Nick Jones

I’ve been writing a new presentation on mobile work for our PCC conference in September and thinking a lot about user-owned mobile technology. Some IT professionals feel that allowing users to bring unapproved personal technology into the organisation is a bit like permitting crazed killers to roam the corridors, and is only a small step away from anarchy and the total breakdown of civilisation as we know it. They deploy many arguments to support their desire for control, but one popular criticism is support costs – even for employee-owned devices they aren’t actually supporting. Their argument goes something like: “end users will waste lots of time supporting themselves and helping each other and this is costing the organisation money”.

It’s hard to measure the true cost of self-support; for example if I use a Mac when the corporate standard is a PC, or if I provide myself with mobile email on Symbian and Nokia when the standard is HTC and Windows Mobile. But for the purposes of argument let’s assume people spend something in the range of one to a few hours per month on self-support and peer-support. If you then calculate the financial equivalent using typical fully-loaded employee costs the resulting numbers sound very scary indeed, hundreds to thousands of euros a year. QED say the IT pros, you can’t afford to allow these evil unsanctioned devices through the door.

But those arguments are one-sided because they talk about cost but seldom about benefit. What’s the productivity benefit of more satisfied employees? What about the fact that an employee may be prepared to carry his/her work handset at the weekend if it’s pocketable or fashionable, but will leave it at home if it isn’t? And I bet that people who are prepared to learn enough to use unsanctioned technology have a deeper knowledge than those who just accept the corporate standard; so the non-standard workers may well be more effective workers. There may also be side benefits from the self-support process, an employee of a multi-billion dollar vendor recently told me that the most heavily used internal Wiki in his organisation was the Mac self-support Wiki. So thousands of employees are not only happy because they don’t have to use a PC but as a side-effect have become expert Wiki users too.

But for me the most compelling argument is innovation. Some of the most innovative communication and collaboration tools of the next decade will originate on mobile devices using internet cloud services. People are already using mobile twitter, facebook  etc. for work, and this is just the start. Imagine what they’ll be able to do with future contextual systems involving location, transient communities, events, information about surrounding people and places and so on. Bottom-up innovation from individuals experimenting with consumer devices and services will be what drives the future of mobile work. And the value of that innovation will likely far outweigh any self-support costs.

The real challenge is not employee owned technology, you already lost that battle. Short of putting everyone through a metal detector as they enter the building you won’t be able to prevent it. The real challenge is allowing the experiments and innovation without incurring excessive risks. And that’s a topic for another blog.