BYOD: Enter the Deluge

The list of semi-villainous characters in the most pop-ular comic strip in corporate history is incompletewithout CIO Mordac.

He is the Preventer of Information Services for Dilbertand his colleagues. "I can't upgrade your computer becausethen it will be non-standard..."

Like almost every character in Adams' iconic strip, Mor-dac strikes a chord in readers (barring IT managers them-selves!) who have encountered IT managers. Ever trydownloading unapproved apps, or bringing in your home lap-top to the office, or enabling company wi-fi on your phone?Mordac's call-sign is the antonym to President Obama's warcry. No. We. Can't.

Not without reason. Standardization has long been the en-terprise IT mantra, for all its reasons of ease of management,support, security. "Any color as long as it's black" has alwaysworked well for corporate IT.

But something changed this year. The change actually be-gan last year, when people started bringing snazzy mobile de-vices in increasing numbers to the workplace. The differencewas, these weren't just the usual nerds and hip youngsters, butmanagers and CEOs.

The pressure began to build up on the IT department.Gradually, some companies figured that if someonewanted to buy her own phone or laptop because they werecool, maybe they could let them, and save the company somemoney.

Now, you probably know that there are tiers of organiza-tions paranoid about security. In the top tier are the military,the financial services companies, and outsourcing servicessuppliers. When these--starting with banks like Citigroup andBank of America--started testing iPhones in 2010 as alterna-tives to corporate-issued BlackBerry handsets, others woke upto the new BYOD reality. By mid-2011, BYOD began to creepinto IT policy of global companies. India went a bit slower,though SMBs were anyway happily inclined toward BYOD.

By then, the iPad had begun to make inroads into the en-terprise. Quite a few now allow employees to set up their per-sonal iPads with corporate email. Subject to minorrestrictions, such as a startup password, without which emailwould not get activated.

I'm writing this in the casino-studded former Portugesecolony of Macau, at Wipro's annual CIO summit, shortly afterchairing a panel on BYOD. Dozens of CIOs here are carryingtheir own, non-corporate, devices, and a few even ad-mit to violating corporate IT policy (perhaps theirown!).

Wipro's CIO says the company has put in place aformal BYOD policy, quite interesting for a security-conscious services provider. Several others have donethe same, or are considering it. The bankers, pre-dictably, are going to wait and watch BYOD evolving. What are the issues? As you'd expect: security tops the list.(Amazingly, it tops the list even in the CIO's overall tech prior-ities for 2012, as this month's PCQ cover story survey shows.)

Next in line: management and support fears. And a possi-ble loss of control by the CIO, though few admit this.

CIOs are testing the waters. One brute-force method is toisolate the BYOD folks onto a physically separate network,with separate access points and SSIDs. Sounds extreme andapartheid to me. I guess better solutions will graduallyemerge.

On the "gains": capex budget savings by the company onclient devices, and,likely, happier employees with their iPadsand other gadgets. Top-gaining vendor in all this: Apple.They're not quite in the enterprise, but have the most desir-able gadgets around. And managers want those sexy iPadsand iPhones.