BYOD : Issue of classification & personal lifestyle

As people bring in their own devices, the cost of accommodating these devices into the enterprise could far outweigh the cost savings envisaged around not equipping the workforce with such devices. To be able to get the workforce to effectively deploy their personal devices to empower themselves in meeting their goals and objectives; enabling them to take on both the enterprise landscape and personal challenges, one will need investments in infrastructure, security and other digital assets and services apart from the investments needed in planning, governance, monitoring  and management of this way of life.

Enterprises are keen on  BYOD for completely different reasons. Most forward looking organisations today hire talent for their attitude, character and potential of promise amongst other personal attributes that HR folks look out for, as they recruit. Gen-Next India from both the employable and ready to graduate in the next 3 year category, though not digital natives, are immigrants who in the last 3 year have been responsible for the momentum that consumerization of IT has gained. Their attitude and way of life reflects in the kind of devices they carry, the kind of apps they download and the way they use them in their daily lives. It will require some serious imagination on our part to gauge and calibrate the attitude, culture and expectations the digital natives will carry to an enterprise as and when they join the employable resource-pool in the next 10-15 years. Today, every young Indian has a digital lifestyle as a result of the device proliferation and consumerization of IT.  This talent pool leaves digital footprints all over the cyberspace that is indicative of their attitude, culture and lifestyle in general. These people look up such data in the cyberspace to analyze, interpret and take decisions based on the digital footprints of others to decide the nature of relationship they would want to pursue.

As these young people enter the enterprise, they will be bringing their way of life into the enterprise. Organisations that do not change to accommodate the culture of this talent pool and make them feel at home, will be able to leverage little to nothing from this educated, smart next generation. Don't be surprised if people are searching for their bosses on facebook, twitter and four-square to form their first impressions about them. If they don't find them there, don't be surprised if their interpretations manifest as behavior that might seem bizarre to those not tuned in to this culture. Don't be surprise if in a brain-storming meeting a young one suggests a-kin to download this, put it in sky drive , open the app, modify, scrap from there, click this, put together , check with you on Skype to see what you feel and then its a go.  Having been in banking and financial service and having started my career with new age banks and financial service, I can visualize some very senior people (some of them IT leaders) reacting to such a scenario with bewilderment and irritation if this were to occur in their meeting rooms. This will occur. And when it does, and if the enterprises react with irritation and bewilderment at such approach to work-life, the talent pool will look up with little respect both towards the brand and the individuals who represent them. Gen-next will find and very little in terms of alignment between their strong-suite characteristics that makes them productive and keeps them creative, and how they see the enterprise empowering them to excel. BYOD today is seen by enterprises as a way of getting in the new age talent pool and retaining them for the strength they bring in.

There are multiple challenges in going the BYOD way. Among numerous other issues around BYOD, the issue of segmentation of data and the subsequent life-cycle management of the same is complex, one that does not have a solution. As data gets accessed using personal devices, content will be accessed not just to be consumed, but to actually action on the data that was rendered. These actions could result in the need to modify the rendered content or request for more enterprise data to add/modify/delete or create new data - all of this on the go and using personal devices. Editing and creating content will need a store-edit-review-collaborate-despatch cycle to be enabled locally on the device. This is an issue with most enterprises who hate to see their data leave the enterprise network and enterprise storage structures.

There is a need to segment data as enterprise and personal so that it can be governed by the enterprise policies to protect enterprise digital data assets and to cater to personal digital lifestyle and cultural needs of the workforce. This segmentation is a complex issue and has no clear cut solution. As long as the data comes from corporate database, this problem ceases to exist. The problem crops up as one uses word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, design creation, ideation (creation and documentation) and collaboration tools to create, edit and collaborate on content. Ability to segment such content at the time of creation, is a complex problem to solve. A heady cocktail of features in content authoring tools, digital rights management integrated with some aspects of DLP and other document life-cycle management attributes, employee life-cycle management attributes (around roles and access rights) and IT security software attributes will need to be prepared to solve this issue. As a player in both enterprise and consumer space I hope Microsoft finds within itself the right recipe for this Long Island Ice Tea! 

The next problem in accommodating BYOD scheme is to provide for a platform for workforce to go thru the iterative cycle of content creation - review - co-creation - collaboration and then submission to corporate networks in a manner that can be governed and managed effectively and efficiently. My view is that an integrated approach between MDM, cloud storage such as Skydrive / Dropbox / Google Drive and mobile apps can make this possible today. Microsoft as an organization that is a serious player in both enterprise and consumer space, is the right organization to take on this challenge and provide solutions. So, I will stick with skydrive, for articulating the enterprise need in the remainder of this post.

Some changes in skydrive will be needed. Enterprises will need to subscribe for cloud storage in a manner that aligns with enterprise IT Security policies. Microsoft's Cloud On Your Terms approach makes skydrive a good candidate for this solution, if they can pull the solution off. Each employee will need an account on skydrive with two logical partitions ( similar to C and D drive on your desktops and laptops); one where all enterprise data is stored and the other where all personal data is stored. One cloud storage account partitioned to create an enterprise cloud and  a personal cloud for an employee. If the employee leaves, the data does not go away, as the organization has administrative control on the storage cloud. When an employee leaves an organization, similar to the way employee car policies and mobile policies work where the employee pays the WDV and carries the car/mobile device with them, Microsoft will need to provide for merging the enterprise logical partition into an enterprise pool post which the enterprise could give the personal cloud back to the exiting employee in a format where the exiting employee continues to use the skydrive account, in line with Microsoft's consumer offering. To prevent the corporate data from getting downloaded to local mobile device storage, an integrated approach of accessing all data thru an enterprise app integrated with MDM implementation will need to be done. When this employee joins another organization that happens to be a microsoft cloud customer (skydrive in particular), the technology will need to accommodate for creating the employee account with the new enterprise with similar partition logic and pull the new recruits personal cloud as a partition into the corporate skydrive account. This keeps employees personal data persistent as employees transition organizations or even change roles (employee/customer/partner).

The bigger problem though is of segmentation. Pure-play consumer organizations like Google might not be willing to solve this problem. Microsoft which plays both in enterprise and consumer space should take this problem up and resolve it. Doing so, Microsoft will end empowering its customers to attract talent pool that can usher in creativity and agility into an enterprise.


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