Every now and again, when they have no real news to report, there’s nothing that the technology journos over at the BBC News site like to do more than rake over a well-worn argument and fan the flames again. Okay, I’m being a bit mean, because this particular argument is worthy of being occasionally re-visited.

About this time last year, as I battled in vain to keep a customer on Lotus Notes, one of the big cheeses in their IT organisation told me that when the iPad 2 was released they’d stop buying laptops and start handing out iPads. I asked him three things:

1. How would the iPad owners print?
2. How would they receive a spreadsheet via e-mail, edit it, and send it on?
3. How would they manage an iPad without a computer to tether it to?

He drew a blank on all three. I was also going to ask why he was making a decision based on a product that hadn’t even been announced yet (and therefore didn’t have a set of detailed features), but I could see it was time to move on from that conversation. A year later, improvements to iOS and availability of apps have answered questions #1 and #3 (so I believe) but not #2 (if I’m wrong, I’ll willingly stand corrected). By the way, they did throw Notes out.

These days I’m frequently briefing customers on collaboration and business productivity, and the subject of consumerisation – bring your own device – always comes up… often before the slide appears, and sometimes before the presentation. Take yesterday for example, someone commented on the four iPads brought in by customer attendees and joked that the owners should put them away. I disagreed – here we see the leading edge of consumerisation and we have to embrace it. And it always provokes an interesting and passionate conversation.

Every time I touch on the subject of consumerisation I mention the Forbes article ‘I Want my iPad’ which discusses the pros and cons, and concludes that compromise is required on both sides (users and IT) but consumerisation is often well worth the effort. A year after it was written I’m still advising people to read it.

Back to the BBC article… the overall theme is that the idea of consumerisation has changed in the years since we first heard the term. It was quite a few years ago (five or six, maybe more) that I first heard of companies considering giving their employees an allowance to buy a computer rather than taking the company-allocated standard, and thus allowing employees to put some of their own money in to buy better kit. Playground elitism moving into the workplace. In reality, I can’t remember dealing with any customer who went down this route, although the BBC article states that Cisco have. Having said that, some of that compromise that Forbes state as important seems to be not quite there yet:

If they choose to use an Apple Mac, the company won’t provide IT support.

You have a choice, but make sure you make the right choice. This is a strange path to take, as you’d think that the desire to own a MacBook Pro would be one of the driving factors for funded consumerisation.

Now if you mention consumerisation, it’s more likely to be understood as bringing a ‘device’ into work and allowing it to be connected to the company network / infrastructure and allowing it to access certain services. Good Technology are gleefully rubbing their hands, as one of the solutions to the work / personal dilemma is ‘sandboxing’ the corporate data, allowing it to be wiped while the user’s personal stuff (Facebook, Twitter, contacts, Angry Birds, the complete works of ABBA) remains. I hear Good’s solution mentioned frequently.

But despite all of these consumerisation / bring yer own device conversations, the one thing I haven’t encountered (apart from that poorly-researched conversation last year) is the notion that devices will erode desktop computers or laptops. My impression is that tablets and phones are still seen as companion devices, not replacements. The only exception is Windows tablets which can be docked, and therefore can take advantage of a physical keyboard and mouse. Hand-held tablets and phones with on-screen keyboards are fine for e-mail and web browsing, but I can’t see them being used for serious number-crunching spreadsheet work or detailed document creation. Some may point at reports of sales of tablets outstripping computers, but there’s no evidence of one eroding the other. Do you know an iPad owner who doesn’t also own a computer?

As a final thought, I will agree with the BBC article on two points. The rise of mobile devices is driving a greater availability of business-ready apps and shaping how development teams think about presenting data and processes. And that leads to the second point, which is the potential for a business to become more agile and responsiveness because the business-critical data and insight is more readibly available to the mobile worker.

Recent Blog Posts

71

Calendar apps for Windows Phone Sat, Jun 15th 2013 1:18p Darren Adams One of the best features of Windows Phone is the live tiles which allow you to see updated info (such as news, weather, social updates) without actually opening the app. Certain apps also push info onto the lock screen – my choice is to have Facebook updates showing, although I also get a count of e-mails, text messages and tweet-mentions. Simple Calendar The live tile for the phone’s native calendar app only shows your next appointment for the current day, but I’ve discovered [read] Keywords: facebook

118

Dell XPS 12 Tue, Jun 11th 2013 3:18p Darren Adams If there’s one thing I discovered about Microsoft it’s that they’re not frugal in the investment of technology for us hard-working sales teams. Several months ago Mr Ballmer announced that all Microsoft full-time employees would be issued with the necessary kit for the new generation of products, namely: A Windows Phone 8 phone (check, a Nokia 920) A Microsoft Surface RT (check, just before Christmas) A new touch-screen laptop for Windows 8 The new laptop program started a co [read] Keywords: facebook laptop microsoft

