There are two overwhelming conclusions from the study. The first is that the rising tide of consumerization can no more be stopped by the IT department than the rising tide could be stopped by Canute. “Trying to stand in the path of consumerized mobility is likely to be a damaging and futile exercise,” says Richard Absalom, consumer impact technology analyst at Ovum. “We believe businesses are better served by exploiting this behavior to increase employee engagement and productivity, and promote the benefits of enterprise mobility.”
The problem is that staff will use their personal devices regardless of the CIO’s attitude. The Ovum study shows that 67.8% of smartphone-owning employees bring their own smartphone to work, and 15.4% of these do so without the IT department’s knowledge and 20.9% do so in spite of an anti-BYOD policy. Since personal tablet ownership by employees has risen from 28.4% to 44.5% over the last 12 months, Ovum expects the use of personal tablets within the company to similarly increase. The IT department should harness this energy rather than attempt to stop it.
But the second conclusion from the study is that this just isn’t happening – at least, it is not happening adequately. Ovum’s research highlights the rise of Bring Your Own App (BYOA – sometimes also described as Bring Your Own Service) within BYOD. While email and calendar are the two most frequently corporate-provisioned apps for mobiles, staff are increasingly sourcing their own apps to increase their productivity and efficiency. More than a quarter of employees have discovered their own enterprise social networking apps, 22.1% discovered their own file sync and share apps, and 30.7% of employees have selected their own IM/VoIP apps.
This is the challenge for IT: since BYOD can be neither stopped nor controlled, it should be harnessed. Keep up – even better, get ahead – or lose control; and at the moment, IT isn’t keeping up. “The new challenge for CIOs,” comments Absalom, “is to strike the balance between meeting the needs and requirements of the consumerized employee in order to avoid driving behaviors out of the line of sight and control of IT, while at the same time keeping corporate data secure and driving productivity.” But the data suggest that for the moment at least, IT is failing in this. “The thread that runs through all of the data is that IT is not keeping up with the changing demands and behavior patterns of the new mobilized, consumerized workforce. Nowhere is this clearer than in the BYOA data. If employees are sourcing their own applications to do their job, then IT is not delivering the right tools or a good enough user experience for its employees,” he concludes.
Ironically, it is the fear of losing control through loss of security, that makes CIOs reluctant to harness BYOD. Nigel Hawthorn, EMEA marketing director at MobileIron thinks this should no longer be an issue if handled correctly: security and mobility are not mutually exclusive, and there is no longer any reason for IT to hinder BYOD.
There is, however, one potential conclusion from the rise of BYOD that Ovum doesn’t accept: that a side effect of the rise of tablets is the inevitable decline of the PC – with some analysts even suggesting that BYOD has sounded the PC’s death-knell. Ovum is not so sure. “I think BYOD has lengthened the PC replacement cycle,” Ovum practice leader and senior consultant Adrian Drury told Infosecurity. He believes that the combination of economic straits, staff willingness to use their own devices, and a new Microsoft operating system that no-one is quite sure about is simply making the enterprise delay new PC replacements.
Nigel Hawthorn agrees that the PC isn’t finished, suggesting that it should be horses for courses. A tablet is ideal for receiving the latest data, but not so good for creating text. “If I have a series of meetings in a variety of locations, then I’ll create a supporting PDF on my PC – but I’ll use my tablet to show people.”