It only took 11 years but Forrester Research has boldly entered the 21st century!
As Philip Elmer-Dewitt reports, Forrester—once a bastion of corporate IT groupthink—has apparently stopped drinking out of the water fountain fed by the lead pipes and recognized that, gosh, maybe it’s OK to have Macs in the enterprise because, as it turns out, Mac users are more productive.
Sure, we’ve only been telling them that for, like, whatever 2011 minus 1984 is, but whatever. The Macalope presumes they didn’t get it for a long time because they were still working on that Y2K problem.
This recent revelation by the brain trust at Forrester still reads like a corporate IT jargon bingo card.
“It’s time to repeal prohibition and take decisive action,” writes David Johnson in a new report made available to Fortune (and available for sale here). “Mac users are your HEROes and you should enable them not hinder them.”
“HERO,” it turns out, is a Forrester acronym for Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives—“the 17% of information workers who use new technologies and find innovative ways to be more productive and serve customers more effectively.”
Go figure! (You know what, Forrester? They’re also better looking.)
According to Forrester:
Many of today’s corporate PCs are saddled with management, backup, and security agents that can bog down a PC.
You don’t say? Wow, wonder who prescribed all that overhead? Wonder what unholy alliance of IT managers, crappy hardware and software vendors, and white-paper-spewing research firms spent years trying to make the user experience so miserable that these HEROs had to take matters into their own hands?
Either Forrester’s analysts just woke up from a long Microsoft-sponsored bender, or they’ve been hiring new analysts.
The problem, Johnson said in an interview today, is that enterprise IT responsibilities have shifted from assisting users to serving as the gatekeeper that governs and controls what tools employees work with and what they do with those tools.
Boy, you’d think a bunch of IT nerds would better remember Star Wars quotes about what happens when you try to tighten your fingers.
[Editors’ Note: In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]