Today, I was watching my son trying to figure out why touching the screen on a BlackBerry Bold does nothing.
Last week, I saw a fantastic presentation from the most innovative IT organization in pharma talking about never building another enterprise app … instead building consumer apps for employees to use.
The week before, at CTIA, I saw some new Android “enterprise-class” phones and couldn’t help but think that design by committee never works.
Sure, there have been a ton of articles written about the consumerization of mobility and IT in general, in the enterprise. But it did strike me that many of us have been looking at this trend through an inverted lens.
The IT organization in most companies is still adamant about trying to put in place policies and restrictions to make smartphones and tablets feel more like laptops, at least from a security and management perspective. This is very understandable because the consequences of security failure are high and so we’re trying to keep the enterprise smartphone alive. But we can’t resuscitate the dead (employees don’t want to use the “old-gen” devices) so we’re dressing up the newcomers to look like the predictable and known.
But it’s no longer about IT. It’s about the user. And that user – that person - is a consumer 24 hours a day. Sometimes they consume personal services, and sometimes professional, but their expectations are equivalent for both.
There will be no more enterprise smartphones or tablets. There will only be fantastic consumer experiences that can be configured securely. So “enterprise” becomes a configuration option, not a design constraint. If I don’t want to use a particular phone or tablet on the weekend, I also don’t want to use it during the week.
Instead of IT telling me “Here is the device you will use for wireless email“, I will now ask IT “How will you give me a mobile work experience I love?”
Command-and-control will fracture and move to cooperation. The enterprise risk increases, without a doubt, but so does the value. That’s a scary equation for most companies because it feels uncertain. But it is inevitable and I’ll write in an upcoming blog about how some IT teams are taking on this challenge one step at a time.
Last week, I saw a fantastic presentation from the most innovative IT organization in pharma talking about never building another enterprise app … instead building consumer apps for employees to use.
The week before, at CTIA, I saw some new Android “enterprise-class” phones and couldn’t help but think that design by committee never works.
Sure, there have been a ton of articles written about the consumerization of mobility and IT in general, in the enterprise. But it did strike me that many of us have been looking at this trend through an inverted lens.
The IT organization in most companies is still adamant about trying to put in place policies and restrictions to make smartphones and tablets feel more like laptops, at least from a security and management perspective. This is very understandable because the consequences of security failure are high and so we’re trying to keep the enterprise smartphone alive. But we can’t resuscitate the dead (employees don’t want to use the “old-gen” devices) so we’re dressing up the newcomers to look like the predictable and known.
But it’s no longer about IT. It’s about the user. And that user – that person - is a consumer 24 hours a day. Sometimes they consume personal services, and sometimes professional, but their expectations are equivalent for both.
There will be no more enterprise smartphones or tablets. There will only be fantastic consumer experiences that can be configured securely. So “enterprise” becomes a configuration option, not a design constraint. If I don’t want to use a particular phone or tablet on the weekend, I also don’t want to use it during the week.
Instead of IT telling me “Here is the device you will use for wireless email“, I will now ask IT “How will you give me a mobile work experience I love?”
Command-and-control will fracture and move to cooperation. The enterprise risk increases, without a doubt, but so does the value. That’s a scary equation for most companies because it feels uncertain. But it is inevitable and I’ll write in an upcoming blog about how some IT teams are taking on this challenge one step at a time.
http://mobileiron.com/blog/2010/10/the-enterprise-smartphone-is-dead/
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