BYOD and bring your own phone (BYOP) provides more added value to the employee and company

Mihail Sadeanu, PhD

I.-BYOD and Bring Your Own Phone (BYOP)

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is a new IT consumerization concept, defining the process by which employees bring at company workplaces one or more from the modern personal devices dedicated to mobile computing: netbooks, notebooks, laptops, tablets, smartphones, PDAs, GPS devices, etc.

Bring your own phone (BYOP) represents that part of the BYOD concept related to employee personal phones, simply ones or advanced smartphones including many additional features as: advanced Internet browser-based applications, high-definition camera, FM radio, GPS facility, etc.

Employee bring and use such mobile devices for global connectivity to the company networks (intranet, extranet), professional work and private usage.

The concept sounds well, promising and fashion-trend keeping, but there are coming many new issues, challenges, and trade-offs. Among the most important of them, there are three main complex directions with advantages and challenges brought to: employee, company as organization, and IT governance processes.

II.-What BYOD concept provides to the IT employee work and satisfaction

1.      Freedom to purchase on their own and bring at work appropriate types of such devices with last-minute technical characteristics to fulfill both the company requirements for proper work usage and those for controlled personal utilization.

2.      Independency from company owned IT devices offered for work, giving the feeling of real possession and liberty of moving them from one workplace to another as well as to home.

3.      Simultaneous controlled and tracked usage of and access to the company IT assets (IT infrastructure, IT governance and related organizational process assets - general IT procedures, processes, policies, standards, legislation, IT system and operational procedures for quality management, etc.).

4.      Limitation with full control over employee private activities performed with own devices through company cabled networks or Wi-Fi networks for accessing corporate databases, e-mail accounts, information warehouses and confidential reports, all these having also a great network bandwidth slowdown and company reduced business performance.

III.-How BYOD concept challenges the company IT infrastructure and mobile device management (MDM)

1.      It lowers the company costs associated for full purchasing of such new mobile devices for every employee, although some of them may be purchased in a joint manner by the company and employee (e.g. the company may subsidize acquisition of a tablet or a notebook).

2.      It comes as a new concept addressing the company IT infrastructure mobile devices utilization and management, targeting the IT infrastructure security processes and specific procedures for proper usage of each mobile device brought by the owner.

3.      It requests revision and enhancement of the corporate wide organizational procedures conceived for IT infrastructure global management (IT procurement, delivery and transportation, installation/ implementation, management and reporting, help-desk for mobile devices management and related employee security and control, network administrator’s new challenging activities).

4.      BYOD device management for professional work is a strategy to be aligned and linked to the corporate business mobile device management (MDM). For this purpose the corporate IT infrastructure must be redesigned and prepared for embedding single or multiple MDM platform(s). The MDM platform should be very flexible for dynamic configuration and availability for new cloud MDM services, thus taking the MDM as a service specific to cloud computing concept.

IV.-How BYOD concept adds value to the IT corporate governance and strategic management

1.      It smoothly redefines, leverages and enhances the corporate wide IT asset management directions, including their number and their related activities for monitoring and control the brought mobile devices.

2.      It challenges for redefining new guidance and control quality management procedures for more effective utilization of all corporate wide IT assets, including the BYOD mobile ones, as a higher IT support for the organization management vision and policy to achieve its strategic goals.

3.      It requests new ways for systematic analysis, control and redesign of the company wide IT governance processes and procedures, as a consequence of the above challenge, thus supporting the specific part of the corporate governance in reaching the strategic management objective.

V.-Conclusions

BYOD is a new rolling concept supported by a very fast technological wave. It may offer a higher employee professional efficiency and effectiveness, reduces the IT costs, redesigns the IT governance processes, and provides a new company wide mobile working environment through MDM platforms.

BYOD brings new corporate challenges as: redesigning the IT&C infrastructure and related MDM security (new levels of security, trusting policies, protection procedures), MDM cloud services and related impact over cloud services and specific cloud software applications (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, On-Demand Self-Service - OdsS), designing and implementing new DR/BC plans for MDM platforms, reengineering the IT business processes, estimating the new IT corporate budget, etc.

Bring your own phone (BYOP) comes somewhere on the top of BYOD concept, for which BYOD vendors offer the most versatile range of devices from simple mobile phones to smartphones and tablets integrating many mobile 4G functions for work and private usage. Usually, the OdsS offers to employees the freedom to manage different catalogue-selected cloud services with no intervention from the IT administrators.

BYOD redefines the company full staff employee professional engagement to accomplish the strategic management objectives. Consequently, for this purpose it requests an enhanced alignment of the new corporate IT governance policies to the corporate governance, together with specific strategic processes and new assigned priorities.