Making employees buy their own IT tools sounds like a crazy idea.  Thirty years ago, IT systems were so expensive that most access was through a dumb terminal, which was essentially nothing more than a session screen that allowed you to type in commands that were sent to the computer.   The computer was of course housed in some data center attended by tens of administrators day and night.  Then the PC – remember it is not called the Personal Computer for nothing — revolution of the 1990’s shifted the paradigm again, so that each user had their own software on their own system.  The corporate systems were still accessed through special terminal emulation software, but Microsoft got fat on selling millions of Windows and Office licenses to their enterprise customers.

Over the past 40 years nobody has questioned the wisdom of having a company purchase and control the hardware and software that employees use to do their jobs.  The wide availability and acceptance of consumer devices is opening up the opportunity of resetting the equation again.  It is not only possible, but there are many benefits from taking this approach.  There are precedents in the construction industry.  Most construction workers are expected to bring their own tools.  It makes perfect sense when working with dangerous equipment.  You want to be completely comfortable with the tools so you can focus on doing your job well.  This even extends into the engineering and architectural professions; I have a complete set of drafting tools from my years as a Registered Architect.

From the enterprise perspective, support costs can be substantially reduced.  Keeping track of thousands of devices is a known exercise in futility.  A major broadcasting organization finally paid for an inventory of their workers’ systems a few years ago and found an extra 3000 undocumented systems in the organization.  Another company had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about employee owned devices and now has to semi-support about 11,000 of them.

From the employees’ perspective, using a single device that is used for both home and work, means eliminating nerd belt syndrome – two or more devices hanging from their waist or taking up space in carrying bags.  There is nothing worse than hearing a ring from one of the devices and trying to figure out which one needs to be answered!

Rather than attempting to halt the demand, the smarter path is to embrace BYOD’s by providing a safe and secure framework for their use.  This framework should have two complementary components: a BYOD policy and the technology framework and administration software to enforce it.  An official corporate BYOD policy would not be dissimilar to the corporate security policy.  To make it easier, some companies just incorporate their BYOD device policies directly into their standard security policy that all employees are expected to adhere to.  The key to successful enforcement is the implementation of the proper MDM software.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions

The 2012 MIT CIO symposium purported theme was the untethered enterprise.  Ironically for all the recent media buzz, there was little discussion of untethered enterprises, or even much mention of mobile at all.  Only one panel was slated to cover the topic, but that discussion quickly devolved into a tactical discussion of IT/vendor relationships and SLA’s.  That doesn’t mean that there was no discussion of mobile devices, just few of the in-depth conversations about how the enterprise can best incorporate emerging technologies that I expect from this usually forward thinking and informative conference. Reading between the lines, the enterprise is not quite ready to tackle these difficult considerations.

Very few companies are creating the holistic enterprise mobility strategy that is needed to drive real business advantage.  To put this all into perspective, an informal conference survey revealed that less than a third of the attendees had an enterprise BYOD policy in place today.  Some simply were letting their employees set the standards.  For one company this has resulted in far too many employees with two devices on their desks (one company issued and the other a BYOD of their own choice), and 11K unsupported iPads on their network.  That CIO wryly admitted that maybe it was time for their IT department to address the issue, if for no other reason than they were wasting millions on underused computer resources.

The push to add mobility is coming from both the top and the bottom of the organizations.  For every executive with their hot smartphone, there are 10 employees with three tablets.  However, IT is responding by pushing mobile apps out the door without a good understanding that mobile is a game changing strategy that takes the organization from the traditional top-down IT approach that has been fashionable in recent years back to a bottom up consumer driven initiative. Of course, this is completely runs counter to the traditional IT mindset.  As long as there is a disconnect between the demands of the workers and the services provided by IT, shadow IT will continue to remain a strong force in the enterprise.

From the technology perspective, while enterprise mobility has been around for 20 years in some form or another, the underlying technology to support the mobile apps is still quite brittle.  We are relying on a telecom infrastructure that isn’t fully capable of supporting millions of mobile endpoints.  Because mobility is primarily a device driven technology, it is completely dependent on the infrastructure.  The IT organization is better off getting into the way-back machine and treating them as dumb terminals.  The good news is that mobility security is finally being taken seriously.  Clearly there are some continuing issues that need to be addressed, but the technology and standards are there to make smartphones and tablet secure enough for even government standards.

Several times during the conference, the downsides of hyper-connectivity came up.  One panelist noted an interesting recent trend where formerly plugged-in 20-somethings were choosing to disconnect as they ramped up their careers and realized that separating their private and work lives was a sensible idea.  Several others commented on the need to provide a work environment that is attractive to the tech savvy worker, but old expectations of 100% worker availability is wearing thin.  Many American companies are realizing what the rest of the world has known forever, just because you can touch your workers 24 hours a day, doesn’t mean that you should.  There is an increasing awareness that for sanity if nothing else, you need to apply reasonable business etiquette for worker communications.  My only comment is that after living the 7/24 IT worker life for 20 years this revelation couldn’t come any sooner for me.

What I realized at the end of the day was that mobile and untethered is just a red herring.  The new generation of users sees it for what it really is, shared ubiquitous access to data in the cloud.   For that to succeed It has to be dirt simple and it has to be a thin client service that delivers the functionality that the users need.   That is not so hard, is it?

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions