• According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in all computer occupations is expected to increase by 22% in the next decade. It’s recommended that such forecasts be taken with a grain of salt because they can’t account for market changes and technology disruptions. But when it comes to the possibility of more jobs, we’ll take it with whatever seasoning necessary.
• Books, magazines, seminars! Advice on tech innovation is everywhere, and it can be an awful lot to swallow. Here is some innovation food for thought in seven easily digestible bites.
• Some straightforward advice on writing a social media policy for your company that somehow manages to include Quatrain LI of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. That aspect alone makes it worth the read, wethinks.
• Finding it harder and harder to find common cause with your younger workers? Well, you both more or less have Trivial Pursuit editions named for you — see!? OK, maybe that’s not enough to get baby boomers and Millennials in your IT organization to get along, but these tips on fostering intergenerational harmony might help. Besides, as our friend Goethe reminds: “Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.”
• And finally, why used-car shoppers should lean toward orange vehicles and other odd insights — brought to you by big data.

When it comes to mobility, social networks and even the cloud, however, command-and-control is still very much in place — although it isn’t necessarily the CIO who’s setting the ground rules now.

Sure, IT has a lot of input in setting policies for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs, given that IT departments have to control their support costs. But limiting choices to a specific iOS or to just BlackBerry devices is more of a corporate cost-control mandate than a control issue for IT.

Social media policies encourage employees to reach out using social platforms but to do so within certain parameters. And those parameters often aren’t set by IT but by company executives — namely, legal.

At Medtronic Inc., a maker of biomedical device implants such as heart pacemakers, Suzanne McGann, social media program manager for global interactive strategy, was told by the company’s executive committee that there “will be no social media in the organization” until she figured out how to do it safely.

IT and CIO were terms McGann didn’t use when she gave a presentation at June’s Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston on the subject of developing social media policies. Medtronic’s director of information risk (who headed up social media policy development) was mentioned quite often, however, as were the global branding, intellectual property, human resources, legal corporate, legal regulatory, and FDA legal and regulatory departments.

It’s an interesting Catch-22 for IT teams. They are not always the rule-setters for IT consumerization, but they ultimately are the enforcers and the ones who take it on the chin. After all, if you violate the rules around that BYOD program, who is going to wipe that device?

On the other hand, many would argue that IT is very much in charge of setting the ground rules for IT consumerization. IT wants to make sure that mobile data doesn’t end up in the wrong hands; it helps business units choose the right cloud provider; and yes, it gives users a choice when it comes to device and application selection — which is why IT was so gung-ho about virtualization long before the business was.

In fact, many CIOs are leading the charge, taking it on themselves to develop a mobile device management program to accommodate proliferating iPads. IT is not so much a command-and-control center as it is a services broker leading corporations to the right choices.