Over half of the employers should require employees to supply their own mobile device for work purposes by 2017, according to a Gartner’s Study of CIOs. That’s testimony to the fact that there’s a feverish rush to embrace BYOD, which is clearly for the benefit of employees leading to cost savings, better collaboration, enhanced efficiency, increased accessibility, and better employee satisfaction. Yet, there seems to be a huge mismatch between the promise of BYOD and the actual implementation. Here are some reasons why:
Too many personal devices: Who has control?
Enterprises have a fear brewing: if every employee has a device, how do you control data flow, application access, document access, and the data itself? Agreed that there are tools and applications available to manage BYOD phenomenon but will it work? Aren’t just too many variables now? Even without BYOD, the industry had to grapple with funds embezzlement, theft of proprietary research, and precious client data. What happens with open – albeit controlled – access across multiple devices?
Employee productivity
The thin line between work-life balances is already blurred. There’s one school of thought that employees will work when you manage them with attunement, empathy, and trust. Yet, there’s another school of thought that they won’t. With corporate walls up and functional, we did have problems with employee productivity, hours wasted away on personal work, and lack of efficiency in workflows.
When employees come tugging their personal devices to work, just what is the possibility that “work” gets done? Who oversees work now?
Legal Hassles
Corporates did have legal hassles earlier; BYOD just gives a new stack of work for employers to do, and a fresh new list of legalities, compliance requirements, and tons of work just to accommodate BYOD. It calls for data management policy changes, adjusting privacy adjustments. The list of compliance and legal requirements is – by itself – an endless train of formalities: data and privacy protection acts, Intellectual property rights, Dodd-Frank, government related regulations, and HIPAA – and this is just the beginning.
The leaking Faucet of Trust
If there was once a divide between employers and employees, it looks like BYOD will blow this hole up wider and deeper. According to Tom Kaneshige of CIO, only 3 out of 10 employees trust their employer to keep personal information private. Likewise, employers don’t really trust their employees to keep corporate information confidential.
Will BYOD blow whatever trust exists between employees and employers to smithereens? Will BYOD fight odds and grow to be a mainstream phenomenon? Or will it fickle and vanish forever?
What do you think?
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