Workers' Own Cellphones and iPads Find a Role at the Office
SAN FRANCISCO — Throughout the information age, the corporate I.T. department has stood at the chokepoint of office technology with a firm hand on what equipment and software employees use in the workplace. — They are now in retreat.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months before this piece, AllThingsD reported the iPad was trouncing Android in enterprise adoption — evidence that tablets were entering offices through channels corporate IT did not control. The Times now names the mechanism behind that pattern: bring-your-own-device, where employees' personal cellphones and iPads win an accepted role on the office network.
The significance is institutional, not gadget-level. Corporate IT has stood at the chokepoint of workplace technology throughout the information age, deciding what equipment and software employees may use; per the reporting, it is now in retreat and ceding that gatekeeping role.
First-order effects
- Employees gain de facto authority over their work devices, choosing personal iPhones and iPads over IT-issued equipment, while IT departments lose the chokepoint they have held over office hardware and software.
Second-order effects
- Device vendors now sell to individual workers rather than procurement departments — which favors Apple, whose consumer brand strength explains its enterprise lead over Android noted in the July coverage — and shift IT spending from buying hardware toward securing and managing devices it does not own.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the CIO's role narrows from technology decider to policy enforcer, and workplace computing standards get set by consumer markets rather than corporate standards committees — a structural inversion of how office technology has been chosen since the mainframe era.
The trend: Workplace technology is being consumerized: the devices employees buy for themselves are displacing IT-procured equipment as the default office standard.