Current, Planned, and Future States

The mastery behind any long-term vision and execution strategy is timing. More specifically, timing that successfully aligns business goals and vendor product lifecycles. To help reduce some of the guesswork as you build your strategy, think of the market in three states: current, planned, and future (see Figure 6). 

While some IT vendors intend to develop a product that externalizes the control plane and brokers content within a single interface, others will focus current and future product innovation on the user, multiple devices, and a variety of consumption models. Understanding both approaches is critical to success. Moreover, organizations need to take a long-range, strategic view in order to determine the best way to implement new strategies into their current technology and business environments.

The Current State: To date, most organizations have taken a very tactical approach, which can limit the potential benefits of technology. As previously mentioned, VDI is a good example of this. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is also another good example. Both are good solutions for a focused use case, but rarely, if ever, is a company able to implement common access and identity management across both solutions.  Moving forward, there is an opportunity to:

Shift away from a device-centric model in favor of a user-centric one.

Develop and implement a comprehensive device support policy, taking BYOD into consideration.

Prepare new and legacy applications for centralized management and remote delivery.

In the current state, IT is in the position to progress to the planned state of a workplace delivery strategy. Laying the foundation early in the strategy will greatly simplify and accelerate an organization’s success.

The Planned State: The planned state is still in its early stages, with vendors starting to help their customers transition to a viable workplace delivery platform. As we move through the planned state, IT organizations that have not incorporated a long-term strategy and direction will find themselves playing catch up with the market. The planned state is about expansion that will:

Focus on platform investment and long-term strategy.

Prepare for further centralization and adoption of multiple consumption models.

Accelerate the onboarding of end-users.

The Future State: Today many consumers use smartphones, downloading and using applications with minimal training or support. This is a perfect example of ease of use. Ultimately the goal of most, if not all, organizations, is to be able to translate the simple, consumer ease of use of a smartphone to the corporate environment.

While this sounds great in theory, most organizations are light years away from living this scenario. Many organizations still must go through a lengthy approval process just to install an application on a desktop. The future state will: 

Aggregate applications, desktops, self-service, and promote a social enterprise in a common application storefront, for ease of use for end-users.

Deliver applications from the most cost-effective, secure, and productive consumption models.

Improve management, security, and IT policy enforcement while delivering the most productive work environment, enabling IT to identify users, devices, and locations of endpoint devices to apply appropriate policy, security, and requisite control measures.

Allow businesses to openly embrace multiple consumption models based on economics and freedom of choice.