Dr Mike Lynch opens IP EXPO 2012

17 Oct 2012

In his opening keynote at IP EXPO 2012, the UK's most successful technology entrepreneur set out for attendees how and why the jobs of the CIO and their team are changing.

"It's nice to get out for a change. Otherwise, I might just be hanging around shopping centres," joked Dr Mike Lynch, at the start of his opening keynote at this year's IP EXPO. Since he left Hewlett-Packard in May 2012, he explained, he hasn't had a 'day job', as such. But despite its self-deprecating humour, Lynch is still the UK's most successful technology entrepreneur and it was standing room only in the Keynote Theatre at Earl's Court 2.

In his keynote presentation, 'It's enterprise technology, but not as we know it', Lynch set out for attendees seven trends that he believe are changing the world of the CIO and their corporate IT team:  the availability of cloud services, new security approaches, new procurement models, increasing regulation, the rise of mobile technologies and 'bring your own device' (BYOD) policies, the use of social media, and finally, big data.

"You might be forgiven for thinking that the role of the CIO is pretty constrained these days. Budgets are limited, risk is shooting up," he said. "But, in fact, to my mind, this is a time of huge opportunity."

Some presentation highlights:

On cloud: "A lot of investment money has gone into companies that take some function normally done in-house and put in the cloud. But for many customers , the most obvious things to do in the cloud are the things that are entirely new."

On security: "Security isn't about locking every door and locking every window. Look at the Olympics: it wasn't possible to set up a security scanner in every Tube station. You can't implement security like that in a city and expect it still to function. We'll see that in corporate IT security, too: we'll see new models emerge that will help us deal with uncertainty, rather than locking everything down."

On IT procurement strategies: "If you want to find out who's making IT investments without telling the IT department, just check the corporate credit card statements. There's good and bad sides to this kind of purchasing. The good side is that employees get the technology they need. The bad side is that it leads to fragmentation, a lack of control and oversight."

On regulation: "The biggest architectural challenge, much bigger than cloud, is regulation. E-discovery, for example, is a massive challenge and fragmented approaches to procurement only make the problem worse."

On mobile: "Mobile technologies haven't just marked a fundamental change in working practices, but also in employee expectations of technology. It's stunning to me what you can do with a smartphone today, and users want to be able to use amazing technology at work, as well as at home. Look at BYOD: companies are quickly finding that it's pretty much impossible to separate someone from the device that they love."

On social media: "The important thing about social media is that it's valuable information, but it's arriving in real time. The ability to monitor and use information in real time, to adapt to a real time model, is a true test for companies."

On big data: "It's big, but is it clever? That's the real question. In the 'Internet of Things', there will be winners and losers, but it will be those companies that own the data who will find themselves in the best position in future."