The first, from Gartner, was 50% of Generation Y and Z workers feel they have better technology at home than at work. The other stems from Forrester Research which revealed 36% of information workers were willing to invest their own money in a laptop if they could have one of their choice. In other words, they would rather spend their own hard-earned salary to work more effectively than jeopardise their productivity by using what they saw as inferior technology supplied by their employer.
These sentiments sum up the BYOD challenge – and the related problem of shadow IT – in a nutshell. Although many companies have found ways to make peace with the invasion of consumer technologies, or at least discovered how to make their usage more secure, the situation has continued to evolve. Now it appears to have come to a natural conclusion in the emergence of the digital workplace and innovations in workspace technology.
Paul Miller, CEO and founder of the Digital Workplace Group, describes the digital workplace as, “the technology-enabled space where work happens – the virtual, digital equivalent of the physical workplace.” Although the concept embraces processes and workflow, at the heart is the technology layer that manages all the things a user needs to do their job flexibly and effectively at any time and from anywhere. To differentiate the technology from the broader term, this is sometimes known as the workspace.
Workspaces set out to balance the yin and yang of business; a freedom of choice with security and compliance. By their nature workspaces are role-based, intuitive and customisable. Ideally, they provide a personalised interface to applications, mail, content, diary, self-service help or whatever the user needs to be productive via a ‘single pane of glass’ experience.
Critical to BYOD approaches, access to the workspace and the user experience must be the same whether viewed on a PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone. It is not uncommon for employees today to use up to five devices to access corporate information. By providing a consistent single point of access, regardless of the device used, employers can streamline business processes, maximise productivity and save time.
Intuitive, web-based access to applications, services and content are prepared and presented to employees across business departments and roles. Workspaces can then be modified to meet individual user requirements and preferences and end-users can customise them to become even more productive. Integration with an enterprise service store enables users to search for an app or service to be automatically added to their workspace.
While users can use the technology in any way they want, they can be assured that they do so in a safe and secure environment. Configuration drift, often caused by end-users installing their own unapproved software, is no longer a problem as workspaces provide central governance by enabling end-users to add their favourite SaaS and local applications for which access is approved. This approach eliminates the need to bypass the IT department and use unsanctioned software, and appropriately balances the centralised control of the employer with the consumer-like technology expectations of employees.
The workspace works well for the IT department because there’s no longer a focus on managing the entire operating system, but rather on delivering the required role-based applications, data and services directly to a browser-based dashboard in a targeted manner.
Beyond the compelling cost and time savings benefits, digital workspaces give employees the freedom and flexibility to do their jobs in the best way available, wherever they are working. Employees are empowered to do their best work when technology supports their role instead of inhibiting it. It’s interesting that employers talk about needing to delight their customers. Just imagine the business outcomes they can achieve by delighting their employees too.
If this is where BYOD finds its natural outcome, it’s worked out better than we ever thought it would.
