Have Your Own Device, HYOD, is the driver of Digital Business and the issues for DAVOS 2014.
(Bring Your Own Device, BYOD, is only important to internal IT operations!)
A very popular slide during 2013 has shown four technologies grouped together as the drivers of change and, invariably, in the presentation that follows Cloud will be positioned as the biggest factor, followed by mobility, big data and then collaboration tools. Indeed some three years ago I produced such a slide myself as part of the struggle to identify, and understand, the new wave of technologies. But why does Cloud always get the leading position? I believe its because the changes that it first produced where understandable in terms of the current IT function, and Client-Server technology, rather than it being the true disruptive game changing leader. That role belongs to Bring Your Own Device, BYOD, or at least to the impact of new user devices and consumerisation of technology.
Actually the term really ought to be Have Your Own Device, HYOD, apparently 50% of all Britons now have, or have access to, a Tablet device, and if you translate that into the use they make of them, then you have the true massive disruption force in computing.
So why did, and still does, Cloud get the top billing? Probably for the same reason that Networking initially got the attention in the late eighties before the real impact of the PC as a true technology disruption, and a driver in Business change, became clear. Networking existing Mainframes and Minis could be understood, and deployed, to improve the operational effectiveness of the existing technology. A quick win! As it is with Clouds and Servers, where Virtualisation is a quick and effective win, and external resource hosting increasingly offers further benefits. Clouds answer the basic question for the IT operations of ‘do more with less’ and as such it’s right to focus on this. But to do this at the expensive of investigating further to understand the real disruption that true Clouds are enabling is to fail to see the real Business issue.
Consider this, with the benefit of hindsight can you really place networking as more important than PCs? Of course not, it was the PC that changed the usability, availability, and capabilities of computing based technology with networking technology then quickly growing in importance and capabilities driven by a whole new set of PC roles and uses. It was then, and is now, a disruption driven by users and usability. If you think of Mobility as delivering current IT applications to Smart Phones and Tablets then that’s more ‘networking’, just as providing a web site as an alternative method to allow customers to order goods is not Digital Business.
The first iPad appeared four years ago to a world that didn’t know it wanted them because they could only visualize using them in the current uses supported by a PC. If you want to do computer centric data transaction work then a PC with a keyboard still remains best, but the iPad, Android tablet, even the Kindle, have all disruptively changed use towards people centric interactions around pictures, music, video, and a host of other new capabilities all driven by simple touch screens, with not a key board in sight. The simplicity of the Cloud enabled mass scalability of simple small Apps delivered by Browser based technology instead of heavy weight Client-Server monolithic applications is the enabler that is powering the huge and rapid growth. But it is the new generation of Devices and their wide spread ownership that is at the heart of the disruption.
Tablets, and the Smart Phones, pretty well only differentiating in details of size and connectivity options, offer a model that allows mass participation in every sense of the word. Taken together these devices are driving computing still further from its starting point, and towards ubiquitous ownership. It’s a change not just in computing, or even in business, but in society as a whole. Digital Business means wholly new sets of Government, Business and Social models. Not for nothing does the Davos 2014 executive summary of the event for World Leaders state;
“Profound political, economic, social and, above all, technological forces are transforming our lives, communities and institutions. Rapidly crossing geographic, gender and generational boundaries, they are shifting power from traditional hierarchies to networked heterarchies.”
These are not the issues caused by the availability of Clouds, its caused by what people all over the world are choosing to do with the Devices of their choice! Having Your Own Device, HYOD, also means choosing what you what to do with it, without the constraints, and (necessary) restrictions, of the internal Enterprise IT model. And that in turn creates the huge and rapidly growing Digital Business model, together with a complex change in social behavior. That’s why BYOD might be an IT led decision in terms of what is supported in terms of existing PC based internal IT services, but for any business surviving, and prospering, means recognizing and enthusiastically grasp HYOD and Digital Business in all its disruptive dimensions.
