There’s a slideshow on CIOInsight that’s all about the perils and promise of BYOD. For an accountant or asset manager, it’s probably somewhat useful information. For anyone interested in employee productivity, enterprise mobility, and how smartphones and tablets can be used, well….
IT didn’t wake up one morning and think, “Gee, it sure would help the company’s employees if we could let them use their smartphones and tablets to connect to the enterprise applications and data they rely on.” As Gartner has observed, IT responds; it doesn’t initiate. The push for enterprise-to-mobile capabilities came entirely from employees who wanted the same kind of bi-directional, transactional interactivity on their smartphones that they had on their laptops or desktops. It’s a trend that began even before the iPhone changed the perception of what a smartphone could do.
Now, with Android, Apple, BlackBerry, and Windows devices all spreading throughout organizations — from the C-suite to the shipping room — there is, superficially, a BYOD phenomenon. But there’s only a BYOD problem if employees have mobile access to enterprise applications and data and, right now, most don’t.
Though a growing majority of businesses accept that enterprise mobility will be beneficial, they’re still struggling with what kind of mobile access to provide and how to provide it. Once they do provide it to the majority of employees — on those employees’ personal smartphones and tablets — there are legitimate concerns about security, asset tracking, remote access, and the like that are more challenging with BYOD and devices’ heterogeneous operating systems.
Those, however, are second-tier problems. Why? Because, without mobile enterprise access — through traditional standalone apps or through Webalo’s easier, faster, and more economical direct connections to enterprise resources — most employees’ personal devices are just that: personal. They don’t enter the realm of BYOD until they’re devices that can access the enterprise workflows and tasks they rely on to do their jobs. And, if IT can’t provide that access in a timely (and, for the business, affordable) way, employees will find a way to get it on their own, making all the second-tier problems much, much bigger.
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