Employers and employees are rarely on common ground, but with BYOD concept floating around, both are keen to implement it – of course for different reasons. While employers can reduce capital expenses to some extent and increase productivity, employees get to work with a device of their choice. Of course, anyone can see that this mutual meeting ground is riddled with security, monitoring and data control problems and hence one needs to tread cautiously before BYOD is allowed to become full-blown.
The complexity that BYOD brings along with it needs to be addressed and will require the efforts of many individuals inside and outside the IT department. To help organizations do that, Tangoe (News - Alert), a global provider of communications lifecycle management services, is offering BYOD advisory services.
“With BYOD there are more questions than answers. Everyone is talking about it but the motivation to adopt this model is unique to every business – for some, it is financial while others may be looking to increase user productivity or employee satisfaction,” said Garrett Long, senior vice president of strategic management at Tangoe.
Tangoe’s team of experts and intellectual property will guide customers through the two phases of implementation: assessment, execution and transition. Tangoe elaborates how and what it evaluates when assessing a company that is migrating to a BYOD model.
The first question that always arises is the money involved, how much capital will be required, will savings offset expenses incurred? So BYOD and the balance sheet always go hand in hand. Besides, everyone in the organization needs to understand in total the implications that BYOD will have on the company culture, in the work environment, and the kind of employee expectations that it’s likely to evoke. Tangoe also emphasizes that employees must be made aware of the devices that are acceptable, the requirements and the ground rules that they would have to abide by.
Once this first hurdle is cleared and all parties agree that BYOD is indeed beneficial, then Tangoe goes ahead and outlines the scope of the project and helps the company make the transition.
Although BYOD appears to be a great concept, a lot of creases need to be ironed out before it officially enters corporate doors. A little caution and a lot of advice are the potions that companies need before embracing the policy in full.
Edited by Ryan Sartor