Living the vision

Years back I worked for a company which insisted that we not use Dell laptops in the field.  They were an HP reseller and the reasoning was that customers would look at what our engineers had and take that as endorsement of the product.  By extension if we had laptops from a competing server manufacturer it was perceived that we were implicitly endorsing the competitor's product. 

Back then I was responsible for selling that idea that my brand of server was better than my competitor's brand. 


As a VDI/Mobility/End-User Computing (take your pick) architect I often find myself called on to talk about and promote the vision of applications and data being available on any device, any time, any where; a concept we sometimes refer to as "anyness."   It's a vision I believe in, and one I think will be the norm of a not so distant future.  This concept is a basic enabler of BYOD.

A fundamental aspect of this vision is the idea of "any device" which makes the actual device irrelevant.  It does not matter if it's a Galaxy Tab, or a Asus EEE PC, Wyse ThinOS client, or Windows PC.  They all work the same.  At least from the perspective of the delivery of your enterprise apps and data.  Users are free to choose the device, form factor, or environment which best suits their wants and needs.

Today I'm responsible for promoting the idea of anyness across all devices.

I once poked fun at a SE doing a desktop virtualization presentation for spending five minutes at the beginning of a meeting connecting his iPhone to the AV input of the customer's projector and then launching a published PowerPoint session to display his presentation.  I pointed out that I could connect my PC to the projector and be running the presentation in 30 seconds, without the hoops he'd jumped through.  He told me that it was all about the wow factor.  At the time I didn't see his point.  Why would you want to show PowerPoint from an iPhone?

Back a the HP reseller a Dell laptop would have worked as well as my HP did; some would argue that it might have worked better.  But my using it would have given the impression that the competing product was better.  The same reasoning applies to the promotion of an idea like anyness.  My friend's iPhone showed that even his iPhone 3G was capable of accessing his corporate data and apps.  His laptop would have worked but wouldn't have had the same wow factor.

I remember my parents once telling me that alchol was bad; then having wine with their dinner.  Somehow the fact that they drank the wine made a bigger impression than their telling me I shouldn't.

This same do as I say, not as I do reasoning applies to to promoting the anyness concept.  You can tell people that they can can access their apps and data from a Xoom; or you can simply do it and not say a thing about it.  The latter makes a bigger impression. 

This brings us to the subject line of this article.  If your goal is to promote a vision then your most effective tool is to live the vision.  Demos are fine, but they are inherently synthetic.  Connecting to your data from your android, taking regular meeting notes on an iPad, and generally doing your normal job day in and day out from your "any device" really proves the vision works.  To you and to those around you.   Living the vision can be your most powerful tool to promote the vision.