Is BYOD good or bad?

One of the important fall-outs of the so called disruptive technologies like mobility and cloud is the strong under current 'BYOD' (Bring Your Own Device) trend. Why I am saying it as an 'under current' is most of the IT orgs  don't even know that employees are using their own devices for official work. This trend is predominant in the last few years or so particularly after the Apple devices started commanding religious following (iPhone is called 'Jesus Phone' by some people).

If you talk to an IT guy about the BYOD trend he must be fuming, may even say 'it's a man-made disaster unleashed by the Enterprise nemesis  a.k.a Apple'. I hope nobody from the IT org likes this and in that sense these technologies are really 'disruptive'.  So what are the IT people doing about it? In most companies, I think they try their best to control BYOD. I guess they may not be very effective because most of the times this is being started by the top management and strong business leaders in the company.

The business leaders usually start by checking their emails in their personal devices, slowly would try to take more control over the enterprise information by demanding access to business critical information like executive dash boards and metrics that they control. They ask this for a purpose, to have a virtual 24X7 control over the business and in most of the cases IT cannot refuse this request. Once the top executives start this, employees will follow the suit. Social trends like 'work from home' fuelled by the high cost of real estate and overheads support the BYOD movement

Leaving aside why it's happening, let's think about whether it's good or bad. From corporate and information security perspective, it's very bad no doubt. Most of the Wi-Fi networks are not as secured as the LAN or WAN. IT organizations are yet to catch-up and implement best practices in the MDM (Mobile Device Management) and MDP (Mobile Data Protection).  Hence an employee losing the mobile or a disgruntled employee spoofing the data could turn into a disaster for the IT. Our sympathies are with the IT guys.

Other complaint that could emanate from managers  is that people are spending their time unproductively with their own devices. There is some substance in this blame, researches show that smart phones are being used more than 50% for sheer entertainment

Good thing about BYOD is that people have used them innovatively improving their effectiveness and efficiency and have come up with some startling but simple solutions for some of the vexing problems in their day-to-day work. Also many people use it to have a 'virtual' control over what it matters to them while on the move. It's a virtual office for them. To summarize, I could list out the following benefits

• Employee productivity and efficiency

• Innovative solutions (a recruiter gets great candidate through her FB connections or a stock broking agent downloads a free or low priced cheeky app that reduces his work load and provides more bandwidth for understanding  her customers)

• Virtual office and continued control over the business
• For IT service companies it may create a lot of opportunities. Business will need a lot of tiny applications that integrate with the monster, on-premises or cloud enterprise apps and deliver only a fraction of the functionality, a mobile employee may need. So they can bet on mobile app development and maintenance

So it's good or bad???

Whatever it may be, the movement cannot be stopped. Best thing would be to embrace the change and leverage benefits out of it while keeping the people and network under constant monitoring. We will require high tech security technologies to put your wireless network under control. So the industry in general and IT in particular must take the BYOD as an opportunity rather than cursing it as a barrier