One Key Ingredient for Enterprise App Stores

Elegance in Execution

There is lots of hoopla in the market at the moment regarding Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and perhaps rightly so.

Increasingly IT savvy users with experiences of the instant gratification that the internet provides are bringing high expectations into the workplace.

If I can download an app on my smart phone seamlessly within a few minutes without any trouble why does it take my IT department so long? Industry SLA’s for delivery of software request vary wildly from 1 to 21 days.

Some IT professionals are nervous about what this means for control of Applications and are even more horrified to consider what these disruptive trends will do to the castles we have built in IT. One ITAM practitioner stated on LinkedIn recently that their approach to personal devices was BYODOMDB – Bring Your Own Device Over My Dead Body!

However, accepting personal devices and opening up the choice of enterprise app stores does not necessarily mean abandoning all of our existing governance requirements.

For example, it would be a misnomer to suggest that the Apple App Stores is the ultimate in flexibility. It is actually quite tightly controlled with stringent protection of intellectual property rights.

The Apple App Store is a locked down environment. You have to adhere to strict guidelines for deployment and updates. The beauty and mass appeal to end users in App Stores of this type is the speed and elegance of execution. Users have the PERCEPTION of choice – when in reality they are being spoon fed what Apple has chosen to list.

Elegance in execution is the key ingredient.

I have been recently reviewing Mobile Device Management solutions in preparation for a future MDM Group Test. There is lots of great technology emerging that allows organizations to deploy their software to various different platforms and devices. Administrators can deploy, reclaim and manage the lifecycle of software regardless of which device it is residing on – even those not owned by the organization. Even more impressive is the ability to quarantine company data. Historically you might have remote wiped the corporate blackberry, now you can remote wipe the company data from an end users personal device without adversely affecting their personal apps or data. So perhaps an Apple style App Store is not too far away.

More on Mobile Device Management coming soon.