78

Happy 10th birthday WordPress Tue, Jun 4th 2013 5:18p Darren Adams Once upon a time, dadams.co.uk was published using hand-crafted HTML. Updating the site was pain-staking and laborious work for the editorial staff, and a walk-out over poor working conditions in early 2007 prompted a re-think in the strategy. It just so happened that the company hosting the hallowed pages offered several options for a more automated style of publishing, among them WordPress. The lead editor and Chief Technology Officer (that’s me) set up a site and started testing. At tha [read] Keywords: blogging facebook profile

265

Why is Microsoft’s share price on the up? Mon, Jun 3rd 2013 6:18p Darren Adams My frolleague Steve Sharpe shared an article from The Guardian which posed the question of why Microsoft and HP are thriving in the post-PC era. Firstly, let’s talk about this post-PC era thing. “Post-PC era” would imply that PCs are dead and buried. So, hands up, who has thrown their PC or laptop away and now only works with a tablet? Certainly no-one I’ve ever met, and certainly none of the enterprise customers I’ve spoken to in the last year. Yes, PC sales have d [read] Keywords: roaming apple applications desktop enterprise facebook laptop microsoft office twitter wiki

205

Windows 8.1 unveiled Thu, May 30th 2013 11:17a Darren Adams First of all I need to declare that in writing this blog post I am not using any Microsoft employee knowledge about the next release of Windows. I actually don’t have any more info than my readers. It does however seem that various tech journalists do have some info, and as of today Microsoft have officially blogged some info on the subject. I don’t intend to write a full synopsis, because you can read it here. But will add some thoughts. In October last year I wrote about the disapp [read] Keywords: lotus notes archive desktop facebook microsoft

166

Making sure the numbers add up Wed, May 1st 2013 4:18p Darren Adams I think it’s safe to assume that Microsoft Excel has now toppled Lotus 1-2-3 as the world’s most-used spreadsheet tool. The great thing about Excel is that it can now do so much more than add up a few numbers… it can analyse, manipulate and predict, provide business intelligence, process data, and visualise your numbers. But beware… Some businesses rely on Excel, and over-rely on Excel. It’s on just about everyone’s desktop and it’s used to create a myri [read] Keywords: connections lotus applications desktop facebook laptop microsoft office server sharepoint

196

Leveraging the paradigm shift of the win / win Sun, Apr 28th 2013 6:16p Darren Adams I refuse to use the word ‘leverage’, apart from there in the title, but that’s for the purposes of irony. I don’t have any proof, but I’m sure it was once only a noun – leverage is something you have, not something you do. But sometime in the last twenty years – I remember having a conversation about it with someone who left Lotus a long time ago – leverage started to be used as a verb. dictionary.com now lists it as a verb, the proof is here. My f [read] Keywords: lotus apple facebook instant messaging sharepoint

175

Windows 8 apps for e-mail, calendar and people Fri, Mar 29th 2013 10:14a Darren Adams A few days ago Microsoft updated some of the core Windows 8 apps, namely e-mail, calendar and the people hub. These are the apps which sit on the new Windows 8 start screen and are of particular importance to Windows 8 RT users (since they don’t have much of a choice of other e-mail clients to choice from). My take on the e-mail is this… phone e-mail is for getting rid of the rubbish and doing a quick reply when required. Outlook is for full e-mail processing when I sit down at a des [read] Keywords: applications exchange exchange facebook interface microsoft outlook

113

Plantronics Calisto 620 Tue, Mar 19th 2013 3:15p Darren Adams Following on from my recent post about the Voyager Legend UC, today I’m turning my attention to something that sits on the desk rather than on your ear. The latest addition to Plantronics’ Calisto range is the 620, and it’s got a rather attractive selling point. My home office (a grand title for the room that often features drying laundry) is equipped with a Jabra SPEAK 410 speakerphone, which connects to my laptop or Surface RT to take Lync calls. After two years this continue [read] Keywords: ibm facebook integration laptop microsoft mobile office wireless

128

Social media annoyances Sat, Mar 16th 2013 12:15p Darren Adams I recently mentioned on Facebook that I don’t like food photos. Other people agree with me – Incubus bassist Ben Kenney said that “food photos are the Comic Sans of Facebook”. I do appreciate that other people probably get equally bored with me posting photos of Missie (although she is really cute so the photos tend to get a lot of likes), and it has been pointed out that posts about Arsenal’s progress are as boring as I find posts about rugby. For a bit of fun I po [read] Keywords: facebook linkedin profile