Bevil Wood­ing

Busi­ness­es around the world are in­creas­ing­ly al­low­ing more em­ploy­ee de­vices in the work­place. A re­cent Ovum study has found that the bring your own de­vice (BY­OD) trend is ac­cel­er­at­ing at a faster rate in emerg­ing mar­kets. Some see BY­OD as a dis­rup­tive change, dri­ven by em­ploy­ee en­thu­si­asm for new gad­gets and tech­nolo­gies. How­ev­er, with the de­mand for mo­bile com­put­ing de­vices such as tablets and smart­phones on­ly ex­pect­ed to grow, this is not like­ly a pass­ing fad. Com­pa­nies will do well to have a clear strat­e­gy to chan­nel em­ploy­ee pref­er­ences in­to cor­po­rate ben­e­fits.

The com­ing BY­OD wave

The US-based Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics As­so­ci­a­tion es­ti­mates that more than 75 per cent of gift-giv­ing adults plan to pur­chase con­sumer elec­tron­ic prod­ucts as gifts this year. They fur­ther pre­dict that dur­ing Christ­mas alone some 32 mil­lion tablets will be sold in the US, up more than 110 per cent from last year. Most of this gift-giv­ing cheer will flood en­ter­pris­es in ear­ly Jan­u­ary chal­leng­ing cor­po­rate IT de­part­ments with se­cu­ri­ty and in­te­gra­tion re­spon­si­bil­i­ties.

For de­ci­sion mak­ers in small to large firms the ques­tions should be the same: Is my or­gan­i­sa­tion ready for the on­slaught?

Have a plan

Key to cor­po­rate BY­OD readi­ness is de­vel­op­ment of cor­po­rate poli­cies that spell out rules re­gard­ing use of per­son­al de­vices. BY­OD poli­cies should de­tail, for ex­am­ple, how per­son­al de­vices ac­cess cor­po­rate re­sources; se­cu­ri­ty re­quire­ments and pro­ce­dures; and per­son­al rights and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, a Net­work World sur­vey ear­li­er this year found that on­ly 16 per cent of the par­tic­i­pants said they have BY­OD poli­cies in place. Ac­cord­ing to Net­work World, if on­ly 16 per cent have tak­en this ba­sic step, we can as­sume com­pa­nies:

1) are hop­ing against hope em­ploy­ees will heed the cor­po­rate ban against us­ing per­son­al de­vices for any­thing work re­lat­ed

2) have faith that the se­cu­ri­ty con­trols they have in place can pre­vent said use

3) don't per­ceive it as much of a threat

4) don't have a grasp of the mag­ni­tude of the prob­lem or the risk, or

5) a mix of 1-4

I would be the first to say that faith and hope have a place in life, but so does wis­dom and strat­e­gy. The same ap­plies to busi­ness. For busi­ness­es to de­rive the ben­e­fits of BY­OD phe­nom­e­non, they should have a struc­tured, strate­gic ap­proach man­ag­ing per­son­al de­vices in the work­place.

Or­gan­i­sa­tions in emerg­ing mar­kets in par­tic­u­lar should take steps to lever­age em­ploy­ee owned de­vices and pro­tect cor­po­rate net­works and in­for­ma­tion sys­tems.

The Ovum study con­firms that BY­OD is gain­ing ground in emerg­ing; high-growth mar­kets. Ac­cord­ing to the study of 3,796 con­sumers in 17 dif­fer­ent coun­tries, em­ploy­ees in high-growth mar­kets see BY­OD as way to get ahead in their ca­reers, with 79 per cent be­liev­ing that con­stant con­nec­tiv­i­ty to work ap­pli­ca­tions en­ables them to do their jobs bet­ter, com­pared with 53.5 per cent in ma­ture mar­kets. In all 17 mar­kets, 57.1 per cent of full-time em­ploy­ees said they en­gage in some form of BY­OD.

Man­ag­ing mo­bil­i­ty

The sur­vey al­so in­di­cat­ed most BY­OD ac­tiv­i­ty is go­ing on un­man­aged. This sug­gests that cor­po­rate IT has work to do to im­prove their mon­i­tor­ing and se­cu­ri­ty ca­pa­bil­i­ties, es­pe­cial­ly when it comes to mo­bile man­age­ment.

Of those re­spon­dents who bring their own de­vices to work, 17.7 per cent claim that their em­ploy­ers' IT de­part­ments do not know. A fur­ther 28.4 per cent of re­spon­dents said their IT de­part­ments ac­tive­ly ig­nore it is hap­pen­ing. There is a bet­ter op­tion to the head-in-the-sand ap­proach. The BY­OD trend has giv­en rise to a cat­e­go­ry of soft­ware called Mo­bile De­vice Man­age­ment (MDM).

MDM lets com­pa­nies track, se­cure, re­mote wipe, up­date, and oth­er­wise man­age mo­bile de­vices, across all op­er­at­ing sys­tems, in­clud­ing Win­dows, Macs/iOS, An­droid, and Black­Ber­ry. While most or­gan­i­sa­tions recog­nise the need for MDM in world where em­ploy­ee owned de­vices are pro­lif­er­at­ing, many have not yet de­ployed it.

This rep­re­sents a tremen­dous op­por­tu­ni­ty for com­pa­nies that of­fer MDM soft­ware, in­clud­ing Good Tech­nol­o­gy, SAP/Sybase, IBM, Box­Tone, and many oth­ers. It al­so rep­re­sents an op­por­tu­ni­ty for soft­ware de­vel­op­ment firms in emerg­ing mar­kets to en­ter a prof­itable new glob­al niche.

Move with the times

Em­ploy­ee owned de­vices in the work­place are hard­ly new, but it is the sheer vol­ume of them owned by em­ploy­ees, en­ter­ing the en­ter­prise that is chang­ing every­thing. A few years ago, cor­po­rate IT man­agers would have balked at the no­tion of let­ting em­ploy­ees bring a va­ri­ety of de­vices to work. But IT de­part­ments can no longer pro­tect da­ta or net­works by own­ing every de­vice em­ploy­ees use.

Em­ploy­ees will be in­creas­ing­ly work­ing on their own lap­tops and ac­cess­ing cor­po­rate re­sources on their own phones and tablets, whether IT likes it or not. In fact, the key to un­der­stand­ing and em­brac­ing BY­OD is to recog­nise the val­ue and op­por­tu­ni­ty it pro­vides to keep em­ploy­ees en­gaged and con­nect­ed. Lever­aged strate­gi­cal­ly, BY­OD can bring re­al ben­e­fits to em­ploy­ee sat­is­fac­tion and cor­po­rate pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

Of course, this can be prof­itable to both em­ploy­ees and to the busi­ness bot­tom line.

Bevil Wood­ing is an In­ter­net strate­gist with the US-based re­search firm, Pack­et Clear­ing House and the Chief Knowl­edge Of­fi­cer at Con­gress WBN, an in­ter­na­tion­al non-prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tion.

Fol­low on Twit­ter: @bevil­wood­ing and Face­book: face­book.com/bevil­wood­ing or email tech­nol­o­gy­mat­ters@bright­path­foun­da­tion.org