IT Policies: Businesses See Value in BYOD, but are Slow to Revamp Policies

60 percent of workers now use personal computing devices at their workplace, according to a survey by Avanade, a venture company backed by Accenture and Microsoft.  Additionally, half of the respondents say that more than half of their workers use smartphones to do tasks like reading email, checking their calendar, and reading documents.

New technologies, like mobile, are making companies rethink the way that they do business.  According to Avanade:

• 71 percent of companies have changed at least one business process because of mobile capabilities
• 20 percent of companies have changed more than four business processes to take advantage of mobile
• 73 percent of companies say that their sales numbers have been positively affected through the use of mobile collaboration
• Companies that use mobile and consumer technologies are 54 percent more likely to report increased profits

Mick Slattery, Avanade Global Service Lines Executive Vice President, said that “The nature of work and how business gets done is going through a transformation. Consumer technologies in the workplace are a significant catalyst for this transformation.  Executives are capitalizing on the opportunity these technologies offer by adjusting business processes and updating policies with measurable results in areas such as customer service, profitable growth, happier employees and bringing new products and services to market faster.”

Benoit Bertrand, Avanade Canada chief technology officer and vice-president, said that “Mobile and consumer technologies are becoming predominant in the workplace and are driving the transformation of how work and business is done.  Business and IT executives are not only embracing these technologies, they’re enabling them and achieving measurable results including increased employee morale, enabling new product development and driving profitability.”

But there are other indicators that the acceptance of the BYOD policy isn’t moving as quickly as suggested by the Avanade survey.  Another survey, one done by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Dell, found that 70 percent of IT managers think that BYOD can improve processes and productivity, and 59 percent even said that businesses are at a competitive disadvantage if they don’t adopt BYOD.  But despite those sentiments, only 17 percent of companies currently have a BYOD policy and program in place.

David MacDonald, CEO of Softchoice, told CDN magazine that “BYOD is talked about a lot but I have not run into any company that has a full BYOD policy. Cost is an issue, but over time they will figure out how to reduce that premium. What we are going to see is companies adopting from a broad spectrum to accommodate any device.”