There is No Tradeoff With BYOD

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The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement has been portrayed as an impasse for organizations that must make tradeoffs between maintaining security and invading employee privacy.
This is an illusion — there is no tradeoff when you take the right approach to BYOD.

As a relatively young field spurred on by the mass adoption of smartphones and tablets, the BYOD space is in the process of reaching a common paradigm. In the meantime, organizations struggle to navigate a forest of mobile device management (MDM), enterprise mobility management (EMM) and other BYOD approaches that claim comparable benefits but don’t achieve them the same way.
Given the buzz and crowdedness of this field, some organizations simply don’t implement a BYOD solution, believing the medicine might be worse than the disease. This thinking is flawed and actually elevates the risk of data leaks, cybercrime and intellectual property theft.

A multi-persona approach to BYOD achieves the ideal balance of security and privacy, cost and flexibility, and choice for employees while overcoming the drawbacks of other BYOD approaches. With a multi-persona approach, there is no tradeoff.

[wcm_restrict]Not All BYOD Approaches are Equal

The myth of a BYOD tradeoff is perpetuated by current BYOD approaches that do require sacrifices, either for the corporation, the employees or both.
The original approach was to issue employees a cell phone (typically a BlackBerry), so that employees carry two phones — one for personal use and one for professional use. Of course, nobody wants to carry two devices.

More recent BYOD solutions use the ‘Big Brother’ approach, which entails implementing controls and surveillance on each employee’s device. The company can blacklist unsafe apps, enforce security policies with PINs, restrict camera use with geofencing, monitor communications and use other tactics that make employees feel like they’re under constant watch. This approach risks exposing private matters and portends legal trouble. As the District Court for the Northern District of Ohio found in Lazette v. Kulmatycki, using a company-owned BlackBerry to access a former employee’s personal e-mail may violate the Stored Communications Act (SCA).

Enter the Multi-Persona Approach

If carrying two mobile devices is impractical and the ‘Big Brother’ approach is detested by employees, a multi-persona approach is the ideal solution for BYOD. A multi-persona approach entails dividing a phone into personal and professional personas. This can be done at the application level (piecemeal and less secure) or at the operating system level (total and more secure). Users simply switch between the personas for personal and professional functions with a single tap. If IT wants business apps protected by password, they can do that strictly within the professional persona. Partnered organizations, such as an advertising firm and its client, might provide each other with professional personas to streamline information sharing and reduce back and forth email requests. Thus, one employee’s phone could have many additional personas.

Corporate data and apps stay strictly within the professional persona while personal apps and personal data remain strictly within personal personas. When personal calls or emails come in, you answer or reply on your own persona. When a business call or email comes in you answer on your professional persona, automatically. When your kids download a fake ‘Flappy Birds’ app loaded with malware, it’s not going to infect your professional persona. In fact, you could create a third “kid’s persona” to protect your personal and professional data against reckless downloading, and provide your kid’s a worry-free place to play.

There’s no blacklisting and snooping – just two or more personas all separated like church and state.

The Modern Workforce Needs Two Personas

As the divides between personal life and work become thinner, the need for BYOD solutions that can safeguard the separation is ever more important. Employees are willing to answer email after 5 pm and catch up on work after tucking their kids into bed. They are hesitant to do this though at the expense of their privacy and digital freedom.

Thus, the multi-persona is not merely a solution to BYOD, but a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent.

Have you ever tried to restrict a Millennial’s smartphone usage? You might as well ask a wolf not to howl. If Millennial job candidates know that you have a habit of commandeering their smartphones when they join the company, they’re not going to be interested. And thanks to sites like Glassdoor, you cannot hide this type of stuff. Your BYOD approach will become a factor in the talent marketplace.

All employees, regardless of age, have likely installed and tested apps that lead to higher productivity. Some of them might use cloud-based to-do lists, some might have installed high-tech scanning apps to convert paper stacks into digital files and still others might have photo applications they use in creative work. If you can’t provide a comparable corporate application, it’s important that employees can still use these apps to reach their potential. Multi-persona BYOD allows this.

