In the army, standard-issue means your boots and fatigues. For 007, it means a sleek car with tons of gadgets.
What about standard-issue for your workplace? Is it like bootcamp or the British Secret Service?
A few years back, standard-issue used to be a black Dell laptop, a black laptop bag, AD credentials, an email address, a security card and a cubicle. Road warriors would also get a Blackberry.
Note that I didn’t mention data storage.
Seems crazy right? Data is what knowledge workers generate every day, yet the only thing they were issued to store that data was the hard drive on their laptop, or perhaps a NAS home directory. The answer to sharing: email. The answer to data access: the laptop itself.
Even then, there were issues. What happened if you lost your laptop? A disaster. What if you left it at home before a meeting? Scratch that presentation. You ended up with a lot of folks carrying their laptop everywhere they went, increasing the chance of the former in order to try to prevent the latter.
Now, I won’t go into a diatribe about BYOD, but things have changed further. Workers today need to be equipped appropriately for a data-driven world. Data is a weapon, a facilitator, a currency – data needs to be available and accessible in order to be used when needed. Smart businesses (yes, I’m complimenting our customers) have realized that they need to reboot their standard-issue.
Now they hand out a check so you can buy the devices you need. They’re usually more open to you working wherever you need to and “touching down” at the office when necessary. In addition to an email address, you’re asked to create a Twitter handle and LinkedIn account. And you still get the AD credentials and security card.
We would add a cloud drive to that list.
A place where you can create and save your plans, presentations, and forecasts. A place where you can review your work and work that others have shared with you inside or away from the office. A place where you can save your work email attachments. In short, a place that stores all your work data, so you can use it when you need it, and where company IT can protect it and control it.
We don’t sell 007′s DB5 with the ejector seat, but short of that, an Oxygen cloud drive is something that every modern worker needs as standard-issue.
- Leo
@lleung
