Instead of trying to stop BYOD phenomena, companies must focus on helping employees of smartphones and tablets, says market research firm Ovum.
According to the result of the “2013 BYOX – Bring Your Own Anything” survey, tablets are on rise in office. Trying to stand in the path of consumerized mobility is likely to be a damaging and futile exercise. Ovum believes businesses are better served exploiting this behavior to increase employee engagement and productivity and promote the benefits of enterprise mobility.
According to Ovum, the study found that 56.8% of employees are using a personal device as part of their professional activity. Compared to the previous edition of the survey, conducted in 2012, the practice of BYOD among professionals is globally stable for a year. Over a third of employees are using their personal device to do work without informing the IT department. The number of employees using tablets has increased from 28.4% to 44.5% in the last 12 months, suggesting that businesses increasingly see these devices on their networks.
Most employees who own smartphones (67.8%) bring these devices to work, and 15.4% of those numbers do this without the knowledge of IT – and 20.9% do so by challenging the rules of company’s anti-BYOD policy.
The survey also asked employees about the software they use on their mobile devices. The mail and calendar are frequently used applications, both in the terms of personal and professional use. However, other applications are gaining ground and are being used more as workers install them on their devices and not through the IT department. These include corporate social networks (25.6%), file sync and sharing services (22.1%) and instant messaging and VoIP (30.7%).
The thread that runs through all of the data is that IT is not keeping up with the changing demands and behavior patterns of the new mobilized, consumerized workforce. Nowhere is this clearer than in the BYOA data. If employees are sourcing their own applications to do their job, then IT is not delivering the right tools or a good enough user experience for its employees, says the report.
According to research by Gartner, half of the world’s companies will seek from their workers to individually provide devices for work by 2017. The benefits of BYOD include creating new mobile workforce opportunities, increasing employee satisfaction, and reducing or avoiding costs.
