An interesting article from Greg Ferro concerning BYOD and the ever increasing divide between user expectations and what corporate IT is willing and capable of providing to users.
BYOD Policies vs. the Realities of Corporate IT
This pretty accurately reflects my feelings and experience on the subject. When I was full time consulting on virtual infrastructures, using a Mac simplified my life enormously with its built in capacity to talk to Windows and UNIX systems, BBEdit for munging log files and so on.
If I’m given the choice between hauling the 3kg corporate laptop to a meeting vs my iPad for note taking etc., it’s clear that the iPad wins.
Given a choice between using an antique version of Visio on XP and Omnigraffle on my MacBook Air I’ll take the Air and email the results in Visio XML.
Writing in Word vs. any decent Markdown editor on iPad and the MBA.
Powerpoint vs. Keynote?
Document review in Word or PDF Expert?
There are so many tasks where the officially supported tool (where it exists) is deficient compared to the tools that I have at my disposition via my personal investments.
Now there is a secondary aspect to this situation and that is that as someone who loves technology, I have been ready and willing to spend out my personal budget to acquire tools that interest me that would be considered by many the responsibility of their employer. This does not necessarily represent the profile of the average employee.
However the cost of many of these tools is sufficiently low that they are within the means of many people, especially “knowledge workers” that are frustrated by the tools available and are aware of other solutions that will make them more efficient.
Another example is a friend of mine who uses an iPad at work and has an authorized VPN connection. Except that he’s not allowed to use the corporate Wifi, just the guest access Wifi which agressively drops connections. So a bunch of colleagues got together and purchased a 4G Mifi that they share in order to get solid VPN connections.
A key point to remember here is that these types of actions are borne out of a desire to be more effective and efficient. The result of push back from IT regarding the use of non-approved tools can have a demotivating effect on employees that are trying to find ways to do their jobs better. Employees that are in this situation are often self sufficient and represent a relatively light charge on IT support resources.
I’m fully aware that in many environments, there are security issues that make BYOD more difficult that in environments that are less constrained. But it should not be a knee jerk reaction by IT to play the security card to avoid the issue. Playing this card too often and too soon, inevitably leads to shadow IT driven by the user community’s needs. Finding ways to bring these user driven advances into the fold benefits everyone.