Do you prefer your own laptop?

What do you prefer, your fancy MacBook Pro or the corporate laptop you have just been handed over?. Or maybe you want to stick to Windows but rather carry your stylish Vaio. There seems to be a new trend by which your personal devices are being allowed into the corporate world. This opens a very interesting debate with very interesting ramifications. Studies by research firms show that, although current CIOs are quite reluctant to allow this to happen, they also recognize this will eventually happen in the next few years.

Bring Your Own Device

This is broadly known as BYOD, Bring Your Own Device. Which effectively means that the company allows you to use your own devices to perform your duties, instead of providing you with a corporate laptop and smartphone, to say. Normally this comes at a price, which is that the company will not give you technical support for these, however, you might still be comfortable with this as anyway you didn’t have any support for this at home did you?.

Let’s go wild for a second and imagine that we are allowed to take our lovely MacBook to work, so let’s think about the implications and interesting topics this opens. Rather than doing a deep analysis of all of these implications I would leave these for further posts, so just take this as food for thought for the time being.

• Self service IT: Is it possible to simplify the current Corporate IT Support structures in our organizations?
• Mobile Device Management: How do we manage the devices we allow into our network, regardless of who owns them?. Remember BES for Blackberry? Now we have a broader landscape.
• Application Management: How do we balance the freedom of choice versus the control of licenses and software costs?. This specific topic opens one idea I like very much, the idea of extending the AppStore concept to the Enterprise World. What about creating an internal marketplace where applications can be downloaded and installed from?. Users can have a budget assigned so they can manage which applications they need and which they don’t. Sounds good right? Let’s explore this in another post.
• Intellectual property: What are the implications in this space? How do we establish some boundaries between what you create on your free time versus what you create on your time at work?.

I think this is a very interesting topic to explore in detail, so don’t be surprised if you find further posts on the implications of this topic because yes, I am one of those that would love to bring my MacBook to work…