CIOIN

Pop Quiz: What do you do with BYOD? 

You could:

A) Deal with it like the four-letter word it has become;

B) Allow staffers to use their own smartphones / tablets / notebooks thus help reduce your hardware headache;

C) Create a framework that leverages the power of user-centric collaboration;

D) Do nothing, after all these trends come and go.

If you answered ‘A’ or ‘D’, then you’re staring at one of the fastest spreading developments in enterprise IT, from the wrong side of the barrel.  ‘B’ gets you marks for acknowledging some of the options, though it’s likely you only have an ad hoc strategy.  And if you’re voting ‘C’, it’s going to pay off big, but will require a ton of planning. 

The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) juggernaut has been steadily gathering pace, but our research reveals that this year is when we’ll start to see separation between organizations that really want to nurture collaborative thought and those that are merely allowing employees to cart along their own compute devices. 

Truth be told, BYOD goes beyond policy or devices. It’s about acknowledging that the way staffers interact with apps and information is changing; and, it’s realizing that CIOs have been given a chance to change, quite fundamentally, how organizations communicate, collaborate and create value.  

Consider three organizations—Century Enka, Max Healthcare and MindTree. They all have different business imperatives, and, thus three distinct approaches to BYOD. Yet, all three embraced it to make life simpler for their employees, while taking productivity to a very different level. 

MindTree has had the longest journey down this path, since its VP and CIO Sudhir Reddy flagged it off to senior management two years ago. While, Reddy wanted to simplify access to data, and reduce the gap between information and insight, his blueprint was also very ambitious. Reddy’s vision was to make the organization more employee-outward instead of corporate-inward. 

The first step was a consolidation exercise, which shrank MindTree’s app portfolio to 48. The process was itself a collaborative one, because Reddy’s team had to discuss the relevance of legacy apps with specific departments, build added functionalities into some apps, and jointly press the kill switch on others. The next step was to build PeopleHub, a single-window that allowed MindTree’s Minds to access all apps, be they transactional, communicational or social. It integrates all apps from mail, collaboration and discussion forums to HR and ERP, and does so with data continuing to reside in the datacenter and not on a client device. 

PeopleHub wanted to mimic the way people have gotten used to interacting with technology. “Search-enabled apps were becoming a reality and we wanted to make sure that we included that expertise,” says Reddy. Search for ‘holiday’ or ‘travel’ and PeopleHub will systematically pop up the holiday list for the year, travel policies, a leave or travel submission form, and, a list of seasonal deals that MindTree’s travel agents have brokered. 

Based on a survey his team conducted, Reddy deduced that employees never travel without a laptop or a tablet. Referring to it as a ‘meet-me-at-the-browser’ implementation, Reddy says, “We knew that smart devices were going to permeate the enterprise. So we standardized on a 10-inch screen—whether that’s a tablet, notebook or netbook—and pushed HTML5-based browsers.”

PeopleHub’s framework integrated risk optimization from scratch whether it was putting a resolute NAC in place to ensure malware-free end-points or it was about content-filtering to ensure that security and risk policies were not breached. 

Like Reddy, Neena Pahuja, CIO, Max Healthcare, also wanted to increase employee productivity. But, timeliness was equally critical. As she points out, in healthcare speed equals life. “We had a large number of doctors who were comfortable using an iPad or a BlackBerry,” she says.  So Max Healthcare implemented a cloud-based solution which was initially rolled out for BlackBerries to view radiology images and lab reports at all 13 locations of the hospital in February, last year. “The idea was to be able to help a doctor serve a patient quicker,” say Pahuja. Her reasoning was that the productivity of doctors is highest on a personal device. 

Currently being used by 241 doctors, Pahuja facilitated the app on all models of BlackBerry, iPhones, and iPads. But it wasn’t possible without robust backend consolidation. “The job at the backend was to collate radiology images from all mortalities of the hospital to our two compact servers,” says Pahuja.  

But Pahuja says, “The main challenge of implementing BYOD is security.” Secure login to the app in a SaaS environment enabled a second level of security.  Plus, radiology images and reports are only hosted for 48 hours. Her idea was to move towards hosted/cloud apps which bring in the right kind of security for any kind of device. “Since our implementation just touches a hosted application; end-point malware don’t touch our network,” says Pahuja. 

Tushar Kasbekar, VP-IT, Century Enka has also leveraged the cloud. With all of Century’s critical apps like CRM and ERP already on a private cloud, Kasbekar wanted to go further. “We wanted to encourage our employees to bring their own device,” says Kasbekar. Allowing the use of BlackBerries, tablets, and Android-based smartphones, senior executives, and Century’s extended enterprise, have the advantage of working out of office.

“We didn’t want to impose standardized mobile devices on our employees,” says Kasbekar. His team developed an in-house security software called Celsoft and installed it on mobile devices used by over 100 senior executives. Kasbekar says, “These mobile devices give them access to only specific information which cannot be downloaded.” In order to make this viewing easier, Kasbekar and his team created a java application which served up the information according to screen size. “It’s a win-win situation,” says Kasbekar.

BYOD, as you might note from these cases, is not just about policy or devices, it goes well beyond to leverage the twin trends of consumerization and collaboration in an enterprise.