The BYOD era may be ending already

(credit:Google)

Few technology trends have forced their way into business as fast as the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement, which started weakly in 2007 with the release of the iPhone but gathered momentum in mid-2010 when Apple added corporate-class management and security features in iOS 4. A year later, IT's "no way will user devices get into my network" policies were in tatters, with a majority of companies having accepted BYOD for at least a portion of the employee base and for iOS devices.

The iPad sealed the deal, as companies saw direct benefit to adopting them, and enabling such adoption automatically brought iPhones along, as their OSes and management opportunities are identical. Motorola Mobility and Samsung adopted similar management capabilities in some of their Android devices, giving IT an acceptable -- if not desired -- level of manageability that meant it could no longer say no to all those execs sporting mobile devices they picked up from the Apple Store, Best Buy, or Amazon.com.

The future, it seems in spring 2012, is one where employees will acquire their own technology either directly (BYOD) or by forcing their companies to provide a selection of what users want (choose your own device, or CYOD). With the shift to user-driven technology in mobile, it's now common to hear business and IT execs talk about letting employees bring or choose their own personal computers in a few years: Windows 7, Windows 8, or OS X on a variety of vendors' hardware and in a variety of configurations, from tablets to desktops.

Or maybe not.

Tablets hold the key for BYOD's impending obsolescenceIn a recent conversation, Phil Asmundson, Deloitte's vice chairman and U.S. media and telecommunications sector leader, suggested that the BYOD phenomenon will be short-lived. His reasoning: not because it's a bad idea but because the technology that makes BYOD possible will also make it unnecessary.

He may have a point.

One of the major reasons for employees' insistence on BYOD is that they want to choose the tools they like, which are not the ones their companies issue. We all know the (accurate) stereotype: Companies issue BlackBerrys and Windows XP PCs, and users want iPhones or Androids and Macs or Windows 7 PCs. They have those devices at home, where they also do some work, so why not formalize that reality? For PCs, that's not so much a BYOD phenomenon as it is a CYOD phenomenon. But for mobile devices, it's more of a BYOD phenomenon because people don't want to carry two devices and would rather use the one they prefer.

Whether it's BYOD or CYOD, the device is increasingly dual-purpose. That's where the technology comes in.

Asmundson notes, "We see a large percentage of people leaving the laptop at home." They bring a tablet with them instead when they travel.

I know what he means; when I first started using a tablet, I brought both a laptop and a tablet with me. The tablet was my entertainment and email device in transit, but my laptop was what I worked on at the hotel and remote sites. But soon I began leaving the laptop at home for trips of just a few days, as I found I could do most of my work on the tablet. Given the limited luggage capacity allowed air passengers these days, I wanted to carry only what was essential. Now, I leave the laptop at home for trips of a week or longer. I rarely need a laptop any more, truth be told; a small PC at my desk and a tablet (say, a Mac Mini and an iPad) would suffice 95 percent of the time.

Granted, your mileage may vary, but Asmundson says that as the iPad continues to gain in capabilities and when Windows 8-based tablets arrive later this year, ever more people will be able to leave a computer on their desk for that occasional "workstation" use and rely on a tablet the rest of the time.

Tablets are amazingly light and portable. Two of them weigh less and take less space than most laptops. In other words, carrying a personal unit and another one for work is not a burden, which means they can again become separate devices and avoid the messiness of a personal device acting as a business device (and vice versa). The same is true of smartphones, and Asmundson points out that many companies still issue corporate devices that have deep network access even if they let employees use personal devices for limited business purposes. Carrying two smartphones is not a big burden either, he says.

BYOD is a proxy for a bigger set of issues that won't go awayLet's be clear: Personal/business duality is the real issue for IT, as they must rely on users to be smart about malware prevention and corporate data loss, and that creates an unknown level of risk. Now that iOS and to some extent Android can satisfy legitimate business security and information management needs, businesses can give employees some choice in their mobile computing platforms; there's no longer the iPhone/BlackBerry gap issue to justify BYOD.

Regular readers know I believe users should be trusted more than IT usually does. As a corollary, users and their business units need to take on accountability for their actions -- after all, if IT takes over, that frees users to be both smart and stupid. But my conversations with Asmundson over the last year tell me his belief in the separation of business and personal devices isn't about returning to the past; he's as happy to help businesses succeed with BYOD and CYOD as he is to help IT organizations implement highly controlled, highly secure environments, if that's what they need.

I agree with Asmundson's logic, but I believe there's another option on the table: Although we're still in early days, there's a panoply of application and information management technologies coming that create the business/personal separation IT rightfully wants, allowing a single endpoint to be two or more virtual devices. The desktop and application virtualization approaches that are emerging for personal computers may come to some mobile platforms. Even if they don't, there are other separation technologies that do the same for mobile. You can have your cake and eat it, too.

I believe we'll see a continuum of choices, based on a variety of factors at each company: actual security and management needs, compliance burden to demonstrate adherence to them, corporate culture, and degree of mobile and nonheadquarters employees. Asmundson's approach would work well in companies such as Deloitte that have conservative IT requirements due to the confidentiality and compliance issues involved. The multiple-personality approach emerging would work better in companies that have less compliance overhead and benefit in terms of flexibility and productivity by letting employees work from anywhere on anything. We'll still have edge cases such as the National Security Agency that must have a tightly controlled environment, as well as smaller businesses that simply lack the knowledge or resources to do more than implement basic Exchange ActiveSync policies and trust their employees.

Will BYOD turn out to be a weird phase two years from now? Maybe. I believe that the "IT knows best" mentality will certainly be seen as anachronistic by then for user-facing technologies. And the BYOD and CYOD will have matured such that the issue is not who owns the device but whether it does the job in a way that satisfies everyone. We'll all have multiple devices, no matter who owns them. That's fundamental to the consumerization of IT. BYOD is simply an expression of that trend, not the trend itself.
                                                                                                                                                                                                (courtesy:www.infoworld.com)