Fragile support model validated by Gartner

Of course, we are so off the global radar here at IMS that I can't claim they stole it; in any event the idea is pretty self-evident once you start looking at the trends and crunching the numbers. But our clients can now rest assured (some of them who have been extremely nervous at the prospect, particularly) that the concept of Fragile Support that we have been pushing on them with varying degrees of aggression for the past couple of years has finally found some favor at major enterprise research firm Gartner. In a presentation at Gartner's 2009 IT Symposium in Orlando the company makes a case for shifting IT procurement and support for laptops and smartphone devices out to the end user and simply paying a stipend to staff, who are already more inclined to bypass the IT department for such personal equipment anyway.

This approach amounts to a sort of IT judo, where the weight and inertia of a more or less inevitable trend is used against itself to get the IT department of a business that it doesn't like and isn't very good at, and allow it to focus resources on core systems that it must support and that it stands a good chance of improving with additional focus. At the same time, it allows budgets to be slashed, sometimes dramatically, presenting a win/win scenario for the forward-thinking CIO.

Many CIO and IT managers resist such a change both out of resistance to such a radical departure from supposed best practice IT strategies and out of a fear of having their authority questioned and their dominions shrunk. But those things are inevitable, and the best way to avoid them is to pre-empt them by making the suggestions yourself. If your department is going to shrink anyway, do you want some say in how and why it happens, or do you want to wait until the day when someone has to come in and tell you to do it?