Most, if not all, students are familiar with the acronym BYOB (Bring Your Own Booze). When attending a social gathering, guests are invited to bring a beverage of their choice for their own consumption. BYOD is a similar concept, which stands for ‘Bring your own device’. In simple terms, this means allowing employees to bring and use their own devices to work.
What are the benefits?
With flex working becoming more and more popular, providing (new) portable devices to employees requires a large investment from companies. This is especially difficult for small to medium enterprises. Allowing employees to use their own devices, saves companies both purchasing and maintenance costs. Research from Cisco (2013) suggests that BYOD can save up to thousands of euros per employee each year. Another benefit would be that since employees are comfortable using their own device, employee satisfaction and productivity will likely increase. It also saves them the effort to carry around multiple devices.
Bring Your Own Disaster?
This concept also brings its fair amount of challenges. As you can imagine, BYOD stretches the capabilities of the IT department of companies, that will now have to manage many different devices. This is especially difficult when it comes to security, as IT would have to put different security systems in order depending on the type of operating system they are dealing with. Next to that, systems must be put in place for situations such as employees leaving the company or personal devices being stolen. This brings legal complications, such as who would be responsible in the case of loss of company data or to what extent the IT department can remotely access the personal device.
What holds the future?
The BYOD market will show significant growth according to recent research by Globenewswire (2016), of which most of the growth will happen between now and 2020. The industry was valued at $30 billion in 2014 and the expected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between now and 2022 is 15 percent (Globenewswire, 2016). In my opinion, these numbers should not be disregarded. Security risks that companies are so afraid of when implementing this concept, can be managed with a proper security plan. There is always a need to be protective of company data regardless of the device being personal or company owned, and it would be unwise to ignore the cost benefits that come with this concept.
What are your thoughts? Please share them with me in the comments!
References
Cisco Blog (2013), Retrieved on October 16th 2017, http://blogs.cisco.com/news/new-analysis-comprehensive-byod-implementation-increases-productivity-decreases-costs
Betanews (2017), Retrieved on October 16th 2017, https://betanews.com/2017/05/12/growth-of-byod-proves-its-no-longer-an-optional-strategy/
Globenewswire (2016) Retrieved on October 16th 2017, https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2016/03/22/822021/0/en/Bring-Your-Own-Device-BYOD-Market-size-worth-USD-366-95-Billion-by-2022-Global-Market-Insights-Inc.html
Hi Beth! Great blog about BYOD, I never realised this could potentially become a big thing in the world. Benefits might seem huge, potentially saving investments in laptops and (smart)phones for employees! However, I think there might be more disadvantages then advantages though… But this is depending on the size of the company.
Imagine working at a small start-up where everyone has to use their own laptop, since there is no money to buy laptops for every new employee. This is totally acceptable, odds are that you are probably working from ‘simple’ programs like Excel and Gmail. Your probably interact with each other through personal communication or online tools (like Google Hangouts, Skype or Slack) which can be used on any device. The company does not really care for data security and people are generally fine with using their own device.
But, imagine working at a medium to big company which uses specialized, or complex ERP software. If everyone would bring their own device, odds are that some problems will arise with different operating systems and programs not being compatible with the device of the employee. Also, as you mentioned in your blog, security problems might arise. With unstandardized devices, a proper security plan is hard to manage, because of all the exceptions. In addition, working at these kind of companies you will often find that there is a separate IT service desk. When everything is standardised, they can use their knowledge of prior problems to fix current problems faster. This is less the case with different operating systems, hardware and software.
I definitely see potential for the BYOD, especially to cut cost for smaller businesses. But, when your business grows and uses more sophisticated software, I would rather think employees to use standardised devices and software. For these companies I see more potential in the BYOB to cut cost.
So when is the next drink?
Source:
https://www.businesszone.co.uk/community-voice/blogs/scott-drayton/the-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-byod
Hi Rick,
Thank you for reading my blog and taking the time to reply. I think you’re right that BYOD becomes more difficult to implement when the operations that need to be performed on said device are more complex. One would first need a clear view of the current environment and draw future requirements from there. Strategies are never really implemented within a day though, so I would say it’s definitely not easy but also not impossible. If you are interested in what such an implementation would look like in more detail, I would like to recommend this blogpost to you: http://www.datacenterjournal.com/byod-tips-successful-implementation/. As for the next drink, I am patiently awaiting the next BIM drink where I hopefully won’t have to BMOB.
In my opinion, “allowing” employees to bring their own device is also “forcing” them to use their private cellphones or laptops for working purposes. In my opinion, my employer should give me the possibilities and facilities to be able to work and I think BYOD will cause a lot of commotion for a lot of employees.
Hi Veerle,
Thank you for reading my blog and taking the time to reply. I think it’s an interesting point you’re raising, and I do agree that ‘forcing’ people to use their private devices is not the way to go. As I mentioned though, not all companies have the necessary budget to facilitate devices to their employees that they can bring home or elsewhere, leading them to only be able to work from their office. As for larger companies, I guess there are options in between where you offer your employees the choice. What I’ve noticed in my surroundings is that employees end up using the devices facilitated by their employer in their personal lives as well, which especially seems the case with mobile phones. But of course I cannot say this holds for all cases.