The IT Melting Pot!

BYOD – Bring Your Own Device – Part 1

Consumerization of IT, BYOD, BYOC and all the fuzz about that we shall and already have started to use our personal devices at work, or that our employer doesn’t provide us with a company asset anymore. So many definitions and models, it’s like asking someone what the definition of Cloud is. You’ll get all the different answers about what a ‘Private’, ‘Public’ and ‘Personal’ Cloud is etc. But where are we really?

My view is that there is a big difference between countries, company sectors and depending of the size of the business. And of course you probably agree because I just made a “political” statement that doesn’t say anything at all… but of course there are businesses that have it way more easy to adopt to a new way of working! Like the company I work for (EnvokeIT), we are providing expertise consulting services and mainly at this point in time for larger enterprise corporations. The way we work is that we work for our customers with very clear deliverables in a project or in a line organization supporting them in their day-to-day delivery of a service. And these corporations are large and of course they have a mature organization, structures, governance models and security organization to ensure that everything they do follow policies and rules. But we as a small company (appr. 20 employees) are on customer site almost 100% and therefore most of the time where we get a customer managed device to work on. And this device is controlled by the internal IT organization or is provided by a third-party service provider.

But for EnvokeIT to function we have these basic needs;

• Messaging & Collaboration services
• Time reporting service
• Storage services

And this is basically it, ooops I almost forgot! We need something to consume these services from in order to be able to for instance collaborate with our colleagues that may be at another customer site etc. And for this we have what I would say a type of a BYOD concept.

Every employee has some sort of laptop (Mac, Windows, Linux) to be productive on if needed, we all have a cell phone to be able to call someone (and Facebook etc.). And most of us also have tablet of some sort, Android, iOS etc but this is most likely just there to consume information and do more simpler tasks like taking MoM at a meeting or so. Because I must say that I’ve not used my iPad often to connect to a Windows-based Desktop that we have in our demo environment running Citrix XenDesktop, the capability is there but WHY would I need a desktop when I just want to consume the application or function needed?

So I’d say that we have a bit of a BYOD concept going on, and yes btw; it’s a corporate asset. Why you ask, well tax reasons etc. in Sweden makes a BYOD concept hard if you where to give the employee an additional X USD or Swedish krona per year though he/she would have to pay tax on that.

But this concept works like a charm, and I’ve almost never used our internal Citrix XenDesktop solution for my day-to-day work. And WHY? It’s simple, we purchase everything as a service and don’t have any “legacy” Windows based apps. Office 365 for Messaging & Collaboration, QBIS for Time Reporting, Storage we have as a part of Office 365 (SharePoint) and for the “Follow-Me-Data” service we use ShareFile from Citrix, Lync for chat and presence. I can use whatever device to do my work!

So why doesn’t the enterprises work like this? This I’ll try to elaborate my personal view on tomorrow… stay tuned!

//Richard