Corporate IT groups are struggling more and more to fight the on-coming onslaught of consumer devices that are more powerful than the business gives out. Let’s look at a few common ones right now:
- Communication – Business provides email, smartphone or Blackberry and maybe Lync. Employees bring SMS, MMS, Chat apps, Hangouts/Video Chat, Slack.com, instant messenger, Facebook messenger, LinkedIn and any variety of other non-enterprise communication platforms. They are probably even using their personal accounts because that’s their profile. Can the business solutions actually compete at all? Do you really think Lync and an iPhone cover the gaps? Of course not, that’s why employees just get the job done – it’s easier!
- Collaboration – Business provides Lync, SharePoint and Intranet tools from within a VPN. Employees desire mobile anywhere tools. That is the opposite of Lync, SharePoint and VPN. If your solutions can’t be used anywhere, anytime, when needed then they are failing against consumer grade apps like DropBox, Google Docs, Gmail and any number of other solutions. Collaboration doesn’t happen within walled gardens.
- Task Management – Businesses, Franklin Covey binders don’t cut it and Outlook is not a task management system. Employees are seeking out options like Any.do, Google Keep, Wunderlist, Asana and any number of other up and coming systems and solutions to keep on top of everything that they have to do. Why isn’t this more prominent on business solution radars?
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Enterprise IT is failing to keep up with consumer grade tools. What should be surprising is that they keep trying. It used to be that cost kept people from bringing their own tools to work but anymore the only item that is too expensive for employees to bring their own on a regular basis is the laptop and even that is quickly changing as Chromebooks bring high end capabilities to low cost devices.