“A briefing by Gartner on the management of employee owned devices within corporate circles ‘affirms the strong opportunity of Apple in the enterprise,’ a market where 91 percent of the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying iOS devices,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppelInsider.
“That observation, by RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky, was made in response to Gartner’s presentation, which estimated that 40 percent of organizations already support employee owned mobile devices,” Dilger reports.
“Gartner called the trend toward ‘bring your own devices’ as an ‘unstoppable train coming down the tracks,’ noting that ‘C-level executives’ have opened the door to employee-owned mobile devices and that younger employees ‘prefer consumer technologies like iPhones and iPads over enterprise-provided alternatives,'” Dilger reports.
Read more in the full article here.
Younger employees, right.
Or smarter ones. (I’m 55.)
eh. “smarter” is too harsh a term. More discerning, perhaps.
Some people just accept whatever you put in front of them, and others just don’t care.
As ubiquitous as technology is, some peoples’ heads just arent there.
I’m the same way with Facebook and Twitter….Why?!
So you work in the advertising department of Toyota. You think that makes you more discerning or are you just exploiting a loophole in MDN’s pages?
I’m 67 and take my iPhone4, iPad2 and MacBookPro to work every day.
As someone whose worked for a couple fortune 500 companies, this is because employees are fed up with IT’s absurd rules and desire for absolute control.
In fact, one of the factors that caused me to leave the last fortune 500 company I worked for was the fact that IT didn’t support Macs (despite the promise that they would around the time I got hired)… all the startups were mac shops and so that was one reason I went to work for a startup.
All I can say is don’t let your IT department control what you can or can’t use. No one tells me what I can or should use for my work. I use what works best for me. If it’s a platform that gives me the best protection against viruses, malware, trojans and the like, then I get to use a Mac. Similarly with an iPhone and iPad. I don’t care what IT says. Those doofuses can’t tell me what to do. I’m at the sharp end of the spear so to speak so unless they bring in revenues themselves, rather than being a cost center, they can pound sand.
I’ve circumvented IT where I worked for years. Guys like us threaten their existence–so they’ll give you a “no” when they aren’t even qualified to give you a “yes” or don’t even have a horse in the race.
They’d tell you what kind of cheese IT “approves” of for you sandwhich if you let ’em.
I’ve seen so many BBs end up in a drawer somewhere. The company still pays for them.
So it would be interesting for the IT depts to scan the usage logs of the devices they give out and see what portion of their budget is really comprised of (in effect) BlackBerry paperweights. Mighty expensive paperweights, I would guess.
Im glad i work where i work. I don’t have final say but my input carries great weight.
We banned user owned devices 2 years ago on the company network and really we had to do it as we had one guy expose us to the possibility of litigation and government fines.
It sucked and hurt our linux and mac users the most. We could have.just said screw off to all of them but im a firm believer in that IT serves business not the other way round.
So we got feedback from employees, did the math and went through the hoops.
We now have multiple systems certified and available to employees, ibcluding red hat linux workstations, mac pros and starting last week iphones and ipads.
We even have a dedicated mac group on our help desk now and we haven’t had that since the early 90s.
Train? Try a bulldozier of the Caterpillar brand. Slowly iOS is cutting a path into the maze of deadwood and old forest of IT. They may be deeply rooted to the ok’d days. But they are now in the way of progress and the new blood has both hands on those controls.
You know what is funny – anyone I see with a Blackberry (they are forced to use at work) also have an iPhone..
Funny you should say this I’ve noticed the same. The company I work for currently uses iPhones but is being bought by a company using BB and that is what we will be going to. Looks like I’ll be joining this crowd when the iP5 comes out.
I resemble that remark!
I frequently make a game out of pounding on our IT group’s lack of vision. iPhone vs BB, iPad vs RIM’s Pos (which they are testing). For every IT delay on new equipment, I offer to just buy my own (Mac of course) and bring it in.
I must carry a BB for work, and frequently do, but I ALWAYS carry my iPhone!
