Corporate America failed to learn from Japan’s 30+ year experiment with BYODs and is making new mistakes, in top of the old ones.
Japan suffered massive IT penetration and data leakage across all segments of society (consumers, law enforcement, Police, Military) due to BYOD policies and the Winny infection. And unlike IBM, most of corporate America is heading for BYOD disaster.
Santayana was more correct than he realized.
From GigaOm:
Enterprises unnerved by the bring-your-own-device movement in which they encouraged employees to use personal devices at work, are now angering workers by trying to lock down those very devices.According to new research from Forrester, the unintended, but entirely predictable, consequence is that many of those frustrated employees just turn to new, unsanctioned devices instead.After surveying 5,102 business users for its “Five Steps to a Successful BYOC Program” Forrester prefers the term “computer” to “device”, here’s what Forrester has to say: Today’s workers often need more than the locked-down corporate PC’s and are spending an average of $1,253 annually of their own money on computers to do their jobs. … Yet the same survey reveals that only 12% of firms encourage those who do so, with the rest actively discouraging it – and some even penalizing employees. The mismatch between employee needs and IT’s position is obvious, but few organizations are adequately prepared to change course.The examples of this tactic are piling up. IBM, for example, disables Siri in employees’ iPhones and forbids the use of Dropbox, the wildly popular cloud-based file storage, sync and sharing service. That raises interesting questions in the cloud computing era, where users can tap consumer-oriented services from their personal phones and laptops that may be verboten in the corporate context.
via BYOD blowback drives more IT underground — Cloud Computing News.