Wearable tech will be affecting your helpdesk - really?

With all the hype recently around the release of Apple's new watch, there appears to have been a plethora of blogs telling us how the helpdesk needs to be ready for the influx of calls from people wanting to use the benefits of wearable tech for work and how the helpdesk needs to address issues like security, compatibility with existing software and hardware and the information "stored on them".

What rubbish.

None of this is a role for the helpdesk.  Just as with smart phones and tablets or people's personal laptops or palm pilots, this comes back to governance.

Do the governors of IT want IT to allow smart watches to be used in the workplace? I doubt they would be able to consider all of the risks and benefits so this is where IT (maybe in the form of the CIO) needs to advise the governors.  When they have all the information, they can make an informed decision. Then they can direct IT to allow certain things.

Without this direction, IT don't allow anything.

If the governors decide that they do want to allow wearable tech within the workplace, then it is still not the helpdesk that addresses the issues mentioned above. Information Security will consider and address information and security concerns, compatibility will be undertaken by architects.  None of that is the helpdesk.

When everything has been considered and all risks mitigated to an acceptable level, then the helpdesk and other support teams (who we hope have been involved in the design of any changes) will receive all the appropriate information BEFORE go-live, so that they can support the users.  Until then, nothing is supported.

So pundits, before you start scaremongering, just consider who DOES need to address concerns and when.  Let's get the governors governing and IT managing.  It's like Government and Police. The Police (IT) are suppose to uphold the law, and the Government (Governors) set the law. (To follow that analogy a bit, see the IT Skeptic's To Protect and Serve)