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It was predicted that the undefended arrival of the BYOD phenomena in the workplace would wrestle control from the IT team to the business at large, and this may with hindsight be partly true.

But consider this: business IT and network provision has moved away from the provision of a desktop with business application access to, in many cases, a company-wide involvement, with employees increasingly supporting themselves and specifying and even provisioning the IT services that they need to do their work.

Many non-technical employees are largely self-supporting as they consult with support forums, adopt the lingo and - apparently - become expert.

If BYOD let the genie out of the bottle then what will IoT do? For a line of business department that needs specific data - data that can easily be collected by sensors positioned remotely and networked centrally - then all that is left for IT is to provision the network and make sure it is all secure.

So that's it, game over: the IT and network professional is permanently degraded to a technical gofer for the digital elite? Well it depends. A lack of visibility and response to IoT on the scale of the BYOD apathy will certainly guarantee such an outcome.

However there is an alternative. If you don't already understand IoT and its possibilities then it’s time to get familiar. If you don't already understand - really understand -your business then get more involved by interacting with colleagues in other disciplines and finding out their plans. Explore what customers of your business need and where IoT could fit in. Finally, speak with managers and directors and tell them about IoT, explaining it with examples that bear some relevance to your business.

In short, become the obvious go-to resource for IoT advice, services and deployment in your business. Just make it so easy that it would be unnatural to go it alone. The future’s bright - and it’s in your hands now.

Ray Smyth - Editor, Network Computing.
Ray.Smyth@BTC.CO.UK | https://twitter.com/ItsRay?