The loyal, long-term workforce never was. Millennials job hop slightly more than Baby Boomers and Gen X, but not by much. Trying to issue expensive smartphones to any employee who will probably leave quickly isn’t cost-effective for IT. Plus, with the dramatic rise of freelancers and self-employment in both the U.S. and U.K., the traditional IT model of “let’s manage all your devices” is impractical, when trying to enforce management tools on personal information and apps. Freelancers will not subject themselves to the types of authoritarian controls that come with many BYOD solutions. However, they will still need access to corporate data, so multi-persona approaches can allow companies to work with highly skilled freelancers, seasonal employees and others who work on a temporary basis. For the duration of the contract, the company would provide access to the corporate network via a professional persona installed on the freelancer’s phone. At the expiration of the contract, IT could cut of access to the network and the freelancer could delete the persona. Indeed, the freelancer might have nine or ten personas safely segregating the data from each client.

Ultimately, the best BYOD approach is the one that is noticed least. The less IT has to manage, the better. The less employees notice BYOD controls, the better. The more choice employees have in their device selection and apps, the better.

The two-phone approach and Big Brother BYOD are quickly falling off the map. Thomas Kuhn, author of the landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions wrote that “the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.” This comment on the natural sciences corresponds equally well to the IT world. Given the extent to which life is carried out through mobile devices, choice between BYOD solutions is indeed a choice between worlds. The companies that choose the multi-persona paradigm will be practicing business in a world entirely different from the companies that choose other approaches. It is the multi-persona world that will unleash the creative potential, free expression and self-direction of the modern workforce.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Omer EifermanOmer Eiferman is Cellrox’s CEO. He is a graduate of Bar-Ilan University with a degree in Computer Science and Statistics, and was a pilot in the Israeli Air Force. Omer has served in a variety of marketing, development and product management roles in technology companies. To read Omer’s complete biography, click here.

How to be an Effective Manager

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Effectively managing people, processes, or both is in many ways a balancing act. Some would even describe it as an art form. There are many variables in play simultaneously which determine if somebody will ultimately be successful in a leadership role.

Before a manager begins to understand all of these nuances they must learn one of the major underlying principles if they are going to recognize their full potential as leaders. They must learn to walk the tightrope between being personal and professional at the same time. It is important to be personal and on good terms with your team members because this is the only way to ensure teamwork and peak performance, but you must also be professional to be respected and trusted. Be too friendly and you may be taken advantage of or not taken seriously, be too buttoned up and ‘professional’ and you risk coming across as uncaring and stubborn.

[wcm_restrict]The key to mastering these seemingly contradictory traits is to build a strong foundation of trust by earning the respect of your team. Earn their respect and your interactions with the team will be looked at more favorably and you are more apt to be given the benefit of the doubt. One of the easiest ways to do this is to learn the basics of their particular jobs, why they do what they do and how they do it. If you already understand their jobs or maybe even rose through the ranks and did their jobs previously it may be a good idea to spend a few hours and relearn the nuances. This is important because they will value your opinions and trust your judgment more if they know you truly understand the roles they in particular play.

The next step is to understand that a manager can be both professional and personal at the same time. These two concepts can coexist. For example, if it is noticed that an employee is falling behind in their day-to-day tasks, a manager whose presenting in a manner that he/she believes is professional may say to the employee, “You are falling behind and I expect you be caught up by days end.” This approach lacks empathy and is one sided. The manager who is most concerned with being seen as nice might say, “I noticed that you are falling a bit behind, do you think you may be caught up at some point?” This approach suggests that this manager prioritizes being liked and non-confrontational above actual performance. The appropriate response should be, “I noticed that you have fallen behind. Let’s talk about what is happening so we can implement a strategy and quickly get back on track to meet our objectives.” This interaction shows empathy while also making it clear that the work must get done timely.

If a manager makes a commitment to having more than a high level understanding of the role each of their team members play and they are committed to exemplifying professionalism and a personal connection through accountability and empathy they are on their way to a successful and fruitful career.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Gabriel Bristol, president and CEO of Intelicare Direct, is one of today’s most versatile CEOs, having led remarkable turnarounds for several large corporations as well as helping establish rapidly growing start-ups. Gabriel’s success has been well documented, with features in Forbes and other publications throughout the country. To read Gabriel’s complete biography, click here.

Sharon Drew Morgen

How Sales, Marketing and Social Can Facilitate the Decision Path

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Sales, marketing, and social marketing attempt to place solutions and create relationships by supplying great content, discovering likely prospects, and creating trust. Unfortunately sellers end up closing a small fraction – less than 5 percent – of those they reach, and marketers and social end up wasting a lot of time and don’t often meet their goals. What’s causing our failure? And is there one solution that can enhance all?

