By Tony Hallett, 3 July 2007 10:31
COMMENT
I was at the Mobility Summit earlier this week (good event, terrible tag line: 'Delivering Business Value in the Mobile Enterprise') and heard about an interesting development. End users, it seems, are to be trusted more and more with choosing their own mobile devices.
I say this as Richard Hall, the UK CTO of Avanade, spoke of a high street bank that is experimenting with giving a large number of its staff a budget to go out and buy their preferred gadget.
Sure, there are provisos. Said device has to support the required apps the bank needs its staff to run and, I'm guessing, has to be 'supportable', in a DIY sense.
I don't think this is strange. In fact it all sounds quite familiar.
Last year silicon.com was at the forefront of reporting on a scheme at oil giant BP to allow staff - admittedly technically proficient staff - to opt out of corporate IT support. The initiative is voluntary and doesn't include tricky legacy applications, for example. It focuses on mainstream apps such as MS Office and web browsers. And, in case I didn't mention it, there's cash in it for those who save their employer this overhead.
The move isn't to be taken lightly. This isn't a SME experimenting but one of the world's largest companies, a global brand. It has to be careful about issues such as security (leading to a rise in staff buying Macs, for one thing, one insider tells me).
This shows a shift in IT support towards self-service. The bank the Avanade exec mentioned at the Mobility Summit will be equally security-minded. And we all know mobile devices can pose a different level of security headache.
But here are four reasons this is an idea whose time has come.
First, it's increasingly possible. Avanade's Hall told me that "application desktop virtualisation is key". Getting your critical apps to your device of choice - could be ERP or CRM, say - is no longer about bearer technologies, as we pretty much have the speed now. It's about consistent and reliable rendering on different screens and form factors, with the appropriate connection to a back end.
Second, security can actually increase when you let the lunatics run the asylum. Don't believe me? Quocirca analyst Rob Bamforth points out that when an end user likes, sorry, loves the device they carry around all the time they are much more likely to treat it well. Witness all those 'standard' handsets that get inexplicably lost or dropped in the bath. Or worse.
Third, from the point of view of costs being ever-squeezed in enterprise IT, self-service is a no-brainer. Just as banks, supermarkets, airlines and others have shifted customers to self-service, so too IT departments want their customers to solve more of their own problems. Bottom line - it's cheaper.
And last, it's happening anyway. This is not just about 'the kids' entering the workforce. More and more of us sneak in kit by the back door. Whether it's a phone, a USB key, a digital music player, a PDA (the difference between the three is minimal) or even a laptop or wi-fi access point, the guys in IT have a hard time keeping up. There's an argument to say 'stop swimming against the tide'.
The initiatives above, spanning just some of the staff in oil and banking, are only the beginning.
Comments
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1. Adrian Trenholm
Thanks for the positive comment, Tony. Will try harder on the tagline next year.
Nigel Heaney from Dexterra also commented on support costs, noting that when a solution is pushed from the top down and does not meet users' needs, support costs rise because the whole thing is not intuitive.
If the user is actively included in desiging a solution and his or her needs are met, particularly when it comes to the device in his or her hand, then calls for support are very much reduced. And you can't get more bottom up than enabling individual users to choose the device on which they feel most productive.
Ross Taylor from E.ON IS also covered this, in a much broader sense. He said that E.ON staff have difficult and dangerous jobs to accomplish and who are we (ie IT) to tell them how to do their jobs?