The Empowered Employee: BYOD and BYOD2 for a Web3 World

Bringing our own devices (BYOD) is so yesterday. We are now entering a phase where we store a lifetime of data that we control and “allow” others access to it. Never has this been possible but with the decentralized web, Web3, we can start to realize the power that each of us has, with data.

The decentralized web has been around for a long time. But the tools to use it for everything from finance to supply chain management are just now coming into their own. Also, the data storage environments like Protocol Labs’ Filecoin allow us to not only store our data but also to use our storage capacity for others. An interconnected and trustless world where your information gets aggregated to your needs.

In enterprises, it is critical that they prepare for a BYOD2 (Bring Your Own Data) future. Using personal devices at work changed many things including possible capital expenditures against hardware. But more importantly, it underscored the need to add new layers of security protocols into their systems. Partitioning a device for the business use of a device from the personal side allowed companies and other entities control the business side remotely. They can monitor, wipe, update apps on demand and more. But the separation between the two parts, business and personal, had to be clearly defined so that personal data privacy stays intact.

For BYOD2, the same principals apply. However, there will also be a need to push data to both personal business data vaults. For instance, validated resumes will allow us to store a certificate token in our personal decentralized data vault that validates we worked at Tesla, or Apple, or Mom and Dad’s bake shop. Human Resources will have the capability and if adopted broadly, the requirement to push these tokens to the company data repositories as well as our own. Building into the future requires planning but also iterative execution.

The benefits of a BYOD2 Web3 world become clearer with every use case developed. As I write this Medium article, I amass another piece of my style and knowledge into a single document. Imagine if I had two hundred articles written about many different things. If they are validated on the blockchain as my writing, stored, and I apply a dApp (decentralized app) that uses artificial intelligence to build me a draft of a completely new article, suddenly my productivity with writing is through the roof. It can pull from all the subjects written about and with the click of a button, I have a new article. Bam.

This example does not mean we will do away with writers or news editors. It just means that a lifetime of data access has valuable benefits to the owner. Like a lifetime of experience. For enterprises willing to embrace the empowered BYOD2 employee, the future is exponential in possibilities.