The illusion of choice

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Image: StockXpert

27 November 2013

What I love/hate about this industry is the way in which acronyms are so swiftly adopted and then, almost as abruptly, superseded. Just when you think you’ve got to grips with something, the clever marketing people come along and change it into something else.

The latest example is BYOD. We all know what that stands for (bring your own device) and we all understand what it means. So now that we’re at the point where the industry has actually done a good job in disseminating a concept to all its constituent parts, it’s obviously time to throw something else into the mix just to add an extra layer of complexity or confusion.

The latest acronym starting to make an appearance is CYOD. Just before you start thinking ‘oh, I see what they’ve done there, they’ve gone from B to C’ and perhaps find yourself worrying that they might make their way through the entire alphabet (what could ZYOD stand for?), I should probably say at this point that CYOD stands for choose your own device.

What’s the difference between BYOD and CYOD apart from one letter in the alphabet? At first glance, you might not think there’s a lot of difference between bring and choose but you’d be surprised. In fact it reflects a pretty drastic gear change from second gear into reverse. It seems that while the industry was keen to talk about BYOD when consumerisation was supposedly driving the agenda with the adoption of tablets and smartphones by ordinary people, things changed quite a lot when it confronted the reality of grafting this utopian vision on top of the foundations of most current IT infrastructure.

Freedom to restrict
In simple English, most organisations were (and are) unwilling to allow or to accommodate such a level of IT personalisation. Hence the shift from ‘bring’ to ‘choose’. Rather like Henry Ford’s infamous maxim that “any customer can have a car painted any colour he wants so long as it is black”, organisations are now seeking to restrict the types of devices employees can use as combined work/personal devices. You can see the logic from the employer’s point of view. If a company can restrict the types of devices and OSs being used on its network, it should be easier and cheaper to support users and devices. Security should also be less of a headache if it has fewer platforms to secure.

All very well and good from the employer’s perspective, although I wonder if I’m the only one with a sneaking suspicion this is a smokescreen for a process of standardisation among corporations that will lead to a single mobile OS in much the same way as has happened on the desktop?

So the employers will be happy but ‘what about the workers?’ While I’ve never been entirely convinced that BYOD was a viable strategy given the essentially conservative nature of most IT departments, I do wonder if CYOD will be any more feasible. The problem with CYOD is that it’s a strategy being imposed on employees for work purposes that extends into attempting to limit their personal preferences. If BYOD was about organisations being forced to accommodate the choices of employees, CYOD seeks to turn this strategy on its head by forcing employees to accommodate the choices of their employers. In this context, ‘choose’ is actually a means to restrict an employee’s choice rather than accept it.

Limiting mobility
Now, unless all organisations have CYOD policies that stipulate exactly the same devices and OS platforms, I predict this could turn into an unholy mess. Let’s say an employee joining company A has an iPad and iPhone but is forced to choose an Android-based tablet/smartphone as their personal/work device. Will they really use the Android device as a personal device? Now imagine if, a year later, the employer joins company B which insists they choose a Windows-based tablet/smartphone. In the space of two years, someone could be forced to change platform two or three times.

Do organisations seriously expect an employee to buy a new device and learn a new platform every time he or she moves company? And what guarantees are there that personal data on a corporately approved work/personal device will be secure from corporate interference or scrutiny while they are employed by the company?

You’ll be happy to hear that even before any of these questions have been addressed (possibly because organisations are too busy seeing the problem from their point of view rather than worrying about the implications for employees), another acronym is being readied for action in this space: COPE. This stands for corporately owned personally enabled, as in devices that belong to the company but which you can use as a personal tablet or smartphone.

This adds even more questions to the mix. For example, if you go back to the question about what guarantees there are that personal data on a corporately approved work/personal device will be secure from corporate interference or scrutiny, with COPE we need to ask what guarantees there are the personal data will be erased from the device once an employee has left the company. And how will employees be able to take their personal data, settings and information with them when they go if they leave the device behind? How will they be able to export that information to a different platform when they join another company?

The irony is that by seeking to impose more control on the choice of devices employees can use for combined work/personal purposes in a bid to reduce complexity in areas like support, management and security, organisations are in danger of making it so complex for individuals that they are forced to return to a world of separate devices for work and personal use. In which case, will we have jumped straight from CYOD to FYOD?

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