A friend of mine was responsible for creating the BYOD pilot program for a Fortune 10, $50B healthcare company. In the process he learned several important and surprising lessons, which he has kindly passed along in blog form.

One lesson he learned is that the biggest cost in developing a large corporate BYOD policy rollout may not be directly related to technology or devices at all. In many cases, it’s the tab for lawyers and HR staffers to review proposed policies, and to develop the lengthy contracts employees ultimately need to sign to use their personal devices on the corporate network.

Originally Posted by Aaron Goldberg, Tablets at Work Blog

When we start to talk about using tablets in an enterprise, one of the first things that must be understood is that the tablets we all know and love are not industrial-strength designs focused on the needs of a commercial organization.  Rather, these are consumer-first products that have real limitations when it comes to using them for business.  And this isn’t just a hardware discussion, although there are some key hardware differences.

1.  Operating System

The first large difference that has to be addressed is the operating system.  And the operating system is dramatically impacted depending on what the tablet is used for.  Consumer tablets are for browsing, running little apps, games, and generally “light-weight” work. 

To control financial and human resources and reduce costs, most government agencies have standardization policies for desktop environments. Agencies routinely let their employees choose from a number of standard desktop hardware and software configurations.

In both the private and public sector, laptops, tablets and smartphones are well on their way to becoming indispensible productivity tools. As governments move toward the inevitable adoption of mobile end user devices, broadening existing standardization policies can bring many benefits to the mobile environment.

Originally Posted by Joann Pan, Mashable

At the start of the semester, students haul more than books, clothes and furniture to campus. They bring a slew of bandwidth-sucking devices with them.

The largest bandwidth-consuming devices used by students include tablets, smartphones, iPods, gaming consoles and e-readers. On campus, about 41% of students will have three or more devices connected to the Internet at one time. That’s a problem for the 76.4% of institutions looking to reinforce their networks to support more devices.

As college-aged students rely on an expanded arsenal of web-connected gadgets, schools face an unprecedented growth of network bandwidth consumption. Will campuses be ready for incoming data-hungry residents?

With more enterprises developing policies around mobile device usage, the role of the cloud is a hot topic. And why not? Any number of trends, issues and mandates suggest that its role will be significant—as in:

Windows 8 promises to be a departure, in many ways, from the much-loved Windows 7 operating system. There’s wide (though certainly not universal) agreement that consumers will embrace it, for its touch-optimized Metro interface, if nothing else.

There’s much more that’s different in Windows 8, but not every new feature or capability will get pulses racing among enterprise IT professionals. There is, however, more than enough to warrant seriously considering moving your enterprise to Windows 8 sooner rather than later. Here are a few of the most interesting updates:

Despite the accessibility and cost-effectiveness cloud computing offers higher education, most colleges and universities have taken a conservative approach when it comes to actual investments in the cloud.

According to a survey of 496 campus IT leaders by the Campus Computing Project, more than two-thirds of colleges have outsourced student email to cloud providers. And yet, conversion rates for faculty email and other office applications are much lower. What’s more, deployment of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and learning management systems (LMS) to the cloud has not yet exceeded 5%.

Just as tablet sales in the consumer market have skyrocketed, data shows that adoption of tablets in government agencies will continue to increase, creating productivity improvements along the way.

Government technology information resource MeriTalk predicts that seven percent of all federal workers will be using tablets by the end of 2012, and it expects the number to increase to 19 percent by the end of 2013. But unlike the consumer market—where the tablet is primarily used to access movies, games and other entertainment—the key driver of tablet adoption in government agencies is improved employee productivity.

When you get a new laptop or tablet, you want it to start quickly and give you fast access to all the applications you need—and you want your applications to be highly responsive.

The foundation for fast, high-performing mobile devices is an optimized corporate image. This can be created and managed in-house, but the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach is expensive, inefficient and prone to the kind of errors that result in excessive help-desk calls and frustrating productivity losses.

Cloud computing has been a bright spot in a gloomy financial environment, with an increasing number of state and local governments adopting cloud infrastructures to cut IT costs and increase efficiencies. Simultaneously, agencies have seen significant increases in the amount of useful operations and tactical data they are collecting.

But just like chocolate and peanut butter, “Big Data” and the cloud are better together. These two IT trends are about to converge, a marriage that promises to permanently alter the way that agencies collaborate and share data.