Big Oil and BYOD as a recruiting strategy
This short article, 'Shell plans to move 135,000 staff to BYOD' about the internal IT strategy at the giant Shell Oil company in about 300 words manages to highlight probably the two most significant trends driving big enterprise IT today.
Trend #1 - The Cloud (and it is kind of past calling this a 'trend' anymore, it's now just reality.
From the Shell piece:
Two years ago, the firm adopted a cloud-first policy, which means that any new applications have to be in the cloud unless there is a business case for them to be on-premise.
Trend #2 - BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) - the tendency of employees wanting to use their device of choice to accomplish their work, rather than being forced into some kind of corporate device standard that often is inferior to the technology they prefer to use in their 'real' lives. Again Shell's take on BYOD:
Shell is undertaking a huge bring your own device (BYOD) project which will see it supporting around 135,000 devices picked by users rather than dictated by the IT department. The BYOD scheme is a major undertaking. Shell has 90,000 permanent employees, and an additional 60,000 on a contract basis so the company is managing 150,000 clients, from desktops to portables to tablets.
Part of the decision for the BYOD drive is around recruitment and staffing. “In about five to 10 years, 50 percent of our staff worldwide will retire,” (Shell's) Mann explained.“We’re going to have a lot of people turning over, and we want to be able to attract and retain talented and young staff. They don’t want to come into a locked corporate environment.
Neither of these decisions by Shell is really all that newsworthy excepting for the fact that these same IT strategies and philosophies were until fairly recently only undertaken by smaller firms and start-ups. When massive, entrenched, and hierarchical industrial titans like Shell start sounding like 15-person tech start-ups, you know that there really is no turning back. Big companies might not hold sway over how a technology achieves popularity in the macro-sense, but their signing on to a given IT approach tends to validate what the market is saying on a smaller scale.
Also, I don't know for sure if the recruiting angle to the BYOD strategy at Shell is really that important or not - while I tend to agree that people don't want to use inferior equipment in the workplace, I don't think that point of view is limited to 'young' people. (Anyone reading this that is doing at least some of their 'work' email in Gmail because their corporate Outlook mailbox keeps going over capacity will be nodding in agreement right now). And while using lousy technology at work does kind of stink, I also think lots of people want to keep their personal technology, well, personal.
Not everyone wants to be reading work email on their iPad when they are chilling on the sofa at night.
Right?
Recruiting, Technology, strategy tagged BYOD, Recruiting, Technology, cloud Email Article 
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Reader Comments (2)
Some interesting points, I think Shells strategy and wish to rollout BYOD likely represents a number of large companies strategy where mobility is being rolled out. However the wish of a company of 150,000 users to support 135,000 BYOD devices is exceedingly unlikely to see that level adoption. Indeed the only way they might achieve this would be to procure the devices for their users, but then by virtue I guess you couldn’t call it BYOD.
Being in charge of this area for my company, both similar in size and field, I can tell you that we currently see around an 11% adoption rate of BYOD as a percentage of total mobility rollout.
So why is that? Well a number of reasons:
For one large corporations for which Shell is certainly one, have legal departments who generally air on the side of caution and as such desire users to sign off on what they see as fairly restrictive T&Cs that scare users away.
The power and adoption of devices largely comes from the vast array of applications that they have available to them. In many cases the pain of users having to procure their own business apps and seek reimbursement for these and for corporate related calls is both unappealing and painful.
Companies already have a large mobilised workforce many of whom are equipped with mobile devices for which the company in many cases owns and more importantly pays for. So the upside of using their own device over one the company buys for them is limited.
There is the potential that many of these corporate mobile users are tied into existing plans that provide corporations with great rates, that unless negotiated and offered to their users as part of the strategy are unlikely to be beaten by what standard consumers can obtain from the high-street. So why do users want to use up their data allowances for company business they get paid for today?
One of the key points of BYOD is that as the acronym suggests the device is 'Your Own' as such (and you touch on this in your blog) do you want your music to stop playing because of a calendar reminder identifying that those colleagues not on leave are now having to prepare for that all important conference call with Houston?
In reality BYOD will be adopted as iOS is today, as Windows Mobile is today, as Android is today, as Blackberry was yesterday. But experience seems to show that if corporations want to see anything like the adoption levels they are talking about they have to get a number of things aligned first, of which some of these are:
Reimbursement models, in house application development, Open but safe Terms and Conditions of adoption, a wide allowance of devices supported, a scalable Mobile Device Management Solution. Cloud and On Prem hybrid solutions, an enabled and established End User support Organisation and a number of other strategic alignments in order to make a dent on projections for BYOD that this blog suggests.
The bottom line:
BYOD is part of a strategy to enable an ever growing mobile and transient workforce, but its only a part (and in my opinion the smaller part). Ultimately you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink. Likewise you can enable a BYOD strategy but you can't force users to adopt. and without adoption you can't communicate with your key workforce so you give them a company device.
I wish them luck and eagerly await their achievements.
Matt - thanks very much for the extensive analysis and observations. I agree, the interesting part of this will be to see how adoption actually goes for Shell and other large companies. It is one thing when employees request BYOD, it is quite another when the company requires it.
Thanks again.