- Here are another couple of ideas
that are generating a lot of discussion
in the arena of the modern workplace.
Bring your own device and bring your own applications.
Now, the talking points for proponents are easy
to understand.
Instead of a company mandating a certain type of equipment,
iPhone over Android, or Mac over PC,
you let people use their own.
The things that they're the most familiar with.
Same for applications.
There are a few things that everyone will have in common,
like network and exchange servers,
but you're free to use your own software tools instead
of a common standard.
For example, you can use Open Office instead
of Microsoft Office.
Why is this attractive?
Well, obviously employees like it
for the freedom it gives them to work with hardware
and software that they're familiar with
or prefer for their own personal reasons.
It can definitely up the employee satisfaction quotient.
There are some financial incentives too.
If a company lets employees
use their existing personal phones for business,
it doesn't have to provide them.
No buying phones.
Same for computers, tablets, software
and that can add up to be a substantial chunk of change,
however, jumping into this without doing some exploration
can result in some pretty big downsides.
Who's gonna support all this additional stuff?
Are the employees gonna be calling the help desk,
asking for assistance
with their mystery brand X Windows phone
or help running a report in some open-source CRM program?
How can you possibly expect your support staff
to be able to answer questions on absolutely everything?
Or, maybe you're going to make a rule
that people are responsible for their own support
and they have to pursue it with the respective companies.
How do you take into account the variable quality
of support out there and how much productivity will you lose
while people are tracking down answers
and maybe having to change to something else
if they hit a dead end?
Let's talk compatibility.
Both software and hardware.
How do you guarantee that the equipment will hook up
to the network smoothly?
That files will be viewable by everyone who needs them?
Finally, how do you manage security
around all these different things?
How do you guarantee that they're safe and protected?
How do you make sure that all patches are applied?
Obviously, even if you want a BYOD or BYOA environment,
there need to be some basic guidelines
around what's allowable
and there need to be minimum requirements
around security that are easy to verify and monitor.
Quite frankly, the amount of effort and resources required
to do this right can easily eat up any savings
you might expect.
When people have to start spending a lot
of their own time managing their own connections
and equipment,
I think you'll start seeing their excitement
and satisfaction levels dropping correspondingly.
Here's my considered opinion on the subject.
I think the success of BYOD and BYOA is very dependent
on the technical literacy of the employees
and the overall size of the organization.
I think it can work great given the right environment.
If you're talking about a relatively small company
where all of the employees are very tech-savvy
and would probably be supporting their own stuff anyways,
you're probably looking at a place where BYOD is going
to succeed.
However, once you get into an environment
where there's a variable of technical knowledge,
you're going to need
to implement some very stringent guidelines around it,
including agreements with the participants about levels
of service and you're going to have
to provide standard tools for the majority
of the workforce anyways.
Not everyone should be allowed to make their own choices.
The long and the short of it,
I think that in an enterprise setting,
it's a utopian ideal,
but littered with landmines that will make it hard
to implement on anything other than a small scale.