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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