Jason Hiner asks Bill Detwiler whether or not it's time for IT to accept and adapt to users bringing their personal laptops and smartphones into the business.

It's long past time, in many organizations. It's hard to see this for a lot of CIOs, because they're still trapped in the old paradigms (the subject of an earlier post this week) of viewing users as customers to be served rather than partners in automating business processes. From that perspective, CIOs see the idea as if they were shopkeepers suddenly forced to dramatically expand their inventory and areas of expertise with no additional income to support it all. But this doesn't take the idea far enough toward its ideal realization. Letting users bring their own tools to the job isn't some sort of appeasement to offer to rampaging users in the face of impending defeat by the forces of consumerization; it's a way to reduce IT's support footprint and improve the efficiency of the people doing the real work in the organization.

The best way to accomplish this, in my view, is with a stipend approach (which Hiner and Detwiler explore briefly): providing eligible staff with a flat annual or monthly cash allowance with the understanding that they use it to provide their own devices or programs for business purposes. Corporate IT systems are structured as black-box interfaces, typically web-oriented and standards-based, and IT focuses on polishing and supporting those internal systems under its control rather than dealing with user hardware and software complaints. This has any number of advantages, from focusing IT efforts, reducing and making more predictable IT budgets

Detwiler expresses a preference for the cafe approach, where certain applications or non-corporate hardware uses are allowed, or where users are presented with a menu of choices from which they can select and which IT will procure, configure, and support.

He sees this as allowing the IT department to retain some control while giving users at least an illusion of choice in their device selection. I see that as the worst of both worlds. Users aren't really getting their choices and probably aren't really able to use their preferred product to its best advantage; IT on the other hand suddenly has a much larger menu of devices and options it has to support, a key factor in inflating support FTE requirements. Do you know anyone who is looking for ways to increase their support staff head count these days? Doing the cafe approach the way it needs to be done to be effective isn't going to make the CFO your pal.

Detwiler does discuss the problems of the expectation of users that corporate IT will provide hardware support, which is a significant challenge to the stipend model. But this is more an education problem than anything; with freedom comes responsibility, and users who want to be able to use their own hardware and software have to be made to understand that the price of that is they don't have the corporate IT safety net there. This is really another advantage to the system, though; once users understand that they don't have an easy way out if they biff up their stuff, they become much more careful with it and are less likely to create problems in the first place (and anyone who has ever worked an IT support desk can tell you that 90% of calls aren't technical issues as such, but user issues). Demolishing this expectation doesn't just cut the IT support burden... it cuts the overall support burden directly. And that's a major advantage to the organization... users without active support issues are users who are busy getting their work done, not waiting on hold for a tech or distracted by constant technical issues.