BYOD frees up time for CIOs to get down to business

Credit: B. Mayer via Flickr

When Paul Caris, CIO at global law firm Eversheds, decided to equip the firm's lawyers with iPads, he met with a lot of resistance. "If I had listened to anybody along the way I wouldn't have done it," he reveals. "My own team was trying to tell me it was a folly. They were rolling out the usual excuses about security and supportability."

Undeterred, Caris initially piloted 15 iPads, then added more and more. Two years later, 500 of the firm's fee-earners have iPads, all equipped with full access to their emails, calendar and a cloud-based archiving system. Deploying the software cost nothing, and the users provide their own support, through an intranet forum that allows them to collaborate on best practice and share fixes.

So is Caris a new breed of CIO? The IT landscape in most businesses already looks very different from that of five years ago. Applications and storage are gradually moving to the cloud, and software-as-a-service providers are taking away some of the pain of day-to-day management.

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These technology trends are putting the 'I' back into CIO, as CIOs can focus increasingly on information as an asset that has to be protected and managed for the organization, instead of focusing on technology.

Caris believes that IT needs to be led by what the business wants.

"I want to change the whole ethos of my internal IT department, so that when anything does pop up, we say 'How can we make this work with our systems and network?' rather than, 'If we can' or 'Should we prevent it?'"

It's not a question of allowing a business free-for-all: devices can be wiped remotely and the data on them is encrypted. But it is an approach that values agility above consistency.

"We've moved away from trying to standardize everything and allowed a totally bespoke IT experience where the individual chooses what the best product is," says Caris.

"Why should I force a workflow engine on them if they can find an app on the iPad that suits the way they work more efficiently?"

Allowing business users to take charge of app procurement and technical support has freed up the IT function to concentrate on developing innovative custom apps, such as one that enables users to turn their PCs on remotely from their BlackBerry phones so that it can be fully logged on and ready to use when they arrive at their desks in the morning.

Eversheds also makes extensive use of the cloud, and this has freed up the IT function to focus its efforts on the needs of its fee-earners. A new job role of Solution Designer has been created: solution designers are embedded in different practice and sector groups within the firm, enabling them to work directly with the fee-earners to design solutions from scratch.

"We don't just develop technology solutions, we sit and work out what our end-to-end client proposition is and where technology can play a part in solving the fee-earners' daily struggle, but also our clients' issues as well," says Caris.

Clients have been helped to implement a collaborative cloud-based system that enables them to work with Eversheds lawyers with minimal overhead to their own IT function.

Keith Wallington, chief customer officer of email management firm Mimecast, believes that with more 'lights-on' tasks left to users or suppliers, IT people are starting to think more about the information that flows through the business and how best to surface it and make it useful to their staff.