Can consumerisation be made to work?

How CIOs should respond to the growing trend of IT consumerisation in the workplace is a hot topic at the moment, and was the focus of Computing’s latest IT Leaders Forum.

The term consumerisation is largely used to describe the increasing use of personal, consumer-oriented devices in the enterprise -- a trend that intersects with another hot issue, namely the extent to which firms should allow employees to engage with social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter at work.

An expert panel comprising Malcolm Carrie, director of global strategy and architecture, BAE Systems, Chris Knowles, head of solutions, Dimension Data, Simon Kosminsky, IT director at SJ Berwin, Jo Stanford, group IT director, De Vere Group, and Stuart Dommett, business development manager, Intel, kicked off the event with a discussion about whether consumerisation actually represents a new kind of challenge for IT leaders.

Kominsky said: “For a number of years we’ve had to deal with staff using their own systems while working from home,” pointed out Kominsky. “They might have had problems after installing software that prevented company applications from working, and it was the IT department’s business to sort it out.”

Touching on the issue of whether consumer devices represent a threat to data security, Kominsky said: “We should also remember that email, for example, was originally a social and not a work tool. When it was new many people thought, ‘You can’t send secure data over an open internet like that’. But is email any more secure now? Probably not, and yet most workplaces still depend on it.”

Stanford said consumerisation was yet another example of the IT industry repackaging old problems. “IT is the world’s worst industry for creating names for things that have always been around. Consumerisation is just another decision as to what technology to buy.”

Intel’s Dommett took issue with this: “Consumerisation is bigger than that, it isn’t just another ‘buy’ decision. Where staff use social media you need to audit activity to protect your brand and data.”

BAE Systems’ Carrie also thought Stanford’s view was rather reductive, arguing that progressive policies around consumerisation were essential to attracting and retaining the best graduates from a generation that’s comfortable with working with many different devices.

“Being able to use different platforms in the workplace is important for Generation Y. They don’t ask what car they’re going to get with a new job, but what IT they’ll be provided with. We sometimes lose the best graduates to better schemes and so we recognise this issue as an important one,” said Carrie.

Buy-your-own schemes raise legal and security issues

Companies looking to introduce a buy-your-own technology scheme need to be aware of a number of legal risks and challenges, according to Louise Taylor, a senior associate at law firm Taylor Wessing.

Buy-your-own schemes are where employers give staff money with which to buy any device that they feel best meets their needs.

Taylor said firms must clearly define the scope of such schemes and who exactly is eligible. They should also specify what devices are deemed suitable and set out minimum manadatory security standards. Any policy also needs to cover maintenance and support, and stipulate, for example, whether the user is responsible for upgrades.

The scheme should also make clear any conditions under which a user becomes liable for the cost of the technology. These could include the user quitting the company before a minimum period expires.       

Any scheme also needs to address what happens in the event of a user losing their device. The user’s employer will normally want to be able to delete any company data residing on the missing device, but what about personal data?  

“There was a case in which an employee had several thousand photographs on their device, they lost it and the employer wiped the device remotely – photographs and all,” said Taylor. “This employer was in a tricky legal situation for a while and thought it might be sued. After all, the photographs were the employee’s personal property. This sort of thing needs to be established in the terms of the contract.”