How companies respond to BYOD

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), has become a trendy topic in the corporate world. Not unexpectedly, in the recently published Gartner’s annual hype cycle the analysts map BYOD on the very top of the curve of inflated expectations. More interestingly, BYOD is moving quickly into the realms of normal ways of working, and Gartner’s analysts predict that the plateau should be reached within upcoming 2 to 5 years.

I believe that most of you are familiar with the meaning of BYOD, or IT Consumerization, and therefore I will just shortly recap the meaning of the term before delving into a more interesting (at least for me) topic of how corporations are responding to this trend. As the term implies, BYOD means the invasion of private consumer gadgets into the corporate world, where employees can complement (or even supplement) their corporate IT solutions with their own hardware (such as smartphones or tablets) or software (for example, using Dropbox or Google Docs for collaborating with their project team). Overall, BYOD can be seen as a technical manifestation of empowerment of a new generation of employees to work anywhere, anytime and in anyway. Therefore, BYOD is an IT addition to the flexible employment topics such as time-sharing, flexible work schedules, and etc.

As individuals, we all have grown so accustomed to the platforms we use (be it an iPhone or Google Calendars) that we also want to use them in the work setting. We love Google Docs and Evernote and hate SharePoint. We don’t want to carry a bulky corporate laptop but instead be able to reply emails from our 3G enabled smartphones. We think that our iPads and our software enable us to do work faster, cheaper and more conveniently than the solutions provided by corporate IT departments. We want freedom to choose how we get our work done.

However, for the corporations’ CIOs BYOD brings a lot of headaches. There are a lot of troubles and tradeoffs involved in enabling BYOD for employees across the organisation. Data sensitivity and privacy, proliferation of formats, IT architecture changes, hardware and software costs on one side line up against employees comfort, productivity and again costs on the other side. The article below highlight what BYOD means from the corporate perspective, as well as reveals 6 ways that corporations respond to this technological change.

It is a great article that I believe everyone of us should read to understand the impact of the technological change on IT departments. BYOD is a real topic that companies have to start dealing with right now, and I believe most of us will encounter this topic early in our professional careers. Having worked for two multinational companies, I saw two very different practices of adopting BYOD. For example, when I added my corporate email to my smartphone, I was prompted to agree that the company can swipe out all of my data (including private data) in case I type a wrong keyboard password multiple times or if I lose a device. I hesitated for a minute before  pressing “Agree.” Convenience won over privacy.

What about you? Have you experienced what it means to use your own devices in the work setting? What approach did your company adopt towards BYOD

IT Consumerization – When Gadgets Turn Into Enterprise IT Tools