I always wondered what choices would be made when one has a choice between a MAC and a PC and doesn't have to pay for it, would they indulge or would they actually think about it. Well according to a recent article:

40 percent of Citrix System employees purchased a Mac when given $2100 towards a new computer for the company's Bring Your Own Computer to Work program. The strategy was an attempt to cut costs incurred in the IT department and aimed to increase employee satisfaction. Workers were allowed to chose whichever computer they wished to use for both work and personal use. Of the 400 employees that participated in the program, 54 percent believed productivity increased while 17 percent of managers believed job satisfaction increased.

Click below to continue to the full article:
40% of Citrix employees choose Mac for home and work

Click below for more information on the Citrix BYOC program:
BYOC Demystified - Part 1
BYOC Demystified - Part 2
BYOC Demystified - Part 2

The headline of an AP article by Martha Irvine on Yahoo! Tech News a few days ago really struck me:  Young Workers Push Employers for Wider Web Access.  The lead did too: "Ryan Tracy thought he'd entered the Dark Ages when he graduated college and arrived in the working world." 

I'm more than a few years out of college - all I will say is pre-Yahoo! - but perhaps given my location in Silicon Valley, and my career in high-tech, ranging from IBM to Documentum and now Citrix, I've always had the latest technology at my disposal, and few-to-no limits about its use. 

I certainly feel for these workers, and am happy to be at Citrix, where we continue to remove limits to the experience that employees have with technology, most recently with a "Bring your own Computer" initiative that encourages employees to use one PC for both work and home. Our CEO, Mark Templeton, is also an outspoken advocate of the need for IT leaders to open up their thinking - as well as their networks and desktop management and procurement policies - to embrace the change that this new generation of workers is demanding.

There are lots of reasons people avoid change...control, security, cost come to mind.  But isn't there a list of equally good reasons to embrace change - especially if it's coming no matter what? 

The new generation of workers like Ryan Tracy is a driving the consumerization of IT.  They grew up with the Internet.  They are used to choice - 500 channels of TV is an expectation, not a luxury.  Personality and individuality are expressed in their PCs and smart phones, in what's on them and how they are used.

Enterprise IT can be the same way.  Let users pick and manage their own PCs, perhaps with some minimum guidelines. This does mean that IT leaders will have to change their desktop management practices, perhaps moving to a model that relies on virtual desktop delivery; change that will mean saving money, and freeing up IT resources so they are working on strategic projects rather than deploying patches and upgrades to thousands of different desktops. 

It also means providing a selection of applications that users can get to on-demand - just as they do everything from home banking to photo sharing to social networking sites, and by making them available using virtualization, the applications and data live centrally and securely in the datacenter, not on the endpoints. 

This approach can make telecommuting and working from home more palatable to IT, since critical information is never out of their control, as well as something that employees value as they strive to balance personal and professional priorities in a world where these once-old lines are rapidly blurring.

Offering a more open approach may feel uncomfortable, but the business benefits are clear:  we've had a financial service customer actually quantify that their new and more open environment means an enormous contribution to productivity by allowing all types of work scenarios - mobile working, working from home on weekends and evenings, working extended hours at the office - to help this 48,000 person company stay competitive and succeed. The results are startling:  they've added 500 person years of productivity annually, valued at nearly $83 million USD.

Of course, opening up enterprise IT means careful cross-organizational consideration of how and where employees work. Ultimately, it's the IT leaders who are showing business the best way to deliver a secure user-centric work environment that get the added benefit of seeing their own operating expenses decrease and their staffs go home happy and worry-free.  So at the end of the day, isn't it a simple choice to make?

Part - 3

In this entry of the series, I am going to answer a few questions we asked ourselves while planning our BYOC program at Citrix.

In the Citrix BYOC program (I named it Citrix Choice), I was on the steering commitee and we had a few questions to ask ourselves.

Here were some of the questions we asked:

"How much of a stipend should we pay per user?"
We chose $2100 because we asked the users to get a new computer with a 3 year warranty. Of course this amount varies from company to company depending on budgets, etc.

"Should we have system requirements?"
We went with the fact that most of the computers coming out had respectable performance. We also mandated that the users with a BYOC computer have an anti-virus solution, the Citrix Receiver and related plug-ins. We set up an AWESOME internal website that had guides on configuring the wireless connections, Citrix Access Gateway, Citrix Receiver, and other settings the user might want. We leveraged our partnerships to get discounts on Microsoft Office, anti-virus, and other hardware and software needs.

