About 38% of companies globally are expected to stop offering devices to their employees by 2016, with ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) trend becoming more commonplace, according to a new report from Gartner.
Gartner Executive Programs’ global survey of CIOs revealed that enterprises that provide only corporate-liable programmes will soon be the exception.
Gartner vice president David Willis said BYOD strategies are the most radical change to the economics and the culture of client computing in business in decades.
"The benefits of BYOD include creating new mobile workforce opportunities, increasing employee satisfaction, and reducing or avoiding costs," Willis said.
BYOD strategy has been an alternative strategy aimed at enabling employees, business partners and other users to deploy a personally selected and purchased client device to execute enterprise applications and access data.
Spanning smartphones and tablets, BYOD would assist in driving innovation for CIOs and the business by boosting mobile application users in the workforce.
However, the research firm suggests the business case for BYOD needs to be better evaluated. "Most leaders do not understand the benefits, and only 22 percent believe they have made a strong business case," Willis said.
"Like other elements of the Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobile, social and information), mobile initiatives are often exploratory and may not have a clearly defined and quantifiable goal, making IT planners uncomfortable.
"If you are offering BYOD, take advantage of the opportunity to show the rest of the organisation the benefits it will bring to them and to the business."
The global adoption of BYOD devices varies widely as firms in the US are twice aiming to allow BYOD as those in Europe, which claimed to have lowest deployment of BYOD of all the regions, while workers in India, China and Brazil would be using a personal devices at work.
According to Gartner, currently, about half of BYOD programmes are aimed at offering partial reimbursement and complete reimbursement for all costs are anticipated to become rare.
The blend of effect of mass market adoption with the steady drop in carrier fees, employers are expected to steadily trim down their subsidies, while as the workers using mobile devices increase, those who receive no subsidy will rise.
"The enterprise should subsidise only the service plan on a smartphone," Willis said.
"What happens if you buy a device for an employee and they leave the job a month later? How are you going to settle up? Better to keep it simple.
"The employee owns the device, and the company helps to cover usage costs."
In addition, BYOD will increase risks and changes outlook for CIOs, while security is major concern for BYOD as they pose severe risk of data leakage on mobile platforms.
About half of organisations rate themselves high in security of corporate data for enterprise-owned mobile devices, reflecting the deployment of more-mature tools and processes that deal with myriad requirements in the security area.
"It is essential that IT specify which platforms will be supported and how; what service levels a user should expect; what the user’s own responsibilities and risks are; who qualifies; and that IT provides guidelines for employees purchasing a personal device for use at work, such as minimum requirements for operating systems." Willis said.
