By Anne Widjaja
A recent IDC report, ‘Analysing the Bring-Your-Own-Device Trends (BYOD) in Australia’, has concluded that an increasing number of CIOs and IT decision-makers are responding to pressure from executives and employees to support the use of consumer technology in the workplace.
“One in every two organisations are intending to deploy official BYOD policies, be it pilots, or partial- to organisational-wide rollouts, in the next 18 months,” Amy Cheah, market analyst, infrastructure, IDC ANZ, said on the report’s findings.
Cheah explained that this statistic reflects how CIOs are paying close attention to high-profile BYOD case studies, which have heightened the need for BYOD policies in the workplace.
However, this finding is at odds with the fact that a majority of employees don’t want to use their own consumer devices for both work and personal use. IDC’s ‘Next Generation Workspace Ecosystem’ research has found that only two out of 10 employees wish to use consumer technology for work purposes.
IDC believes that BYOD strategies are therefore more likely to involve the introduction of a broader range of devices and operating systems into the corporate network, rather than simply a mass shift to BYOD usage in the office. IDC recommends that this strategy should also be complemented by more frequent upgrades of operating systems (OS) and application processes, considering the shorter lifecycle of many consumer devices.
“While many expect BYOD to help reduce costs, these shorter lifecycles will need to be managed carefully in order to mitigate any blowouts in support, application modernisation, and lost employee productivity,” Cheah said.
IDC also emphasises that BYOD strategies must be fully supported by most of the employees in an organisation. The report found that BYOD policies that were most accommodating of all employees’ preferences turned out to be the most successful.
The IDC report can be accessed here:
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=AU1123707T
