Bring your own tech: IT’s missed opportunity

Employees have been bringing their own devices and technologies into the workplace in greater numbers over the past few years, for a simple reason with less than simple root causes: The technology they can bring in is superior to the technology IT provides.

Now, they are “bringing their own cloud” — subscribing to cloud-based services on their own and using them on the job. BYOD, BYOT, BYOC? It’s enough to drive even the strongest CIO to BYOB.

BYOD (or BYOT) came about because of four challenges IT departments have faced for years. It should have evolved out of the enormous opportunity they represent — one you can still take advantage of.

BYOC is different. It should be and can be completely unnecessary. It’s emerging as a workplace trend because IT is falling down on the job. All that’s needed to make BYOC unnecessary is a complete change in attitude on the part of IT leadership. But to do that, we have to know where we went wrong — and that happened well before the first employee-owned device logged on to the corporate network.

Here is a look at the four challenges at the center of BYOD/BYOT and how to prevent the third phase, BYOC, from ever being a factor.

Challenge No. 1: Budget-starved IT

Constantly challenged to make airtight business cases for everything, IT has done everything possible to stretch its personal-tech budget. Thus, employees use aging desktop and laptop computers, with obsolete versions of the operating system and standard software suites. They’re jokes compared to what most have at home, except that jokes are supposed to be funny.

At the same time, IT still provides company BlackBerrys, while everyone else has figured out that BlackBerry is now an industry joke — once again, except for the funny part.

Company-provided tablets? What about “budget-starved” did you miss? CIOs who can’t even afford to keep desktops current aren’t about to divert their tech budget to yet another category of device.

Challenge No. 2: Lockdown, aka the Value Prevention Society

Locking down employee desktops is called a “best practice” in the information security trade — except it isn’t. For the best information security, implement what used to be called an air-gap firewall, “air-gap” being a euphemism for “unplugged from the Internet.” Disable the USB ports, too, and just to be on the safe side, remove the PC’s power supply; now you have a truly secure device.

Anything short of that isn’t best; it’s a compromise. Once information security starts thinking in terms of compromise, it’s in danger of recognizing there is no such thing as a best practice, only practices that fit particular situations best. “Best practice” means one size fits no one. Nonetheless, those who declare such things insist that only fully locked-down personal computers will do.

So if Jane in property management figures out that taking pictures of properties on her digital camera and using, say, Microsoft ICE to stitch together 360-degree views would be useful, that’s just too bad. Enable the SD card interface? Let her install a free downloadable program from the Internet? The risks dwarf any possible business benefit.

Instead, Jane goes home, plugs her camera’s SD card into her (more powerful and up-to-date) home PC, installs ICE, and emails the result to work without her house ever once exploding. This is the same reason why, years ago, I chartered the Value Prevention Society (VPS) to provide a home for those bent on, well, preventing value by locking down user devices.

Challenge No. 3: The tale of two everythings

Jim travels. In addition to a career, he has something many of us call “a life.” He’s in the habit of checking his personal email, Facebook, and LinkedIn from his hotel room. He also calls home from his hotel room to talk with his wife and kids. Sadly, his company has implemented a common thought process about personal technology: The company owns it, so it should be used for company business only. As a result, he carries two laptops and phones with him when he travels.

Challenge No. 4: Stockholm syndrome

As is well known, after a while, hostages often start to sympathize with their captors. In similar fashion, after so many years of overseeing tight personal technology budgets, locked-down desktops, and all the other VPS policies, many CIOs consider this sort of behavior not just normal, but reasonable. It isn’t — there’s a difference between giving up because something is politically impossible and rearranging your neurons until they accept it as actual sense.

BYOD, BYOT, and now BYOC prove they aren’t. Each has been a response to the above-listed challenges. Instead, BYOD and BYOT should have been a response to opportunity, one that likely would have rendered BYOC unnecessary.

The opportunity: Increasingly computer-literate employees

Many employees own laptop computers. These systems are portable, more powerful, and more up-to-date than the computers they use at the office. They have plenty of unused storage. If their owners were allowed to work with them at the office, they’d also make office life more pleasant and productive.

Most of these same employees own smartphones as well, along with tablets. They’d be happier using these at the office, instead of having two of them or doing without during the work day.

Except for one thing: Why would any employee donate a portion of their personal equipment to their employer?

The answer is simple and obvious: Offer a personal technologies subsidy — say, $600 once every three years toward the purchase of a laptop computer, plus company-provided copies of Microsoft Office and Outlook, configured by IT to work with both the company’s Exchange servers and the employee’s preferred email system. Companies accustomed to providing BlackBerrys might also offer a smartphone subsidy, put together in similar form — tablets, too.

Do the math: $200 per employee per year for a laptop is a lot less than IT currently spends. IT could then use the savings to make the modest security and support improvements necessary now that employees use their own equipment.

What BYOC should have been

The question: Why do employees want to “bring their own cloud”? Why do they want Dropbox, Google Apps, Gmail, and for that matter, Skype?

Answer: Because they can use them to do things they can’t accomplish with the limited toolkit most IT shops provide.

Start with SharePoint or whatever general-purpose CMS you prefer. If you have it and properly support it, there’s no reason anyone would use Dropbox or Google Apps instead. SharePoint does everything Google Apps does and a lot more besides.

How about Gmail? Here’s a bet: If you have employees who surreptitiously establish Gmail accounts for business use, they do it because IT has placed a ludicrously small limit on Exchange storage (and probably hasn’t explained how to use links to SharePoint instead of attachments).

The solution is cheap: Open up everyone’s local encrypted hard drive for .pst files, and set up easy backup for everyone, perhaps to an inexpensive NAS device. Storage costs less than 14 cents per gigabyte. We don’t have to be stingy with it anymore. Yes, you have to manage it, except no, you can’t because your employees are moving their messages to Gmail anyway, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Then there’s Skype. Employees use it because a Web conferencing solution still can’t be used for ad hoc calls, and they probably have to go through an administrative procedure to schedule them. For most of them, most of the time, Skype is more than good enough. It gives them video calling and even lets them share their desktop, more or less.

Think you can’t afford it? Sure you can. Compared to your savings from not having to own so many PCs anymore, Skype for everyone is a pittance.

Employees don’t bring their own cloud to spite IT. They bring it because IT hasn’t listened to them when they’ve explained how they want to work. Worse, they bring it because IT has failed to anticipate their needs. As we’re supposed to provide information technology leadership to the company, that’s a very serious failure.

This story, “Bring your own tech: IT’s missed opportunity,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’ Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.