BYOD, or ‘Bring Your Own Device’, is spreading through the business world. Initially a user-driven phenomenon, some organisations now even want to stop supplying computing devices to employees that have them anyway. But once computing and data for computing for the organisation are no longer controlled by the organisation, the question of business continuity comes up. CIO.com has a fun slide show that puts BYOD workers into ten different categories that could help BC managers, but there’s also an underlying message that they would be wise to heed.
In the 10 BYOD Worker Types, everybody has a little fun poked at them, including:
• The ‘Millennials’, who blur the lines between business and personal
• The ‘Techies’, who can bend their own BYOD to help them better manage the IT systems
• The ‘CEOs’, whose command is ‘BYOD! Jump!’ (to which they expect to hear the answer ‘How high?’)
• The ‘Bad Employees’, looking to siphon off confidential data and hide it in the cloud.
Underneath the descriptions of these stereotypes is the notion that what is important is not just the technology, but also the people who use it. With a wide range of different motivations and work styles, each BYOD category identified represents a different flavour of the BYOD challenge to business continuity. Organisations won’t be dealing with ‘Millennials’ (who have their own devices and want to use them) in the same way as the ‘older generation’ (who don’t have these devices, and yet may be expected to acquire them).
While IT solutions go part of the way there with software that can handle the allocation and enforcement of different rights to see and handle data in the organisation, they don’t handle the human element. When it comes to unrestrainable enthusiasm, unreasonable expectations, distrust, or even sabotage, it still takes a human being to understand; and to react with appropriate adjustments to the organisation’s business continuity management.