BYOC: If you love your computer, you’ll complain less

"Since I was able to choose my own laptop, I feel like a kid again!"

It’s been almost a year since the concept of “Bring-Your-Own-Computer” started getting attention in the media. I have to be honest: when I heard about the concept, I wasn’t sure why a company would choose to pay for a computer that belongs to the user, not the company.

Sure, I’ve bitten, clawed, and scratched my way at previous companies to buy a different kind of computer than the vanilla PC they wanted to give me. I’ve written pages of documentation about how my choice will save the company money and allow me to be more productive. In most cases, I’ve won, even when it meant running on a different OS than everyone else. But I was one of a small minority to even attempt it, and even now, looking back, I think the company gave in with a sigh because it was less trouble than continuing to fight me.

But, man, when I had a PC that I didn’t choose at that company, I complained constantly. My biggest complaint: as a graphics manager, I constantly had to use special characters that I could only access through Windows’ Character Map. On the Mac — which is what I ended up getting — an option-shift-bracket or an option-8 gave me what I needed almost instantly — instead of spending 1 or 2 minutes digging through the character map to find the typographer’s quote or bullet. Yeah, I know I was annoying. Yeah, I know the IT department (Hi Peter!) gritted their teeth every time my name showed up on their caller ID.

As it turns out, that’s one of the reasons why companies like Citrix have implemented the BYOC program. According to Citrix, BYOC “will greatly increase user satisfaction by giving employees the freedom to choose the exact mix of options, features and styles that match their personality and individual computing needs.”

Earlier this week, I had a conversation with Tedd Fox, a Technology Evangelist who coordinates the BYOC program for Citrix. “We designed the program for the Echo Generation,” Fox says. ” They are the people raised with TiVo and the Internet, who have lived online for a good chunk of their life.  They know their way around a computer and usually have strong opinions about the laptop and OS they use. Most of the time, they have an awesome laptop that they love to use already.”

Although Citrix doesn’t come out and say this directly, I believe the thinking goes along these lines: If you love your computer, you’ll complain less. That equates to fewer help-desk calls and more productivity. I’m not sure if any companies have done a cost-benefit analysis taking this into account, but it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense.

From personal experience, after I got my Mac, I think I called our IT help desk considerably less. Part of the reason for this is that the IT people said, “Listen, we’ll buy the Mac for you, but we don’t have people here who know the Mac. So if you have an issue, we probably can’t solve it.” But because I’ve been a Mac user since ’89, I was comfortable with that; with PC’s, I didn’t know a .dll from a hole in the ground, so I couldn’t even begin to troubleshoot it.

Cost reductions are in many places in the BYOC model, says Fox. Some of the cost reductions that were outlined:

1. No hardware help-desk calls. Citrix requires 3-year coverage on all purchased laptops, and the employee deals directly with the laptop supplier, not with IT, when they have a hardware issue.
2. Reduced inventory of laptops. Fox says the company still maintains a fleet of loaner laptops for when employees have to send their laptops in for repair, but that they’ve been able to reduce their inventory because they do not need to maintain a fleet of laptops for new employees.
3. Infrastructure savings. In order for the BYOC model to meet all the HR and legal requirements, including Sarbanes-Oxley and other data security measures, Fox says that there was a lot of top-down planning involved. Citrix makes a lot of back-end software that supports a model where all the user’s applications, resources, and data live offline, however, so I think the nature of their business probably made it easier for them to implement BYOC. This type of planning allowed Citrix to take advantage of the savings that technologies like virtual desktops offer. Trying to shoehorn BYOC into an organization where companies require corporate data to live on the user’s hard drive probably doesn’t make sense. “In effect, you have to quarantine the physical end point in some fashion and restrict information usage to a ‘safe’ computing arena that the organization can manage and maintain,” says Patrick Cunningham, a long-time corporate records manager and the author of Above the RIM, an information management blog. (Cunningham’s initial post about BYOC appears here; more of his feedback about BYOC will appear in a future blogpost.)

Fox reports that the first year of the program has been successful. The roll-out of BYOC wasn’t all at once–Citrix did it by geographic area, which also allowed them time to tailor the program to different countries’ privacy and data security laws. Fox also points out that BYOC is not for everyone, and isn’t required. “If users are happy with the laptop, support mechanisms, and need a bit of extra handholding,” says Fox, “they can stay with the IT delivered device and service offerings.”

I would also like to point out that Citrix doesn’t need to pay to eat its own dog food–their back-end infrastructure software that supports the BYOC model is free to them, which obviously positively affects their ROI. Other companies would have to pay to change their infrastructure into something that can support this. There are many options available, of course–Citrix isn’t the only player in the virtualization or management space. But Citrix’s software outlay was significantly less than other companies.

Not only is this not for everyone, but I’m not sure it can be appropriate for all roles. Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.), for example, which most graphics and marketing people use on a daily basis, doesn’t work over most application virtualization technologies. (Not usably, anyway; plus, it sometimes violates the software’s license agreement.) If you still have to have Creative Suite or other software run locally, and save files locally, there might be fewer positives for the BYOC model in that situation, and there might be legal issues for storing corporate files on a personal machine.

Next up: the cons of the BYOC concept.

Photo credit: Patricia Dekker for Stock.xchng