Writing a Framework for Your Company's BYOD Adoption

Decision makers and business leaders rarely speak the language of IT. Acronym-ridden and complicated texts are the daily bread of IT professionals, but the business set needs the stereotypical one-pager of stats 'n' facts. One of my strengths as an IT professional has been providing the equivalent of a Rosetta stone: Presenting the project in three languages -- finance, operations, and technology.

This three-pronged approach allows all parties to understand a project, thereby increasing your chances for a successful implementation. Having an implementation's reality meet a technology's expectation is not usually a cut-and-dried task. The amount of hype and, often, inflated sales-related functionality statements surrounding bring-your-own-device makes this even more complicated.

The stated functionality of a specific BYOD device may in fact be true, but not adoptable due to your company's governance rules. Financial restraints based on bandwidth usage might hinder a flashy function from being available to employees. It may be a question, not of the tech, but of the business model supporting the tech.

Here to help is a plain English BYOD project document, perhaps best-titled "BYOD: A Framework for Adoption."

Step 1 - Investment ROI analysis baseline: Your current total cost of ownership
What is your company's current expenditure to support cellphones, remote users, data overhead, and security upkeep, licensing, and support? This total expenditure will be the comparison point for your new BYOD budget. Take into account anything that might be affected, positively or negatively, by your new BYOD model.

Identify one-time investments

1. People will need new hardware.
2. How many people qualify for the new products?
3. Take a head count and multiply by the per-person costs (devices, cases, and chargers).
4. Will your edge security (firewall and VPN) need to be upgraded? If so at what cost?
5. Does your existing data integration support the new model (static IPs, VPN seats, and others)?

Assess ongoing cost with new model

1. Has your TCO increased? TCO = hardware upgrades, licensing, support, etc.
2. As your user base grows will your licensing model also have to grow?
3. Will you involve strategic partners and vendors in the new model? If so, will your architecture support this secondary access group?

Go or no-go decision
Weigh all the information and get a decision from the guys in the wide hall with the window offices. Getting buy-in includes, not only the money for the project, but the impact of the risk/gain analysis you have done during due diligence.

Present the information and then proceed as directed.

Step 2 - New setup implementation: Build enabling infrastructure for your solution
In the first step you took care of outlining the products that will be supported with your BYOD rollout. Build the internal components, roll them out, and test them. Pick two or three trusted users with some tech know-how and test the new components. Outline this in the project document as a beta rollout.

Finalize sourcing options. Interface with your vendors and execute a deal. Not only should this be good for a nice dinner, on the vendor’s tab, it should also be the beginning of a good working relationship. Establish a working set of contacts with a phone and email list. Know whom to contact when things get sideways, which they always do.

Define new support model. After finalizing your relationship with a carrier/vendor do a walk-through with its support team. Ensure you have the information and contacts at hand to solve problems in real-time. Establishing a line of demarcation between your internal systems and the carrier's external systems is of prime importance. This will avoid the finger-pointing games later in the rollout. If you do not carefully approach this step your CEO will be the first one to hear, “That is not our problem, it's your IT department." Avoid this at all costs.

Launch pilot program. The pilot program is different than the beta rollout. Pilot candidates are the users who will gain the most from the BYOD adoption. Typically these are sales people. Regardless of whom you pick as the first group, I recommend making them high profile. Create a thirst for this new and exciting tech in your corporate environment. This will increase your success factor, project momentum, and in the end (if you find success) your IT budget.

Step 3 - Companywide rollout

Define trigger for onboarding. After rolling out the primary and most needed BYOD-related components to the core corporate personnel, you need a plan to qualify who gets supported next. If you have done the job right, there will be a line out the door of your office, people clamoring for this new and useful technology. Protect yourself with a qualification document, approved by your boss or, preferably, your boss's boss.

This document will act as a shield. The downside to an excited and expectant user base is telling users they must wait. Adopting at too steep a curve is dangerous: stressing newly adopted support models, surpassing licensing infrastructure, crashing the system... All of these risks come into play if adoption isn't carefully planned in steps. Having an onboarding strategy will help calm the masses and shift the blame to departmental management away from IT.

Define policies. Last, there's policy management. This is a document, administered by HR, covering the restrictions and governance issues related to BYOD. This document is notcrafted by IT -- or should not be. The social use policy should come from the social side of management.

IT policy, the nuts and bolts, packet management scheme, firewall settings, VPN setup, and all the geek policies should come from IT. The usage policy with governance in mind should come from management, be executed away from IT, and then forwarded to IT as an “approved user.” This step will further distance the “who is next” question from the integration professionals, and provide a layer of job security for the technology department.

Just ask any Apple executive about the risks of letting a prototype iPhone out of the lab and into the wild. Rarely does a technology stay under wraps for long, once it gets into testing. The same will happen with your wandering and protected information.