do their job in a secure way, Templeton said. So government employees are dividing up work tasks and personal activities on the same mobile device.
Citrix, a cloud computing provider of solutions for remote and mobile working, appears to be taking the importance of work and life transitions to heart in its new products. Templeton announced several new offerings, including GoToMeeting HDFaces for iPad and Android tablets (a mobile version of the company’s popular videoconferencing solution) as well as enhancements to Citrix ShareFile, an iCloud-style virtual storage for business. Templeton also touted a longer-term initiative called Project Avalon, intended to give public cloud-quality infrastructure in a private cloud setup.
Templeton proclaimed the PC era over. Now that companies and people are in the cloud era, he said, former IT practices that were once assumptions are now considered obsolete. The exceptions – mobile devices, wireless connections, and cloud – are now the assumptions.
IT organizations will have to let go of the idea of an owner/operator mindset, Templeton said, and move to more of a retailer mindset in order to have a closer relationship with customers. It’s also unnecessary, he added, for fundamental applications such as email to be built in-house.
“Why would you build email when there are so many email services you can provision, license, aggregate and deliver?” he said.
