Insisting on BYOD

Gartner’s latest report, stating that 38% of companies will stop providing staff with devices by 2016 and that half of all companies would be making BYOD mandatory by 2017, seems to have really stirred up the debate around BYOD this month. That was obviously it intension but the premise would have been impossible to imagine only a few years ago with the complete resistance coming from IT only a few years ago. However, when you start to think about the realities of the knowledge economy and how the future may look the idea may not be so far fetched.

For years I’ve seen companies provide the vast majority of the workers poor quality, incorrectly specified devices. This didn’t seem to matter as the average office worker was performing a narrow set of tasks and the frustration they experience d was simple excepted. This however has changed. With the rise of the knowledge worker and generation x, the employee is increasingly a skilled worker who is judged by what they produce. They will no longer tolerate ineffective systems, in part due to the fact that many will have home systems far more powerful that their desktop in the office, and poor tools. In fact these workers will have more in common with the skilled tradesman who arrives on the building site with his own specialist tools, which are of the highest quality. Also, just like the building site, companies will have to provide the big heavy lifting equipment, specific to the operation of the company.

This will still leave many challenges with BYOD that will have to be addressed, but I look forward to working with the tools I choose.