Gartner Recommends “Design Principle” and Open Standards for BYOD
Gartner Recommends “Design Principle” and Open Standards for BYOD by UCStrategies Staff
A BYOD decision should be treated as more than just a purchasing policy and should be based on applications architecture and solutions design, according to a new Gartner, Inc. research note, BYOD Is an Applications Strategy, Not Just a Purchasing Policy, which is part of a Gartner special report entitled The Mobile Imperative: Mobile Application Strategies and Architecture.
“Designing your applications to meet the demands of BYOD is not the same as setting usage policies or having strategic sourcing plans that mandate a particular platform,” said Darryl Carlton, research director at Gartner. “BYOD should be a design principle that provides you with a vendor neutral applications portfolio and a flexible future-proof architecture. If the applications exhibit technical constraints that limit choice and limit deployment, then the purchasing policy is irrelevant.”
Most business organizations are composed of an assortment of workforces – full-time staff, external agencies being contracted, independent professionals, and part-time work personnel. On top of workforce changes, all enterprises – business, community, and government – have been advancing their processes beyond the boundaries of their organizations, resulting in an IT team grappling to maintain full control over the access tools for corporate systems and data.
Carlton explained that the user community has broadened its scope to include customers, employees, suppliers, and stakeholders. According to the Gartner research director, this means that “we are no longer developing applications for deployment to an exclusive user base over which we exert standards and control.” To better address this, IT teams should then explore other techniques to achieve what Gartner has termed as “global class” computing, a method that entails designing architectures and systems so that computing processes are extended beyond the enterprise and touch on the cultures of consumers, mobile workers, and business partners. The so-called global-class approach leverages internet-enabled computing.
Carlton also claimed that BYOD is a sign of internal IT’s inadequate “support for a segment of the user population and they are seeking alternatives elsewhere.” Carlton said, “It’s important to recognize that BYOD, bring your own application (BYOA) and cloud adoption are leading indicators of long-term structural change occurring in the industry, not the demands of a few errant staff demanding their favorite brand of technology.”
Citing the growing phenomenon of user community expansion to include both customers and suppliers, Carlton advised that organizations should be able to support this. He described customers who would require access to online inventory, purchasing systems, and shipping data. Similarly, different user groups would have growing demands for device and solutions capabilities. Thus, an organization’s IT department cannot simply lay down standards or solutions that come with proprietary controls.
CIOs, who view BYOD activities as temporary setbacks generated by a small segment of the workforce, are committing a grave error, according to Carlton. “This is a leading indicator of change for which an appropriate response is required. Reasserting control is not an appropriate response. This is a permanent and irreversible shift in the way that IT is procured and implemented to support the organization, suppliers and customers.”
The new Gartner report essentially suggests that enterprises formulate their strategy in such a way that it is hinged on the notion that BYOD will, indeed, happen and that there is a need to support users beyond the boundaries of the organization. This means open standards are a must when implementing solutions. (KOM) Link. Link.