Is BYOD Right for Me?

With BYOD, there are sometimes more questions than answers. While organizations might have different reasons for adoption—for some it’s financial, for others it’s a desire to increase user productivity or employee satisfaction—no matter the driver, each organization needs to address the same questions: How do I assess my needs?  Is BYOD right for my organization? And, if so, what is the best way to implement BYOD?

Creating a winning BYOD strategy isn’t easy. The fact that it’s still a hot topic several years after becoming a household name speaks to the complexity of this issue.

There are different perspectives on BYOD from different roles within an organization which can make it difficult to establish a clear set of goals for a BYOD initiative. For example:

• Sr. Executives/Finance sees BYOD as an elegant way to tackle rising mobility expenses continuing to grow year over year and become more complex.

• IT views BYOD as a way reducing the numbers of users to support but at the cost of increased risk associated with the number of uncontrolled devices accessing a network, as well as personal resources accessing valuable, highly sensitive information.

• Human Resources is focused on the who/what/where of usage and views BYOD as way to define and enforce a usage policy. They are concerned with policy fairness, and determining if it provides needed enforcement tools and flexibility.

• Employees often react to BYOD in three ways: some are irritated by a BYOD policy that asks them to pay for the device used to do work for their business. Others are happy to reduce the number of mobile devices needed, allowing them to access work and personal activities on a single device of their choice. And then there are the employees who are indifferent and likely already using their own devices to work and don’t see a significant change.

Common BYOD Policy Pitfalls

Since each organization is different, it’s important to understand the dynamics outlined above before establishing a BYOD plan and policy for your organization. Since at first glance many may think that BYOD is a single question (who pays for the device) with a single answer (you do), that’s often not the case. As we said, BYOD is a complex issue, and organizations need to examine various usage scenarios and determine corporate policies reflective of those variances. The fact that BYOD shifts ownership to the employee is no reason to ignore the creation or implementation of a BYOD policy. In fact, failure to address key concerns will lead to policies which:

• Lack sufficient detail in terms of entitlement
  • Specifics on network access, reimbursement, etc.
• Are unfair to certain user groups
  • Some groups may be consuming mobility more frequently than others and are not being fairly compensated.
• Trade one set of problems for another
• Ultimately fail to meet expectations
  • Whether in terms of cost savings or meeting the demands of employees, there’s an over simplification of what really needs to happen to meet these expectations.

BYOD is only a single component of establishing a robust mobility strategy, but the topic is important since most organizations already have BYOD going on without the proper governance. In the next article, we’ll look at how the BYOD topic has raised awareness for many mobility actions inside the organization that may have previously been ignored or unknown, like a sales person emailing a presentation to a prospect or uploading information to a tablet when traveling for convenience, and how to establish an overarching strategy to manage these actions properly.