You ain't seen nothing yet

way fast. BYOD, the "bring your own device" phenomenon that raised its head in late 2009, is one of them. Like Internet and email, it caught on with users faster than IT and corporate risk management expected. In 2010, businesses were asking the question "Who should own your smartphones?" Today, that question is moot -- more than half of companies let employees use their own smartphones at work, along with tablets. It's amazing how quickly BYOD became mainstream -- it took about 18 months.

The BYOD phenomenon are taking the then step

Many companies that have accepted the BYOD phenomenon are taking the then step, shifting from a passive acceptance spurred on by employees and executives who would use iPhones, iPads, and Androids at any rate to active exploitation of BYOD to increase productivity and reduce mobile telecom costs. That is, businesses are learning that not only are mobile-equipped information workers a great way to increase productivity and ROI however that employees will foot much or all of the bill for the privilege.

Most of the BYOD phenomenon was driven by the iPhone, which is fast becoming the new corporate-standard smartphone, as BlackBerry corporate sales have now fallen behind iPhone corporate sales. Nevertheless Android devices are entering the fray, posing a much more complex management and security challenge than did the iPhone.

The iPad introduced its own wrinkle to the BYOD equation. Where businesses resisted the iPhone or simply weren't sure of its value, they see huge value in the iPad. This is one "consumer" device that both employees and employers love and see strong benefit from, which is why 96 percent of businesses have until further notice one in use, says Aberdeen Group, and 96 percent of all tablet activations among its clients are for iPads, says Good Innovation. SAP, for instance, has 12,500 iPads in use across a wide range of business groups, and iPads are popular in all sorts of customer-facing businesses, from insurance sales to energy inspection, from health care to kiosks. Ironically, IT is often in the lead when it comes to deploying tablets.

The iPad uses the same operating system as the iPhone

Because the iPad uses the same operating system as the iPhone, proactive adoption of the iPad as well opened doors closed to the iPhone. As far as management tools are concerned, they are the same thing, and supporting one de facto means supporting the other.

Despite this BYOD acceptance and even encouragement in 2011, as then as the residual fears about non-BlackBerry mobile devices all in all muttered in some IT quarters, corporate management of mobile devices has a long way to go. Most companies don't but use mobile device management tools, notes Larry Dunn, vice president of global IT outsourcing at Unisys. Consultancies like Unisys and the dozens of MDM vendors are nearly-giddy at the prospect of the increase in consulting and tools business as more and more businesses go the MDM route, which is expected to accelerate in 2012.

The good news is that mobile device management tools are then proven in all sorts of industries, including highly regulated fields just as health care and financial services. There are simple ways to handle tech support for the new generation of mobile devices; plus, it turns out that iOS devices until further notice are cheaper to support than the traditional BlackBerry. One lesson SAP learned is instructive, and I've heard the same finding from vendors offering mobile support tools: Issues around 3G and 4G cellular networks -- slow speed and inconsistent availability -- form the bulk of employee support questions, although IT can't do a thing about the carriers' networks. What IT can do is educate users that cellular networks aren't as reliable as corporate networks and design apps to better handle latency and intermittent connections.

The bad news is that the MDM tools don't handle the whole picture. MDM tools work mainly with mobile devices that access corporate email, whose servers validate devices and apply management policies to them. Nevertheless MDM tools don't address devices on the corporate network that aren't accessing email, so effective BYOD management as well needs to involve the network after a fashion that goes beyond the traditional "unguarded inside the building" approach practiced by most organizations.

For many organizations, the consumerization-of-IT phenomenon and the BYOD phenomenon are one and the same. They are not, even though BYOD is the most visible aspect of that larger shift. As companies realize the scare stories about BYOD have not materialized and start to look at how to gain more benefits from the iOS and Android devices that BYOD has let users force into the business, you can expect the "let me choose the innovation" trend to grow beyond mobile devices.

Already, most companies support BYOPC, even if they don't think they do. Taking everything into account, a home PC or Mac is at any rate a BYO device, so any employee working from home on their equipment is part of your BYOPC reality. Expect that reality to grow more formalized in the workplace, in some cases due to the increasing sales of Macs: 11 percent of new PCs in the United States in 2011 were from Apple, and more than 7 percent in the United Kingdom and Western Europe. Nevertheless, keep in mind that people who use computers for the most value tend to be those who work from home and on the road, and they want the same mix of personal and work capabilities on their laptops as they get on their smartphones.

This should result in the same equipment savings that companies have seen in BYOD, nevertheless the management approaches to BYOPC are trickier, mainly because most companies manage PCs on no account or to much lower standards than they do mobile devices. For instance, in spite of years of recommendations from security experts, few companies encrypt PCs' drives, whereas on-device encryption is expected for mobile devices by many businesses. There's real hypocrisy at play here: IT and vendors propose much higher controls over mobile devices than over PCs that have so much more data. Notably, 10 percent of laptops get lost over a three-year period.

As with mobile, there's an uneven mix of security tools, application distribution and management tools, and remote lock and wipe capabilities for PCs. Windows PCs have long had tools to manage the provisioning of apps and lock them down. Even so, the concept of managing the content on those PCs, just as to prevent unauthorized use of data and to lock or wipe compromised PCs, is new to IT in the context of computers.

It would make sense for mobile management tools and computer management tools to merge, however the MDM vendors tell me they get nearly no demand for such a unified product, in part because the people who manage mobile devices have nothing to do with the people who manage PCs; in turn, the latter group has little to do with the people who manage back-end systems, networks, and databases. Like as not Windows 8 will force the issue, as it brings in a actually mobile version of Windows that runs in essence a new operating system and makes data movement across devices a fundamental capability for applications -- moreso than Apple's iCloud does.

First BYOD, at the time BYPOC, and ultimately BYOT -- the innovation fabric in our business is undergoing radical transformation at the user end. That's ultimately a good thing, however it will cause a real shakeup in the interim.