Personal and unmanaged applicaitons (PUAs) are increasingly part of the end user’s productivity tools, and you need to understand the risks and benefits of these applications. PUAs, similar to personal and unmanaged devices (PUDs), are an organizational problem. However, unlike PUDs, PUAs cannot be blocked.

If the Application Manager has a plan for choosing and deploying the appropriate applications for the organization’s risk tolerance, there are real productivity benefits in allowing the use of PUAs. Communicate with the other IT managers to develop a plan for the CIO to present to the organization.

• Remember the five E’s – Educate, Engage, Enable, Extend, Enforce.
• Align PUD and PUA management strategies to provide a single organizational approach.
• Leverage the PUAs to fill productivity gaps in your application portfolio.

PUAs are an organizational problem, but can be used to realize real benefits in end-user productivity. Your role is to provide the guidelines for acceptable use, and build an application ecosystem to protect organizational assets and enable worker productivity.