Problems with Our Current Thinking

Here’s a bit of flawed thinking that exacerbates the problems:

  • Sellers believe prospects are folks who SHOULD buy rather than those who WILL buy. It’s possible to know very early if the prospect CAN buy;
  • Marketers believe that content is king, that offering the right content at the right time enables a buying decision. But we don’t know the role the reader plays on the Buying Decision Team, how or when the content is being used, and if it’s making a difference in the buying decision (i.e. it might be just a resource);
  • Social believes that by engaging in relationships over time and developing trust, followers will come back when they are ready. But because we can’t know their decision path, or associates who need to buy-in to any change, or internal political issues, we can’t know if we are spending time wisely.

We can facilitate the buying decision and create more success with followers by employing different thinking to save us from:

  1. Merely guessing at, or manipulating, our results without knowing our true outcomes;
  2. Wasting time assuming if we play nice or offer good content people will buy or take action;
  3. Neglecting actions we can take to facilitate the decision steps buyers and followers take before they are ready to make a choice.

Let’s look at some new thinking to add to what we’re successfully doing.

What I Learned in the Trenches

We overlook the myriad of things that buyers and followers must contend with outside of the purview of the solution, need, or relationship:

  • People have complicated issues to handle before they can buy or change;
  • Figuring out the full complement of people to include in any purchase or change decision is complex. Each participant brings their unique criteria into the mix;
  • Given politics, internal relationship issues, history and future, it’s challenging to get buy-in from everyone involved with the final solution, yet the buy-in is necessary to ensure the status quo doesn’t implode with a new purchase or change.
      • I learned this as both a sales person and an entrepreneur. When Merrill Lynch hired me a stockbroker in the 1970s, I became a million-dollar producer my first year. But I couldn’t figure out why everyone with a need (especially those I had a great relationship with) didn’t buy. Where did they go?

      When I started up my tech company in London in the 80s I realized the problem: as a buyer, my direct needs were often superseded by the social, political, organizational, and relational considerations I had to manage. When sellers came to pitch they understood my need and gave fine pitches but had no way to handle the fights I was having with the Board, or the issues the distributor was having with my solutions. Nor did anyone even try.

      The sales model, I realized, was not designed facilitate the behind-the-scenes non-need-related issues I had to manage before I could consider buying anything. I then developed Buying Facilitation® to add to the front end of the sales model. My own sales team used it as a front-end to our sales process by first navigating buyers through their change management issues – buyers must do that anyway so we facilitated the stages and steps instead of sitting and waiting for the time it took them to figure it out on their own. That way we got onto the Buying Decision Team early and became great relationship managers. Our sales tripled and the time to close was reduced by two thirds.

      The takeaway here for marketers and social is the recognition that we are largely ignoring the hidden, systemic issues going on that are not available to outsiders yet fundamental for any change to happen. That is our Achilles Heel.

      What’s the Role of Change Management?

      Buyers and followers don’t know their journey to change when they begin and hence take longer than necessary. But we can help them, and make our value proposition our ability to be their GPS.
      There are two elements of the Buying Facilitation® model that can be added to create a ‘pull’ that’s change- and decision-focused.

      1. Listen for systems: instead of coding, noticing, tracking details that will help us guess at who’s reading, who’s a decision maker, where they might be in their sales cycle, etc. let’s begin listening for, and designing, tools to facilitate the movement along the decision path that change decisions goes through; let’s ensure the right people are all involved (some not so obvious) and address consensus-building. We now listen for what we want to hear rather than listening for issues with decision making, change or choice.
      2. Use Facilitative Questions: instead of waiting until they do this on their own, Facilitative Questions guide people through their buy-in and change management issues (necessary for both small purchases and large solutions) and facilitate the trajectory through their steps. Facilitative Questions are a type of criteria-recognition and choice format I developed.

      It’s possible to develop assessments, questionnaires, intelligent contact sheets, CRM tools that provide the capability to lead buyers and followers through the steps they must take, send out just the appropriate data at the right point in the cycle, and facilitate the consensus and buy-in as they ready themselves for change. We can add these to the sales, marketing, and social models to truly serve our buyers and followers and close more. It will be an addition, and the results will stronger relationships and more conversions.

      About the Author

      Sharon Drew Morgen is founder of Morgen Facilitations, Inc. (www.newsalesparadigm.com). She is the visionary behind Buying Facilitation®, the decision facilitation model that enables people to change with integrity. A pioneer who has spoken about, written about, and taught the skills to help buyers buy, she is the author of the acclaimed New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

      Need help developing content, tools, training or questions that will enable a buyer’s buying decision process? A speaker at your next conference? Contact Sharon Drew at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com or visit her website: www.buyingfacilitation.com.

StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Warning Flag Article

Business Performance Assessment Program Warning Flag 7 – Content Without Context

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StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Warning Flag Article“Don’t make a mountain out of a mole hill.”
Author Unknown

Because all things are relative, context is important. All too often, individuals react to a given set of circumstances or facts without considering the context within which those circumstances or facts exist. Consequently, the importance assigned to the circumstances or facts may exceed that which is warranted.[wcm_restrict plans=”47839, 25542, 25653″]

Applying context during a self assessment is extremely important. Without context, a business performance assessment team may inappropriately identify issues and recommend corrective actions that are themselves more costly to implement than the savings to be gained by the issue’s resolution. Similarly, the assessment team itself may spend more money identifying and developing an issue than the value potential presented by implementing the performance improvement.

Business performance assessment team leaders and members asserting the existence of issues and recommending corrective actions without the proper context can cause serious harm to an organization. Such action greatly diminishes the assessment’s value; robbing the organization of opportunities to improve. While not all inclusive, the four lists below, Process-Based Warning Flags, Process Execution Warning Flags – Behaviors, Potential, Observable Results, and Potential Causes, provide insight as to whether assessment findings contain the context necessary to ensure their relevancy. Only after a problem is recognized and its causes identified can the needed actions be taken to move the organization toward improved performance.

Process-Based Warning Flags

  • Assessment procedures exclude participation of local personnel
  • Evaluation processes do not require a findings briefing for managers of the organization being assessed prior to final report issuance
  • Assessment guidelines preclude the use of external assessors
  • Evaluation methods do not include the use of common tools that help provide contextual references such as Pareto Analysis, Performance Models, Process Flowcharts, etcetera
  • Programs gathering, analyzing, and processing internal and external benchmark data are immature or do not exist

Process Execution Warning Flags – Behaviors

  • Assessors ignore the input provided by local personnel
  • Evaluators do not reference outside benchmarks or emphatically reference only their own experience
  • Assessors do not consider unique circumstances that necessarily drive the cited performance
  • Evaluators are closed to considering approaches outside of their experience base
  • Assessors do not consider the interactions between processes, functions, and equipment

Potential, Observable Results

  • Assessed managers and staff become disenfranchised with the self assessment process; participating less and resisting the implementation of all recommended solutions
  • Creativity and innovation is stifled, particularly when such changes upset the status quo (even though overall results may be significantly improved)
  • Distrust builds between individuals and work groups grows because of the assessors apparent lack of openness to new and/or different ideas
  • Cross-functional coordination and support within the organization is weak diminishing the organization’s ability to deliver products, services, and initiatives requiring broad participation
  • Organizational results – operational performance improvements, market share gains, revenue growth, etcetera – lag that of competitors and the economy in general

Potential Causes

  • Common evaluation methods, models, and tools, do not exist, are immature, or not used
  • Assessors are not trained in evaluation processes including the use of analytical models and evaluation tools
  • Assessors have not been trained and/or are not knowledgeable of the interactions between processes, functions, and equipment
  • Organization leaders, managers, and employees do not value external experience
  • Individuals are closed to new and/or different ideas – if it was not invented here, it shouldn’t be done culture
  • Divisions within the organization operate in a highly siloed fashion

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[/wcm_nonmember]Additional Information

StrategyDriven Advisors often find it is within the unique context of a situation that the most valuable insights are gained for the unlocking of substantial performance improvement. As such, we’ve captured practices to better help assessors understand situational context within the following articles:

Return to the Business Performance Assessment Program Forum

About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Honoring Those Whose Sacrifice Gave Us Freedom

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Freedom is never free…

It is the SERVICE MEMBER, not the preacher, who has given us freedom of religion.

It is the SERVICE MEMBER, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to assemble.

It is the SERVICE MEMBER, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the SERVICE MEMBER, not the politician, Who has given us the right to vote.

It is the SERVICE MEMBER who salutes the Flag.

It is the SERVICE MEMBER who serves under the Flag.

Never before have so many owed so much to so few. Let us remember and be thankful to all those men and women who currently serve, who have served, and who made the ultimate sacrifice to secure the freedom we all enjoy.

All the Best,
Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal
Nathan Ives
President and CEO
StrategyDriven