The third and final installment of TTITITA… The Consumerization of IT.  Read Part 1 and Part 2.

8) Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) is not about the technology. It’s about the data. I, like many of my colleagues at other companies, are constantly being approached with a proposal to give our employees more choice in technology devices. “I’m a Mac.”, “Don’t you guys like Android?” and “I’d be way more productive if I only had…” Many of our employees believe we actually care about what OS or spreadsheet they use. We don’t. We care about protecting our information about our employees and our company – and more importantly for Accenture, we care about protecting our clients’ information. When an employee brings his own laptop to work (whether it’s Mac or Linux or even Windows), I have some challenges: Who owns the data on that hard drive? Accenture? The employee? The client? What happens when the employee quits? What happens if he gets a new computer and sells his old one on eBay? There are two paths to potentially solve this problem: Virtual Desktop and Cloud Storage. We’re actually pursuing both sets of solutions for different use cases. I have more faith in the latter (Cloud Storage) than the former (Virtual Desktop). Why? Do you know any Mac carriers? Ask them to use their sleek, beautiful Mac all day by running everything they do in a Virtual Desktop running …Windows. Yikes! Remember, it’s not about the technology, it’s about the data.

9) The security issues are real. Consumer technologies in the workplace have always magnified security threats. Lost phones, PII data, sharing and collaborating – all these things are threats to our security and privacy. Whether it was the PC, or IM, or Facebook or Android phones, proliferation of technology creates more attack vectors. There is no denying this simple fact. On the other hand, enterprise IT has always had the job of trying to improve productivity while reasonably protecting security. In a well-run company, the biggest security risk always has been, and always will be the employees. IT must take the lead in not just protecting, but also educating the employees. IT must not say “No!” but say “Yes, here’s how.” Challenge your teams to respond to every consumerization “threat” with “Yes, here’s how.” If you hope to control this via outright banning via policy, you had better make sure you have a large budget for enforcement. Oh yeah, and make sure you tell the CEO to not bring his iPad to the next analyst briefing.

10) Consumerization is opportunity, not threat. The emergence of consumer technologies is giving us business ideas for powerful new tools. Accenture’s new internal portal is a perfect example. It took 4 years of pushing, cajoling and socializing IT’s vision for an iGoogle/myYahoo style internal portal that had no “business case” or hard ROI. We saw how our employees were using these consumer portals to manage their lives and saw our outdated, link-farm portal as something that was great when we implemented it 10 years ago, but something that time had passed by. The new portal is made up of corporate application widgets – project financials, HR action lists, travel plans and expertise finder. This portal is now available to all 230,000+ employees around the globe. Enterprise IT can either lead the way or continue to get the [occasionally deserved] label of back office, low-value, money-sucking machine. By the way, the teams working on these “consumer” technologies tend to be some of our most engaged.

Thanks for reading. The challenge of consumerization is very real.  Without action, you might find yourself subject to a movement from your employees – “Occupy IT” anyone?

As usual, I’d love to hear any comments or feedback.