Hello
there. It's a wonderful summers day at 30,000 feet and I, as stated by many
friends, am now obliged to write an airplane post. Although I might be expected
to write this by this stage, I assure you, I am still doing this on a solely
voluntary basis, plus, I have nothing better to do! For those of you who were
bored out of your minds with the previous series
of posts, I apologise, but I felt that it might help the next years doing the
competition on their torturous journey, and it was nice to reflect on a year
gone by, but this post, I have decided, will not have been thought through very
well beforehand and will adopt a very decentralised structure.
I
shall be talking about BYOD, “bring your own
device”, is the
"phenomenon", as many IT departments like to call it, where the users
of the network (at school/work/etc.) bring in their own devices from home and
use them for work. In addition, I shall also be discussing my experiences with
being the IT admin at home, and the annoyances that come with it. I plan to
link them in some way I have not thought of yet: maybe a stroke of genius will
occur or this whole post could fall flat on its face, that's the fun!
I
would like to say that my school has an effective BYOD policy in place, and to
be honest, I will. I am lucky enough to go to a school that allows the use of
personal devices within school hours and even lessons, if the teacher allows
it. I am able to, if I wanted, take notes on my iPad and later upload them to
my Mac all within the lesson. It's great! Of course, no one abuses that policy
to play games in the lesson, well, not me anyway: maybe the "lower third
of the year"*. My sister, on the other hand, goes to a school with a, what
I perceive to be, a militant ban on these devices, even during break. Both have
their benefits and shortcomings.
Continuing
with the example of schools, with an effective BYOD policy, much can be
achieved. Students are able to look up extra resource material to aid their
studies and learn how to efficiently and concisely take electronic notes or
conduct quick research. In addition, in a school with limited IT facilities,
students could bring in their own devices and have regular access to some sort
of IT facility, or in a school like mine with ample facilities, teachers would
not have to book an IT room, spend half the lesson walking there and the other
half waiting for the students to log on to computers that should have been
replaced many years ago, waiting for the dreaded Windows 7 "Group policy
printers policy" to clear. I am amazed that Microsoft’s most advanced operating
system still cannot form proper sentances.
On
the other hand, banning this would allow for greater control over network
usage, and for incompetent school IT departments [I note, ours is in my opinion
more competent than the average...] it is useful to have the network standardised rather than being
inundated with a very wide variety of devices. In order to accomplish such a BYOD
deployment in a school, on the technical side, a separate physical network infrastructure
or VLAN (virtual local area network) has to be created in order to separate
different types of traffic, and from what I gleaned from a recent networking
talk, that is not that simple. On the practical side, getting students to
behave was always a problem, and allowing them to bring in their own devices
would only worsen a pre-existing situation. I do believe, however, that schools
should embrace BYOD, especially as it is becoming more and more ubiquitous.
Chances
are, I am missing out a large, glaringly obvious point here, but, as I have
already said, this post is being planned as I go!
The
debate is much more heated in business environments. Employees are slowly
becoming sick and tired of their offices crappy devices, especially
Blackberries! (Sorry, had to include that. Have you seen their recent quarterly earnings report? They are
going to go bust. HA! I told you.)
As a result, they are starting to bring in their own devices, to the dismay of
those hard working IT departments. They are asking to have access to their
cooperate email, contacts, calendar, etc. on these devices, but the IT
overlords deny this request. The funny thing is, the justification they give
for this is the lack of security on these devices, but Google, Microsoft and
Apple have decent exchange server integration with a high level of security and
have all pledged to continue working on this integration, so their argument
slowly sounds more and more like they cannot construct a cross-platform network
or they are a bunch of control freaks, and in all honesty, most IT departments
are. The reason for this might possibly be the fact that they have so much to
worry about! IT is possibly the most vulnerable point of the security of a
company, so if important documents get out through an employee’s iPad, IT get the blame, so
it might be beneficial to be overly secure rather than overly lenient. It's a
balance that has to be sorted out carefully for BYOD to ever work.
So,
now is the time for me to artificially link the problems cooperate IT face with
the problems I face in my day-to-day life. To do so, let me give you an
example. I have noticed that at school, when the Xerox photocopier does not
work while a technically incompetent student is using it, the blame immediately
gets shifted on to our IT department, despite the fact that Xerox photocopiers
tend to be highly annoying machines that hardly ever work correctly or it's
simply the students incompetence, which is most likely the case, like not
hitting the big green button or failing to notice the big "release
documents" option. At home, my technically incompetent family (sorry, but
it is true!), especially my sister, like to print annoyingly useless documents
in full colour. As I like to keep my household up to date, I bought a
wireless printer. How wrong I was to do so. They suck, basically. This means
that whenever my sister wants to print three pages of A4 full of pictures for
her locker, she shouts, "Nicolas, the printer is not working!". It at
this stage I am forced to drop anything I was doing and assist her in something
I have shown her countless times, then notice that the printer has no ink left
due to other previously printed "very important locker pictures",
proceed to order new ink, all while listening to her shouting at how important
these things are and how her Mac sucks for not being able to print these very
important pictures, while I am in the process of scrambling to finish long
overdue homework at 11pm. A typical evening. Please note that this example is
only one out of many, like listening to my dad go on about features Apple
should add to the iPhone: the exact ones that killed Blackberry or Windows
Phone 6.3.
So,
aside from the large amount of technically incorrect things technologically incompetent
people like to say, there is some underlying point here.
What
on earth is my family going to do once I leave home? It will be a disaster!
No,
seriously though, I like to think of myself as a small network IT manage at
home, and it is astounding how 4 people can make you want to crush every single
of their computers with a hammer. I applaud those who have to work in cooperate
and school IT environments. It must be an absolute nightmare. So, to those few
technically incompetent reading this, I say be nice to your IT manager! For
future reference, I define a technically incompetent person as one who is
unable to give a rough definition of Linux or name a Linux distribution. Go on;
try it on your friends!
P.S,
I was recently informed that the school got rid of that Xerox. Halleluiah!
Image Source: Damballa Blog
