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| Enterprises embrace bring your own laptop to work |
Mark Dean, Principal Business Architect
In today’s financial climate pressure on IT departments to save money is set to increase dramatically. “More for less” is the cry from business leaders. What’s new, business leaders have been calling out this mantra for several years. The difference this time is they really mean it. The continued survival of many organisations in these troubled times may well depend on how efficient, and let’s not forget flexible, these organisations are.
What does this mean? A modern enterprise is now more than ever dependent on IT for its operations, so a large dollop of change is sure to fall squarely onto the shoulders of IT.
Isn’t this more of the same from the IT perspective, organisations need to:
- Remove complexity from the environment.
- Simplify the infrastructure.
- Automate processes.
- Make IT more flexible and responsive to business change.
- Align IT to business.
Organisations will need to look to sweat their assets and maybe move assets off their books to outsourcers still able and willing to take on assets. Well maybe there is another way. Embrace consumerisation.
Consumerisation of IT has come a long way in the last 5 years. Owning a laptop is no longer the preserve of the privileged few, the status symbol of the executive. The personal computer is now a commodity with laptops frequenting the bedrooms of not just university students but our school children’s. We are now in the situation where the public can purchase PCs for less than our corporate IT departments; such is the power of the consumer. Receive a free laptops with your broadband connection is a clear example of this.
The advent of cheap, available and fast internet connectivity has driven a sea change in the way people view and consume services. People are now receiving better, faster, cheaper and more flexible services at home than they experience at work. The upshot is that people are more knowledgeable and independent than they have ever been when it comes to using a computer. So the question is, has the time come for businesses to stop providing employees with laptops? Why should a business purchase, manage and dispose of a device that their employees probably already own and can certainly purchase cheaper than they can.
If you find this an absurd notion, that users would want to provide and use their own PC, then look back in history because we have seen this behaviour before from businesses.
Back in the late 20th century businesses where giving out company cars like confetti and it seemed like every other car on the road was a company car. Not today, whilst the company car still exists the car allowance is king with employees providing their own cars in many and varied shapes and colours. In the coming years we will see businesses choosing not to hand out laptops and PDAs but provide employees with a computer allowance. The move will have a dramatic effect not only on reducing the IT asset holding of organisations, but on how IT is architected from both infrastructure and services standpoints. Getronics Future Ready Workspace provides a platform that can enable organisations to easily create this kind of user centric environment allowing business to jump off the costly PC refresh treadmill and empower their users.
With the right approach organisations can see substantial savings with increased operational flexibility. IT service providers that understand this and are ready to embrace these changes will be in a good position to advise, provide services and survive the coming turbulent years.
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