Ask The Experts: When Home Tech Meets Business

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Bringing it all back home

As users possess more devices, and have smart homes, they will have something like a consumer version of EMM to handle their own gadgets. Will enterprise systems need to use these systems (in the usual “consumerisation” approach) to help support remote working staff?

(Director of a startup)

Smart homes – a fascinating topic, both to me personally and as an R&D topic at IBM; we have been working on this with some of our largest clients over the last couple of years.

I’m not sure whether you are suggesting that enterprise could leverage some kind of ‘personal’ or consumer MDM (Mobile Device Management) solution or rather that the growing use of home-automation will warrant consideration by organisations wanting to enable or encourage remote/home working. But as far as some sort of integration between these things and the enterprise… I don’t think it’s likely to happen soon.

Apart from anything else there is nothing approaching a universal standard in home-automation; too many competing niche and open source solutions and too much hacking and personalisation would make it dangerous territory for any organisation.

Employers will be not be keen to ‘hand-off’ management of corporate devices or even employee-owned ones used for business, to a piece of software over which they have no control. To do so would severely damage the security stance that drives most organisations to implement EMM (Enterprise Mobility Management) solutions.

However, quite clearly the accelerating use of home-automation technologies and apps will have an impact on the way devices are used; this may well mean that decisions have to be made on what constitutes acceptable use of a (corporately owned) device in this context and as a result policy or configuration items may have to be amended.

The advent of consumer solutions for device management will also mean that EMM vendors (including IBM) will need to consider the potential conflict between the two and will I think, drive the increasing use of partitioning/containerisation and dual personas on devices – a single device with two carefully separated environments for personal and business use.

But any vendor entering the home-automation market will also need to pay close attention to the impact their software has, and recognise that a personal device used for business (many are and the trend is growing) will most likely be subject to enterprise control and restrictions.

But who knows, perhaps Apple’s announcements at WWDC will change things…

Answer provided by Simon Gale, CTO workplace services UKI IBM. Look out for the fourth part of our advertorial series ‘Ask the Experts’ next Monday!

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