On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the company, I spoke with Jamf CIO Linh Lam on a recent visit to the UK. The 2020 Bay Area CIO of the Year finalist joined JAMF in 2021 – and thinks Apple will be the top enterprise end point by 2030 as its current momentum accelerates.
The Transformed Landscape of Enterprise IT
“As demand grows and the younger generation is expected to join the workforce, Apple devices will be the number one endpoint by 2030,” he told me.
This is not an external analysis. Inspired by Apple’s own rapidly evolving silicon adoption move, Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa recently predicted that Apple would occupy 10.7% of the PC market in 2026 as Windows shares slip. In the enterprise, where Apple adoption has been particularly rapid, BYOD is accelerating the impact of mobility and the revival trend of flexible and hybrid work.
This rapidly changing technology and management of the cultural landscape has forced CIOs to focus on new challenges. For example, when workers bring their work home with them during an epidemic, they also bring their technology home.
“It’s blended with their home technology,” Lam says. But it wasn’t just workers ’technology or their domestic technology. “I have two kids at home who have been in third and first grade together for almost two years and they have also bought their own technology house,” Lam said.
Delivering the technology was the first challenge, the CIO soon saw a security threat inherent in the distribution beyond the traditional permit control. “So, since all of these devices are connected to our network, how do we make sure they’re not introducing more risk?” Said Lim.
Safety – Balancing productivity
CIOs must strike a good balance between elegant user experience and security, but in doing so they must also understand: , It seems a bit big brother, are they accessing my personal data on my device? ‘ What happens if employees stop using your solution, you lose productivity and security. “
You end up with employees using unauthorized solutions to get things done.
There are lots of safety tools out there, different tools that do different things. The challenge comes when you try to put them together.
“Some of them have different levels of support for different OSes, so to push the policies, you have to push them across different tools to make that end user experience work, and that can be very inconsistent.”
Lim argues that creating a seamless experience is essential for staff empowerment without compromising user experience or the functionality of the device. “This is where you are going to succeed in the place of that employee experience,” he said.
“Technology will enable them to do their job, not make their work difficult for them,” he said.
Eric von Hipel, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, called it a “user innovation” and believed that when businesses work with employees to identify and address the challenges employees face, they should be forced to address them. 6 is done Need on them.
“We are all IT engineers at the end of the day. We’re making things, “Lim said. “It simply came to our notice then. But it is even more exciting to see it used. So, if you roll out solutions, or put safety devices on devices that make them harder to use, or make life harder for your employees or students, they’re not going to use them or find a way to get closer to them. This will be the worst case scenario, because if they start doing this, you will lose visibility and control and security around those connections. “
Remote work is a huge opportunity
Ultimately, employee experience is critical.
Lam is based in California, and notes that a positive outcome from the epidemic is the desire to embrace distant work. Otherwise he would not have been assigned to JAMF, for example.
“Our staff can work from anywhere. The staff has a choice now, right. So, if you make it so hard for them when you’re known as a company that says, ‘Oh, man, all their devices are locked down – you can hardly do your job on those devices.’ People have choices and they can see elsewhere.
[Also read: How Apple improved enterprise deployments at WWDC]
“I feel like, you know, it’s just a muscle to remind yourself, that experience needs to be there because – well, see what’s happening – great resignation, for example.”
The ability to work remotely makes it possible to create teams from a variety of backgrounds. Not only sound education but his alertness and dedication too are most required. McKinsey says there is a link between diversity and business success, so more diverse teams are more likely to experience financial improvement.
The complexity would be logical
“I came from a world where I had to support Windows devices and Macs,” Lam said. “My breakdown was about 40% Mac and the rest was Windows. I was doing Zero Touch deployments with Autopilot and Intune for Windows devices. There was no chance I was going to perform this for Mac and we leveraged Jump to it. And I’ll tell you Jump. The experience of doing this for Mac devices in was almost flawless from start to finish with the installation, there was a little bear on the other side, right?
“With the release of a new OS, everything broke down because users would update and then call my help desk because the apps stopped working and this happened every time an update was sent. But telling people not to update while shipping software is a terrible experience. “
Jamf, of course, provides one-day support for Apple software updates, and Lam and his team use the same technology to maintain their devices. “I know that all of our devices and their apps will continue to work seamlessly when updates are sent.”
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