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In May 2011, Jeanette Horan was appointed Chief Information Officer of IBM. Ms. Horan’s organization supports operational excellence and drives IBM’s transformation agenda – focusing on business transformation, workforce transformation,[…]
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Employees have expectations from their consumer lives about technologies such as mobile. They want to have that same experience now within their corporate environment.

Jeanette Horan: Integration of mobile devices is becoming something that every CIO has to deal with whether you think you have a strategy or whether you don’t, they’re in your environment and they’re being used pervasively.  And I think where we are today, we’re moving beyond the point of providing the basic productivity to all say mail calendar contacts on mobile devices to truly thinking about how we can enable business applications out to those mobile devices.

Mobile devices, for better or worse, are more easily lost than, you know, than a laptop device, you know.  Just the form factor, et cetera, they’re much more easily lost.  So we definitely are extremely concerned about maintaining the security of the device and of the data on the device. And there are a number of technologies that are available today that allow us to manage the devices, understand what software is running on the device and in the event the employee loses the device that we can wipe the data off of it so that it’s not compromised.

These days so many of our employees are on the road or they’re working at client sites.  And they have this expectation from their consumer life that they can do all of these transactions while they’re on the road, they’re sitting at the airport, whatever it is.  And they want to have that same experience now within their corporate environment.  And I think that’s one of the biggest things that we’re all trying to figure out is how do we enable that that allows employees to use these devices so they get all the productivity gains but that we also manage them in a way that maintains the integrity of the data for the corporation.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd

 


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