4 Ways to Kill BYOD: Because No One Really Wants it Anyway

Mobile Device Management Austin, TX

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, got it right.  Paraphrasing what he said at Evernote’s annual conference in San Francisco, “End users do not want BYOD anymore than the company they work for does.”*

End users want a great experience.  They want tools that enable them to get their jobs done as efficiently as possible so they can go home and enjoy their “real” lives.

End users sit in the cubes and offices all day doing their job and come to realize that they could do their jobs better with the tools they have at home than they can with the tools they are provided at work.  As a result, they petition their bosses to let them bring tools from home or bring their work home to their tools so they can do a better job.

End users would much rather have their company provide them with great tools than have to resort to using their own personal stuff.

Would you like to have a company car?  Yes, you might say.  How about a company car that was in worse shape and less reliable than your personal car?  No thanks.  I will stick with my car and expense the mileage. 

There are a lot of great technologies out there that help solve the BYOD problem today, but if your business does not want to invest in the technology to deliver a rock solid BYOD capable infrastructure, maybe the better answer is to invest in technologies that are equal to or superior to what your End Users have at home.

If you are evaluating adding BYOD policies and capabilities to your IT infrastructure, ask your end users, you may find that you do not need to go down the BYOD road if you just improved the quality of the tools that they have to work with.

Killing BYOD in four easy steps:

1. Look at how your employees are getting their jobs done today.  Talk to them.  Is there a better tool, application or device available as a consumer product that exceeds what they have to work with in the office?  Watch.  Ask.  Listen.
2. Evaluate the feedback you get.  Will the ideas you get scale across your enterprise or are they spot solutions that add to the IT management burden?
3. Look around.  Form teams of end users by role type, with or without an IT team member to find and evaluate other methods to solve the same problem, both on the commercial and consumer side.
4. Test what you get back, and reward the sources of the ideas that measurably improve productivity or the business at large.

If your business provides the best and most efficient way to get the job done, what would be the point of allowing BYOD devices?  The capital costs of the new applications or devices, perhaps?

The other side of this argument is that it might take a mixture of 10 different types of edge devices, different operating systems, etc. to get every employee operating at maximum efficiency, but the cost of managing the devices would push IT support costs through the roof.

The answer to this argument is get out of the end user device management business.  Maybe that is with Citrix or VMware, maybe that is with mobile or Software as a Service applications.  The point is that that there are technologies out there that will maintain a reasonable balance between IT support costs, End User productivity, and business profitability.

Finding that balance between these three competing needs is not as difficult as it might at first seem.  There are a handful of great tools out there like Aternity for example, that help you see exactly what your End User is experiencing, what tools they are using, and gauge their relative productivity.  Combine that with some good conversations with actual End Users and I think you will find, as we have, that a path that strikes the right balance on all three points will present itself.

*Matt Rosoff, with CiteWorld, has a great article on Phil Libin’s address if you would like to read more about the presentation.  You can read Matt’s article here.