BYOD In Full Bloom But Only In About One Third of Corporations
A new report sheds some interesting perspectives – in fact, provides a useful reality check – on the state of BYOD (bring your own device) initiatives in the enterprise.
“A Practical Guide to a Mobile Strategy: Results from IDC's Mobile Benchmark Study,” released today by International Data Corp. (IDC), indicates that 77% of organizations still rely on “corporate-liable” mobile devices, as opposed to BYOD phones and tablets provided by users. In fact, 70 percent of those devices are entirely paid for by the corporation.
The study also found that:
- Most organizations (73 percent) pay the entire service bill for their employees’ mobile phone use – including voice and data.
- 71 percent pay the entire mobile service plan for corporate-liable tablets, as well.
- 45 percent provide at least some IT help desk support for business applications on individual-liable smartphones, and 42 percent do so for tablets.
- A third of the respondents provide no support for smartphones when the employee is legally liable, and even more – 44 percent – refuse support for individual-liable tablets.
Perhaps the biggest surprise, however, was how many of the respondents expect tablets to become a primary business device – second only to laptops and desktops. The bottom line is that while BYOD may be growing in the workplace, most organizations still prefer to issue mobile devices centrally, and pay the bills directly. What about your organization? Is BYOD the order of the day, or do your users still rely on corporate-owned cell phones and tablets?
This is the trend seen in procurements. The talk about BYOD exceeds the reality.
I fine the 'percentage of companies allow or having BYOD" not very meaningful. If 20 people in a 1,000 or 10,000 person company have BYOD they count. What would be more interesting is how wide spread is it in a company. My guess is that the percentage of companies with someone doing BYOD is large but that the number of people doing it is small. Having said that the trend is that most company will have some BYOD and need to figure out how to deal with it. Plus even their corporate own device will be increasing treated by many employees as if it was their own making the deference between corporate owned and BYOD not very meaningful.
My observation is that most organizations are only talking about the opportunity of bring your own device at this point, and not actively moving forward with implementation plans yet. Based on the amount of active interest I am seeing from current clients and prospective clients though, I do believe we will see a tremendous wave of implementations sooner rather than later.
The power of pull from end users and the consumerization of IT is an unstoppable force and rather than the CIO playing police officer and saying NO, they must get out ahead of this trend and at a minimum create some good policy in preparation for BYOD. To be honest Steve, it is hard to believe that one third of corporations are already in full bloom but I know you are always data driven, so these are exciting statistics indeed.
Having architected, designed and implemented BYOD programs, I know the direct benefits to all stakeholders and look forward to the day this will be the default means of provisioning productivity tools and not the exception. And as these tools change, as they jostle for position based on user preference (not corporate dictate), I do agree that the tablet form factor is here to stay and will move up the stack and assume its rightful position near the top.
BYOD is a significant trend, but its not for everybody. To me, the BYOD numbers are strong. I don't think company owned and paid for mobile devices are going away but rather supplemented. The key, given this hybrid environment, is determining how mobiled devices are deployed, monitored and measured.
--Paul Calento
(note: I work on projects produced by Computerworld and sponsored by RIM)
I think a lot of companies, including my own, have informal policies that for some reason they are reluctant to communicate broadly. To me that suggests they aren't fully embracing this concept, though at the same time accept it as inevitable. Still it would be a good idea to embrace it in more of an actual policy manner.
I have read in several places that companies handing out smart phones and paying the bill is on the decline. And burning through 4G data caps in mere hours adds a whole new dimension to paying centrally. We've written about this extensively at the Enterprise CIO Forum.
Here's a couple of links to some posts about these new dynamics:
http://www.enterprisecioforum.com/en/blogs/dsnow/data-pooling-better-solution-skyrocketin
http://www.enterprisecioforum.com/en/blogs/jdodge/4g-wireless-data-allowances-woefully-ina
Nice article, Steve. It will be interesting to compare these results to the findings in the 2013 version of the Guide.