"What OS's should we allow?"
We had clients and software for Windows Vista, XP, and Mac OS. We might do Linux later, but we wanted to go with the three mainstream operating systems with our initial roll-out.

"Why should we do this?"
Users wanted the latest a greatest hardware and wished IT could keep up with the curve. On a standards scale, it is hard to do that, but if you are a self-supported user then that makes it feasible. If you are a Hardware geek (like me), you like to change out your equipment quicker than the IT timeline for refresh. BYOC gives that flexibility to do this. We also wanted to leverage our own solutions

"Are there HR concerns?"
This was a big question for us. We debated on this for a few meetings and took a few weeks on this part of the process. We wanted to make sure we were compliant with regulatory items. We leveraged our current policies for much of answers. Most of our policies already addressed most of our concerns. Most companies already have these types of policies in place. Check out your company's data, email, and technology policies and you will find out that most of your concerns are already covered. Legal departments usually cover all possible bases when they make these policies.

"Should there be a term?"
Of course every company, country, and department has different requirements and wants/needs for this area. It is a very difficult question to answer , but we chose 3 years at Citrix. So when the warranty is up, the term is up. This way the user does not have to pay premium prices for any repairs or parts after the warranty has expired. The user can then "opt in/out" for the next three years.

"How can we do this and maintain compliance?"
We leveraged our own products (XenServer, XenDesktop, Access Gateway) to keep in compliance. With Citrix solutions, we are able to keep data secure and encapsulated within our secure corporate environment. All of the users work related documents are stored in a home folder on the network.

"How much freedom do we give the users?"
We give the users the freedom they have been demanding while keeping compliance. We give them the freedom to use any computer they want. We also give them the freedom to have one computer for work and play. With the company data secure on our internal network and documents stored in network home drives, the user has carte blanche to do whatever they want on their computer.

Hopefully, this helps answer some of your questions and can help you in implementing your own BYOC programs. If you have any other questions, please feel free to email me at tedd<at>citrix<dot>com and I will try to address them in future posts.

More later...

Part 2

In our last installment of this series, I touched on the paradigm of the BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) concept. In many cases, this concept can scare the IT departments of the world because it is giving some very important control back to the user because the user decides on the equipment and the software they will use.

In the old realm of IT:

The technicians and/or the respective departments owned the actual hardware and software. Hardware ownership can be a double-edged sword. Yes, the department has the control of standardization to help with supporting the machines, but the company is now responsible for the actual financial asset, , spare parts, book keeping, and "end-of-life-ing" the machines when they are old or fail. Some may see this as a small item and I may agree there, but there is a disadvantage to this scenario.

Support costs money:

Each time a user submits a trouble ticket for hardware issues, it has a fee attached to it. Every time a technician attends to hardware troubleshooting, it has a fee attached to it. Service agreements with hardware vendors has a big fee attached to it.

We (IT) are in the business of saving the company money, right? If IT is busy supporting the hardware, when will IT get cycles to innovate, optimize, and simplify other processes and procedures (a.k.a. save money)?

In the BYOC world:

Users OWN the laptop and the support agreements for the hardware and OS's themselves. When the user obtains the laptop, they would get the three year support agreement (like AppleCare). When a user has an issue, they call the vendor to troubleshoot the hardware and/or OS. If there is a problem, the user sends the laptop off to the manufacture for repair (or brings it to a local repair depot). If the customer has to send in or leave the laptop, IT can help in this case with a loaner pool during the down time. IT would only need a small loaner pool for this support. This saves IT cycles and IT money over the spectrum of a whole company because they are not being billed for service calls, contracts for support, or personnel hours. Saving support dollars and support time is a major part of the BYOC concept. Thus, making the bean counters happier

What IT would own:

IT would own the corporate software (MicroSoft Office, SAP, etc.). IT would own the security of those applications and any data that is being accessed and stored via those applications. With Citrix XenApp, all of the company software resides on the XenApp servers. This ensures the license compliance is in IT's control and the updates, patches, and administration is under IT's control. XenApp does not care about hardware vendor, OS (Macintosh, Windows, Linux), or connection. If the user wants software locally installed (not via XenApp), the user would purchase the software, install it, and support themselves without IT support. Some users may want this option, but the number is not large. The users usually like having the software support that IT provides.

It is all about having a choice for today's tech-savvy workers!

At Citrix, we leverage our partnerships and vendors to offer employee discounts on certain software, but this method is not imperative for a BYOC program to work since the user still has access to these applications via XenApp.

Of course there are a couple of other AWESOME Citrix solutions that can be implemented in the BYOC world and we will talk about those in future installments of this series.