Are You Ready for Personal Devices and Apps? Tips for Taking Inventory Before Writing Your BYOD Policy By Ken Gonzales Published by
When it comes to establishing a BYOD policy baseline, one of the most popular questions in the ITSM field is: Where should I start? There are so many potential options that many people want to get additional guidance before they commit to a specific course. After all, it s easier and generally safer to try to get it right before you go public with your work, right?
It s a Personal Matter In the case of the BYOD policy, this maxim generally holds true. Why? Your BYOD policy isn t just a random document to the affected community (your customers and stakeholders); this is very personal. Even if it was not intended, chances are it will feel this way to your customers. Why? Think back to the last device you purchased. It is likely you had a decent range of devices and options to choose from. It s not like you were at Henry Ford s first showroom: They can have any color they like, as long as it s black. No, you chose the one that you felt was the best fit, based on your desires and preferences. In other words, you became invested (emotionally, intellectually, etc.) in the purchase decision. Guess what? Your stakeholders did too!
Not Just Policy Given that this is going to be (at least somewhat) personal to those who are subject to the policy, this is more than just a policy; it s a means of proactively managing expectations and shaping your relationship with customers. As such, we d like to invest a little time up front to ensure that we re taking the right actions to build the best, most fitting policy we can. The less rework or cleanup we have to do later, the better off all parties will be. After all, isn t it better to anticipate and prevent a customer relationship problem than to be forced to fix one?
Building the Baseline For now, we ll work off the assumption that you re going to use some type of template as the starting point for creating your policy, but it s only the first step. The key issue here is what you should do when personalizing it to your needs. What should be added, removed, or modified? If you don t have some sort of baseline to work from, you re likely on the cusp of a misfire. Here are three simple questions you can consider that will start moving you closer to having that baseline in place: 1. What do you already support? 2. What do your customers use now? 3. What are they using it for? Let s consider these in order. For each, you ll want to consider the number of apps and devices you ll have to support, where they re at in their lifecycle, and how long you anticipate you might have to support them.
What do you already support? This is probably the easiest question of them all. Your starting point is considering the various devices that IT has issued or officially supports today. You will be able to determine this list from asset records, based upon the device type. Blackberry devices are a good example. Historically, when provided by the organization, a telecommunications team was responsible for device issue, service provisioning coordination, and carrier contract discussions. 1 2 3 4 5 A B C D E
What do your customers use now? For things that aren t being provided by IT today, there are several good, lightweight methods or tools you can use to obtain customer intelligence. Review Employee Reimbursement Surveys Observe Review Employee Reimbursement Information with Finance Talk with your finance and human resources team to obtain the current expense policies related to BYOD and network service providers. Work with them to create reports that help identify the choices made, and incorporate this information into your dataset for analysis.
Surveys There are lots of different low-cost or even no-cost survey tools available to you today. Your tools should help you engage the different workgroups and personnel working (by role) within them. Ask: What devices do you use today? For each device, what applications do you use? For each application, what business outcome is this associated with? It is important to remember that many people receive a lot of requests to complete surveys. More often than not, those are given relatively low priority or are ignored completely. Keep this in mind when reviewing the survey results. Examine carefully to determine whether or not this is a statistically valid sample size and then consider accordingly.
Observe in the Wild This is an incredibly valid, but often overlooked, technique. Talk with the leaders of different workgroups to identify the set of consumers who best exemplify specific roles and get their permission to interview and/or observe them while they work. With minimal effort, you can gain significant insights into the devices people are using, which apps help them pursue their organizational objectives, and what issues and challenges they encounter when doing that. The important part about this recommendation is that it comes complete with customer-specific context and a direct connection to business and organizational outcomes. Information that you collect in this manner can help shape how you interpret the data collected using the other methods previously described.
But, wait, that s not all Of course, you may have other thoughts and ideas on how to approach this, given your own organizational culture. Feel free to add to or modify the recommendations to fit your circumstances.
What are they using it for? Do not assume things; ask your customer. Communication is key While some people might give you a hard time about it, most will likely appreciate that you re taking the time to understand the needs and challenges they face on a daily basis. As mentioned earlier, we re trying to build a picture of how these devices and applications drive business outcomes and identify where the customer issues and challenges exist. This helps us in two ways: 1. Establishing the minimal set of candidate devices and apps that IT should include in its officially supported device policy 2. Gaining an initial understanding of where the support challenges will be, so that they will be able to take steps to proactively address them
Summary By considering the simple questions outlined in this article, you are on your way to establishing a baseline that can be used to craft a reasonable BYOD policy that respects the preferences of your customers, the needs of your organization, and your responsibility or intention to help drive results in support of organizational objectives. This ebook is published by Cherwell Software. Get a demo of the most flexible IT service management platform and improve the management of mobile devices and apps. Connect with us. Copyright 2014 Cherwell Software, LLC. All Rights Reserved.