Employee-owned Smartphones: Seize the Opportunity

white paper
Employee-owned Smartphones:
Seize the Opportunity
As more employees desire to use their personal smartphones for work, IT managers must leverage the opportunity, or risk their organizations missing out on an emerging business trend.
Consider this scenario: An employee
is at his son's soccer game, which
has just announced a rain delay. If he
could access his work email on his new
smartphone, he thinks to himself, he
could track those projects he's been
working on. So why won't IT let him
have access to the corporate network?
In increasing numbers, employees are clamoring to use personal smartphones for work-related duties. According to IDC, employee-owned smartphones will represent more than half (56%) of the business smartphones shipped in 2013, for a total of 56.7 million devices going into the hands of individual workers in the next three years.It's no longer feasible for an IT department, regardless of company size, to ignore the smartphone push from the majority of the employee population. IT management must attempt to channel the chaos and determine ways to embrace the personal mobility wave while maintaining effective security and management measures, especially in relation to the corporate network.WHITE PAPER | Employee-owned Smartphones: Seize the Opportunity
corporate-supplied smartphones are balking at the 64% of IT organizations clumsiness of having to lug around two separate devices, one for work and the other for personal interactions.say that maintaining the The fact is, there's no stopping the employee-owned smartphone trend and its overlap with the work environment. appropriate level of security Consulting firm Yankee Group says 54% of employees already use their own mobile devices for business purposes, for mobile devices/mobile whether sanctioned by their organizations or not. IT executives must craft a mobile strategy that incorporates data is their highest priority. employee-owned smartphones and accommodates these source: survey by CIO and Computerworld workers as they embrace extended mobile responsibilities, or the workers will figure out a way to do it for themselves.
This new environment calls for innovative mobile strate- Ownership Rulesgies, new policies, and a fresh approach to allowing smart- There are several good reasons why organizations should phones access to corporate resources. IT management must open up their mobile strategies to incorporate employee-take a leadership role in setting those strategies and policies. owned smartphones.
The Consumerization of IT 1. Control cost. Having employees take over the ex-Until recently, smartphones were something of a corporate pense of their smartphones, both the initial cost of the de-status symbol. Organizations provided them for a small, but vices and their ongoing voice/data contracts, benefits both increasing, percentage of the corporate population, and sides of the equation. By being more efficient and effective supported the voice/data plans of those devices directly at work, an employee can leverage an expense that he or through what was known generally as corporate-liable she would be making anyway. And the employer saves the smartphone policies. significant cost of an ongoing budget commitment to an While expensive, the efficiency gains of mobile access ever-expanding circle of corporate-liable smartphones.to email and company information paid back in months, if not days. In addition, these policies enabled organizations 2. Embrace technology enthusiasm. The second to impose strict limitations and stringent controls. They good reason for organizations to open up their smartphone limited not only who had access to corporate resources, agendas is to capitalize on employees' enthusiasm for the but also how those resources were accessed: what devices technology. That enthusiasm translates into commitment could be used, including which features on those devices that will help make an organization's mobility strategy were enabled and which disabled. IT provided users with a success. secure network connections and controlled the devices us-ing sophisticated management systems. 3. Multiply the benefits of mobility. The benefits However, smartphones have undergone the same that come with a mobile workforce-real-time communica-transformation as other electronic devices, dropping in tion, faster ... [download for more]