Bring your own technology (BYOT) – the practice of allowing employees to bring their own devices, applications, clouds, and services is expanding within the enterprise. Though at many companies the focus is still on devices, we see the associated host of other technologies as a close follower, complicating the tasks of enterprise IT to both plan for, and manage their own data security while still enabling work on these devices.

Going through the benefits and concerns that BYOT policies present, often looks like an argument that suggests an immediate ban on BYOT is the only viable solution. Though the reduction in capital expenses on the devices themselves might be compelling for some users, the added complexity of managing more types of devices and more data makes this seem like an uneven trade. Additionally, because the devices are not company owned, but still personal, the management of the device must be more subtle – meaning that the simple approach of complete device lockdown in not viable.

IT and business leaders responsible for making sure that their investments don’t cripple their enterprise’s ability to do business should take a look at Mike West’s latest Strategic Perspective, which introduces Saugatuck’s Risk/Reward Assessment model.

We see this as the first approach to IT assessment that provides both buyers and providers with an objective, truly useful means to identify and then manage challenges in understanding, evaluating, selecting, and managing IT solutions in this new era of the Boundary-free Enterprise^™ and dramatically-altered IT/business master architectures, and the processes and practices needed to cost-effectively manage them.

What is Happening?  Last week, Saugatuck attended the Wells Fargo Tech Summit in San Francisco, moderating a panel and meeting with a number of industry leaders. This was the second year that we participated in the conference – which we greatly value as another important window into the dynamics shaping the market for business computing products and services – in this case a Wall Street perspective.

Day 1 of the event was filled with an all-star cast of industry leaders. I especially valued John Chambers (CEO, Cisco) opening keynote, as well as the Consumerization of IT panel, Jason Maynard’s (Wells Fargo’s lead software analyst) fireside chat with Safra Catz (CFO, Oracle) – as well as the panel that I moderated on the Future of IT (with senior executives from Snaplogic, ServiceMesh, Deloitte and Nodeable). One of the highlights of the morning session was a short presentation by Biri Singh (Head of Cloud Services, HP), where he outlined at a high level HPs new holistic Cloud strategy that was subsequently announced this past Tuesday (see Saugatuck’s initial take in our Lens 360 blog post HP Cloud Update: Solid Strategy and a Top-down Mandate, 09Apr2012).

An emerging and disruptive master architecture – combining Cloud, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics plus Integration to on-premises Data Assets – is now forming to enable the Boundary-free Enterprise™ that Saugatuck foresaw in 2008. The Boundary-free Enterprise will not be constrained by organizational boundaries and firewalls, but can enable a new model of work and facilitate new business relationships that are not bound by time or place. Nevertheless, there are new risks and challenges that must be managed for its rewards to be fully realized.

Table 1 - Convergence in the Cloud: 21st Century Organizations, Boundary Free and Global

As the IT discipline around Big Data matures, it will drive businesses to seek answers and value from their own data. We have seen an interest in leveraging this data for competitive advantage. To help our customers do this we have built this simple list of criteria to help judge the value of your data, as well as the likelihood of return on any data initiative conducted with an organization

1. Data Uniqueness – Is the source of the data unique to your organization? Data that is not unique (customer information, for example) might have been collected by your competitors just as easily as by you. For competitive advantage, focus on unique data such as clickstream information to minimize the intrusion of external variables.
2. Data Accessibility – Is your data in the form of log files spread across 50 different webservers? Or is it already nicely formatted, ready for analysis? If huge investment in time and resources is necessary to bring data together for analysis, does the effort outweigh the costs?
3. Data Relevance – Does your data address your specific business problem? Data sources should be examined with a particular business goal in mind. Forcing irrelevant, but available data to suit a problem is a recipe for faulty analysis.

Not all data is created equal, and for many organizations it will be of paramount importance over the coming year to prioritize and evaluate the relevance and quality of the data they have been collected. Though all the data may yield prescient insights into various dimensions of the business, the majority will be more suited to facilitate internal review, rather than drive competitive advantage.