Director's Blog
Macs in the enterprise

A new report from Forrester Research states that businesses which have traditionally required Windows machines for access to corporate resources are seeing their most productive workers buying Macs with their own money and bringing them into the office.  These “Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives (HEROs)” [Their term.  Ugh.] are people who “find innovative ways to be more productive and serve customers more effectively.”  Forrester, which has long advocated for monoculture in IT, is recognizing that the trend towards consumerization of technology has resulted in executives buying the technology that works for them, and requiring their IT folks to support it.

From the abstract:

Mac users are drinking furniture polish in back hallways, getting their fix from fellow bootleggers who have blazed the trails around IT’s prohibition. End user computing professionals steeped in two decades of Microsoft management traditions are either prohibiting Macs on the company network or limiting their support to executives only. It’s time to repeal prohibition and take decisive action. This document is the first in a collection in which we’ll introduce you to a new class of Mac users, explain why they matter to the business, and share how other firms successfully managing Macs are doing it.

We’ve seen the trend towards Apple hardware in the devices people are using on campus, not only among the faculty but at the director and executive level.  At the same time, many of our campus-level initiatives are being implemented with software which provides little or no support for Macs.  I have been at meetings where campus IT leaders talk about standardizing on an application which only runs under Windows, while every person at the table is using a mobile device from Apple.

Enterprise vendors (Oracle in particular) are very slow to react to changes in technology, so it may be many years before they’ve caught up.  But in some cases, these enterprise vendors are the only ones providing software that meets a specific need, so we may have to select one that doesn’t fit well with our actual population of devices.

I will make two assertions:

1. If we’re considering a vendor who does not have cross-platform support, we need to seriously think about accepting different or lesser functionality from a vendor who does.
2. Web-based products which fail to work cross-platform on modern browsers are broken and should not pass acceptance testing.