Baker: Federal CIOs Will Embrace a 'Bring-your-own-device' Strategy in Less Than 2 Years

In less than 2 years, federal agencies will allow workers to use a single, employee-provided mobile device for work with the ability to connect to the network, predicted Veterans Affairs Department Chief Information Officer Roger Baker.

"Vivek was right. It's not going to be that long until we start saying to our employees, 'I don't know what you want to have as a personal device, but here's 500 bucks. Go buy it and that's what you're going to use to access the infrastructure,'" said Baker May 17, while speaking at the ACT-IAC Management of Change Conference in Hot Springs, Va.

The phenomenon, often referred to as consumerization of the enterprise, was first seriously considered in February, when Federal CIO Vivek Kundra revealed he was looking into a move to "employee-owned" mobile devices which could disintermediate centralized IT departments.

...Telling workers "no," often results in the introduction of unapproved mobile devices and unauthorized cloud services anyway, simply because employees want to use tools that help them do their job better, he said. Baker recently said VA is working to give employees access to commercial cloud info sharing sites by the fall.