When we attended DEMO Fall 2009 last month as one of the companies presenting on stage, I was impressed with all the cool apps being showcased that helped people do things better, faster, or in a more collaborative way.  There were tools that made your emails into a task manager, a social video chat service, and an application that lets you connect your various spreadsheets into an integrated model.  Good stuff…and I will probably try a few of these out myself.  However, I couldn’t help but notice that while these apps certainly appeal to the users of these tools, they don’t speak to the other group of people who are just as important in getting these tools implemented within businesses – the IT folks.

On the other end of the spectrum, the solutions and policies that IT implement within a business environment typically address one of the top priorities of IT – governance for security, compliance, and effective management reasons.  Yet, many of these traditional enterprise systems are simply too complex or enforce an unnatural workflow for end-users to work with on a day-to-day basis.  In the end, the people who actually use the system become frustrated and eventually look for tools elsewhere to help them do their day jobs...tools that enable users to work but are out of corporate IT’s control…which was the very reason IT implemented certain solutions in the first place (the last paragraph in this related article about the recent T-Mobile Sidekick fiasco touches upon this...on a side note, there wouldn't be any data loss if Sidekicks were running on LeapFILE's virtual file system).

Since end-users and IT live in the same house, how do we repair the relationship between the two?  As any marriage counselor will tell you, a good start is to understand the reasons behind the discontentment before we can address it. 

There are two very good articles here and here written awhile ago by our friends at ReadWriteWeb describing trends dubbed IT 2.0 and “tech populism”.  In a nutshell, the corporate workforce is increasingly distributed, mobile, and highly collaborative.  At the same time, users are becoming more tech savvy and thus “self-provision” web 2.0 tools because they need and want collaborative applications that are always on and always available, regardless of location.  This directly conflicts with the “intra”-firewall perspective of traditional IT, whose primary mandates include controlling and preserving corporate data.  “Extra”-firewall Web 2.0 technologies are continually being adopted to circumvent IT shortfalls…so because of this, standard applications over VPN are simply insufficient as data is already leaving the corporate firewall via mobile users.  This combination of a mobile workforce, ubiquitous bandwidth, and cloud computing is driving this next big shift:  the need for IT to extend beyond the corporate firewall.

We at LeapFILE like to think we’re playing this marriage counselor role between end-users and IT.  Our existing Secure File Transfer product and especially our new Virtual File System (aka LeapFILE Folders) were built from ground up based on this trend we’re seeing and the need to satisfy both the end-users and IT within a company.  For users, this means the ability to access and share all corporate files wherever they may be located…with anyone, at anytime, and from anywhere simply from the comfort of their own computers.  For IT, this means the ability for IT to extend their reach beyond the company firewall to govern corporate-owned data and gain instant visibility to all activity around that data.

I believe LeapFILE is among the very few that have designed an enterprise-level solution with this notion of IT 2.0 in mind.  But, this is coming from the horse’s mouth, so don’t take my word for it.  We invite you to try it out yourself, whether you are an end-user or IT administrator.  Register for a free beta account (limited availability) for our new product and tell us what you think.