Hello! Magazine

Jose Mosquera has been HELLO!’s head of IT for four years, supporting about 100 users, 70 of them in the London office. He has six IT staff looking afterwards users in Madrid and London. In a varied 20 year IT career, he has put in spells at Apple and at an Internet service provider, most recently working in the public sector.

The company has been providing mobile phones for key users, however as the innovation changed, why not allow other people to use their own mobile phones, as long as we can make sure our data is protected?

Bring your own device pilot

We are going through a bring your own device pilot. As we have tackled it, we are keeping an eye on the legalities, and we’ve tried to document all that and make it clear where the responsibilities lie. Insurance and upgrades are the responsibility of the user, and we provide a service – in substance email on your phone, with the corporate data sandboxed.

If anything happens to your phone, you give us permission to delete our data, and should you want us to, we can wipe your phone. If the phone does not meet our requirements, it gets blocked automatically and email stops coming. It’s very simplistic, nevertheless it’s best to approach it this way.

The response we have got from our users is very positive. They want access to the email, it is not the company pushing them. And key users on the whole have devices from the company, some of them iPhones and iPads.

The key to all this is having the right IT staff

The key to all this is having the right IT staff. They have to be multi-skilled and multi-talented. We have Linux, Mac and Windows servers, virtualisation and open source systems. We have to deal with all of those… as then as simple support questions! IT staff have to be jugglers. You just cannot afford to be doing one thing all the time – however you have to control every single task properly.

The greatest change is that we are now seen as a fundamental part of the company. Media is a dynamic sector and very pressurised. We are always trying to find that edge that allows us to do better than other companies – IT people can bring a lot to the business, and IT has to be an active department.

What tech were you involved with ten years ago?

What tech were you involved with ten years ago? Ten years ago I was overseas, working for an ISP startup – the first private ISP in Slovenia. We were trying to be technologically advanced, looking at things like bringing VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) into the country, and building a city-wide Wi-Fi system.

What tech do you expect to be using in ten years’ time? In ten years’ time being constantly connected will be part of life. Having access to the Internet all the time will be a normal thing. In the media we will use augmented reality for marketing and advertising purposes.

Who is your tech hero? No person in particular, nevertheless I respect companies that use their resources and money to push the boundaries of innovation – innovating to create new markets.

What’s your favourite innovation ever made? Which do you use most? Right now I would say smartphones, just simply because I have so much information there with me all the time. I have all my corporate data, and all the other information I might want. I can see the time of the at once train or bus – so when I leave the office I know the time I have to get to the station or the bus stop. I think that changes the way people live.