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Former Member
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Where does BYOx fit in the priorities for today's IT professionals? Part of the answer to this lies in how important an multichannel (a.k.a. omnichannel) business strategy. Multichannel strategies are a very hot topic as many organizations race to digitialize their relationships and workflows. So this involves mapping, orchestration, analytics, etc. I believe BYOx needs to be one of the pieces to a multichannel strategy where business to employee (B2E) is concerned.

The reason for this is that digital strategies for consumer or B2B by definition are BYOx - there is little to no control over how a consumer or business partner interacts with a brand in the physical or digital world and that reality tends to force a more market-driven approach. But for B2E applications this introduces new thinking. By opening up BYOx for content, cloud, devices, apps, etc.  the rate of innovation can be greatly increased by balancing the tradeoffs between cost, security, ease of use, and control at multiple layers of a solution.

These tradeoffs are at the heart of a multichannel strategy: not all channels are created equal - there will be a wide variance in the value and requirements between channels, and in many cases multiple developers/departments/ecosystem partners will be innovating in parallel. This parallelism puts pressure on IT in that control of B2E oriented multichannel experiences impedes the innovation. So that's where the flexibility of BYOx and the frameworks and governance models will boost the productivity and trust in the multichannel experiences.

So, while BYOx stands for Bring Your Own Anything, it doesn't mean Bring Your Own Anything Any Way You Want To. That's where open platform-based approaches can add tremendous value by providing the connective tissue and insight between the channels while guaranteeing a certain level of performance, security and graceful degradation.   Without a platform approach, implementing BYOx can get very expensive, as platforms (whether they be app development, mobile management & security, etc) define the key control points and criteria for aligning how much trust and expectations are given to each category within BYOx.   For example, if a class of applications is useful but represents a higher than desired cost of use profile, then the way that application is utilized and managed can be modified by a set of rules. Another example is that the power of multichannel can be unleashed by sensing the context around the introduction of BYOx technologies (e.g. licenses) so that behavior can be inherited across channels.

Many organizations are making huge strides in their multichannel/omnichannel presence, particularly towards consumers - isn't it time to make sure that you plan to use BYOx to unlock the innovation of multichannel for your employees?

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