“AppelInsider”
I know, I know, a typo, unintentional error. Thought I pointed out still… etc.
That is the real Apple Trojan.
I have worked for a small business for the past 6 years and we were 85% OS X, 100% iPhone. I’ve just moved jobs to a large solicitor’s firm and my role is to incorporate iOS into their IT systems.
This is just the beginning folks, people are beginning to see the light.
So what will happen when blackberry goes out of business? Talk about a runaway train!
What is not being said here is that these Apple iOS devices and other Mac products are not requiring IT support either. You think the boss doesn’t realize they are saving money? Didn’t pay for them and don’t need to support them.
What do you think will happen the next time all the RIM devices go down or Microsoft Windows gets taken out by the next virus? Who is working still and who is sitting on their hands. Do you think the IT group will be fired first or told to remove that Microsoft crap first. Then go.
Nothing is *support free*. This exact statement came up when we were talking about *officially* supporting macs in our help desk. Someone said “well we shouldn’t have to support them”
What I found after talking with a lot of Mac users in our company was that they were largely more resourceful at dealing with their own issues because they had no where else to go anyway. One guy put it bluntly “Why call the help desk? They just say they can’t help and do not have any information I can use”
A few of them had kind of banded together and had a distribution list in the GAL that they’d use to trade information back and forth. They took care of themselves by necessity.
We took a lot of their data and incorporated it into our knowledge base systems and we easily found 20 people who were excited to leave windows and man the ‘mac phone’.
From the metrics I’ve seen the Mac users do call in and require support but it is a different kind of support. They don’t call in because “my computer won’t stop thinking” or because it crashed etc…. they call in for things like configuring their mail app so that they can open encrypted emails within the corp domain, or they are on some government program and we’ve had to devise a workaround to access a system that government programmers assumed would be accessed by IE only or that requires some off the wall old version of Java.
So some of the issues they call in for are the same as our windows users but there is a very big difference in the numbers of ‘failures’ they experience. I haven’t done the math yet (and trust me I want chart it all out when I get the time) but my gut feeling is that our macs are more trouble free for our IT department.
I’m OK with this. Hell we’ve got more than enough on our plate and chasing around glitches really slows down our progress on the big picture stuff anyway.
Make sure you drill down when you do the “trouble” comparison. Due true root cause analysis. You will likely find (as I did in my org) that the the bulk of mac issues were not SO induced or due to a failure of the Mac system. They were overwhelming caused by. 1. Proprietary back end system limitations. 2. Improper configuration 3. User training issues.
Unlike the PC’s, 1. WIndows/office crashes 2. Shoddy driver issues 3. Junk hardware issues
It’s not a forest, it’s a jungle of thistles, brambles and thorns. Forests are magnificent… kinda like Apple IOS devices.
There actually are a few corporations today that cannot support Macs, but most IT depts tend to offer a list of BS “reasons” why they can’t support Macs. However, the truth is, most are simply MS-trained monkeys who can only troubleshoot by rote and can’t think outside the Xbox. They are terrified you might expose their ignorance of basic computing systems if you start asking unforeseen questions or making simple demands with your “stupid Mac”.
Nothing new here except we’re forewarned of ITs strategy.
In 1984 I was carrying my personal Mac 128 and a dot matrix printer to work every day at a Fortune 500 corp. I didn’t get to use it much, because long lines of engineers formed, wanting to use Excel and MacPaint. How could I say no?
Pretty soon we got the company to buy 5 Mac 128s, which we promptly networked (with no IT help) with a laser printer. This was long before any to the IBM PCs were networked at all. Talk about productivity!
The company did a study and found that Macs (512s by then) could do 85% of the tasks that a Xerox Star workstation could do for 15% of the cost. So the IT department standardized on PCs.
The introduction of so many employee-owned smartphones and tablets to the workplace is great in many ways; the convenience, the productivity boost, the practicality, and yes, having more fun doing your job.
That does not mean the risks of doing so should be ignored. Find out how YOU can properly facilitate the introduction of employee-owned smartphones in your workplace: http://bit.ly/r82KRT