World - Bring Your Own Device is Much Ado About Email

Everyone talks about the consumerization of IT and the rise of Bring your own devices (BYOD).  We’ve discussed how iPads in the C-suite are fueling the move to BYOD.

Research firms across the globe, including mine, have surveyed IT leaders over the years on their current or planned acceptance of BYOD. We’ve grown excited as the percentage of IT leaders that say they’ll support BYOD has grown from single digits to upwards of 60% in some surveys. But in truth, we’ve misreported what is going on with BYOD because we didn’t ask the question properly.  We should’ve asked, “What, if anything, are you allowing employee’s to access on their personal devices?

The answer is different than many of us envision when we comment on the use of BYOD.  In most cases, businesses only let employees access email and calendaring on personal devices.  While this is a great first step, the world of enterprise mobility is about more than email and calendar access. Real enterprise mobility strategies are about making business processes and applications portable to numerous devices.  Enterprise mobility is about making workflow faster and more seamless.  For example, healthcare professsionals using mobile devices for data collection at the point of care or field services reps getting updated work orders and rerouting while on the go.

But the reality of where we are at today is that many of the most advanced and useful mobile solutions we have today are in fact paper to glass replacements for slide decks and price books.  These may or may not be accessible for BYOD employees. Also, we are just starting to see firms embrace business to employee mobile app development, regardless of BYOD or corporate liable device use.

If an IT leader says they are supporting BYOD now, I have to ask several follow on questions. Are you offering more than email and calendaring? Are you enabling corporate access via a mobile VPN? If so, what does that experience look like? Does it feel seamless or clunky? Do you have a plan for accessing legacy application data on a mobile device?  Do you really think desktop virtualization on an iPad is the experience your users want? Are you offering BYOD on any platform or just on “iDevices”.  Many firms say they do BYOD but only for certain operating systems and device models.

Upon reviewing the security and management challenges with supporting mobile devices – even just for corporate-owned devices – it’s no surprise that IT managers have been cautious.  Perhaps it’s just too hard to support the ever changing wave of devices.  Not to mention that mobile application development is no small task when you still have at least four rapidly evolving mobile operating systems to contend with.  It’s clear to me now that it was too early for us to claim victory on BYOD.  We’ve been discussing mobility for years –and in some cases deploying rugged handheld devices for years — but we are at the beginning of the changes that mobile will bring in software and processes.  Over the next several months, I’ll be doing research on what apps and services firms are actually mobilizing. I’d love to hear from IT leaders on the joys and sorrows of your endeavors.

Until next time….

Maribel Lopez

Forbes

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