It’s funny how things evolve so quickly. Just a few years ago, the thought of employees using their own phones or laptops for work at work was unthinkable.
But as the consumerization of IT trend grows from a trickle to a flood, many organizations have no choice but consider how to implement a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program. And the experience at Softchoice was no different.
This is the fourth in a our series about how Softchoice is implementing BYOC. We hope you find the series interesting and look forward to your comments and thoughts on your own experiences.
Recently our team met to create our Softchoice BYOC Acceptable Use Policy that will be tied to this program. Not what you’d classify as a “fun” meeting. I’m pretty sure that there isn’t a person out there that likes writing out policies and it’s something that’s really hard to start. So hopefully this blog post can reduce the pain of your organization’s policy building meeting. Thanks to finding the right guidance from Gartner and InfoTech Research, our team was able to bang out a first draft in under an hour!
According to Gartner’s BYOC Checklist the major areas a policy needs to cover are:
Do our users want BYOC?
So all of us on the team were excited about the possibilities of BYOC, but what we hadn’t checked yet was what percentage of Softchoice laptop users would actually be interested in a program like this? At the end of the day, no matter what great technologies and policies we put in place, if we didn’t have participants, then the program REALLY wouldn’t work!
Designing surveys can be tricky, so I looked online to see if there were any standard surveys for this type of program that we could base ours on. Sadly, I couldn’t find anything so I started putting our survey together from scratch. I knew the main things that I wanted to understand were: [Read more...]
This is the first in a series about how Softchoice implemented BYOC. We hope you find the series interesting and look forward to your comments and thoughts on your experiences.
Like many other organizations, Softchoice is in the process of working our way through all the complexities of the Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) revolution. We’re down the path now, and so we wanted to share our experiences with the hopes they might help you on your journey to BYOC.
Our First BYOC Team Meeting
I have to admit that staying on subject during our first BYOC team meeting was tough. BYOC is an exciting new strategy where so many elements of its success depends on factors outside just the technology itself.
We talked about what other companies have done in the past, with Citrix’s recent rollout providing a lot of great guidance. The video of Citrix’s CIO Paul Martine explaining how they implemented BYOC gave us a good starting point for all the things we should consider.
He recommends 5 phases to the project: [Read more...]
This is the second in a series about how Softchoice implemented BYOC. We hope you find the series interesting and look forward to your comments and thoughts on your experiences.
Building the team: You start with inviting a great marketing person to the team.
OK, most BYOC teams don’t have someone like me blogging about the process, and providing my “2 cents” based on things that I’ve read from marketing materials. But, having a marketing person does have its benefits, since there’s a lot of employee communications that require good writing skills. Plus, I have access to marketing survey tools, which is handy for our employee survey.
So other than me, who else is on the Softchoice BYOC team?
This is the third entry in a series about how Softchoice implemented BYOC. We hope you find the series interesting and look forward to your comments and thoughts on your experiences.
As Madeleine’s blog series on Softchoice’s journey from Blackberry to BYOD is starting to wrap up, I’ve now started on a new journey considering whether Softchoice should expand BYOD to an employee Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) program too. Now it’s rare to ask a “marketer” like myself to join an IT project team, but I got asked because I had recently published some blogs and campaigns about these issues, so I had a good amount of researched knowledge on the topic.
However going from reading some white papers and watching some videos on the subject, to actually trying to figure out how to make it work in a real organization is quite a big jump.
I’m realizing that marketing tools such as the vendor study that I attached to my last email campaign, or the Client Computing Revolution infographic I just worked on are great at illustrating the trend and talking about considerations and challenges at a high-level, but they don’t really provide that much help once you actually start down the road of planning a BYOC strategy. Yes, we all understand the “why” to go to BYOC, but what’s lacking out there is a real account of the “how.”
So this blog series is going to detail step-by-step how we went from our CIO saying “we should look at BYOC at Softchoice” to working through a BYOC project using Six Sigma Practices. I’ll share the tools we found most useful, the surveys and policies we created and then outline how we built the business case and implemented the neccessary technology. [Read more...]
Recent Conversations