President Obama, speaking to the graduating class at Hampton University in Virginia Sunday, rued the rising tide of consumer electronics gadgetry, which he said diminishes the educational and empowering potential of information.

"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations,--none of which I know how to work--information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," Obama told the graduates. "All of this is not only putting new pressures on you, it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy."

The growing dependence on consumer electronics, particularly among the younger set, threatens to put new pressures on CIOs as well.

Recently, the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda at the University of Maryland conducted a study of college students and their digital connections, in which the students went without all media, including smartphones, for 24 hours. The study found that students not only felt relentlessly bored without their MP3 players, but they also expressed feelings of withdrawal--such as anxiousness and jitteriness--not unlike symptoms of substance addiction withdrawal.

The addiction to always being connected is somewhat foreboding for the future employers of these students. As it is well-documented that using personal devices over the corporate network presents risks for network security, not to mention productivity. When employees insist on using their smartphones for work, or on staying connected to Facebook or Twitter much of the day, it can put additional strains on an already streteched IT team.

Obama pointed to education as a way for the young graduates to "fortify" themselves against the pressures of our digital age, and education may be the best answer for those in charge of the corporate network as well. Instruction for employees can come about through strong management of usage policies and controls, but this approach must be backed up from the very top, and that is not always a given.

In response to my recent column asking whether IT has relinquished too much power over the network, one reader summed up this aspect of the mounting pressure on information professionals: "[W]hat can you do when your Chairman is the one that wants access to Facebook and insists on using his hotmail account in the office?...Now we are too frightened to upset someone's 'human rights' to ban them from doing certain things in work time, on work equipment. IT hasn't given away the control it has been slowly squandered by the lack of management controls."

Perhaps more education may be needed in the C-Suite as well? - Caron