In our last post, we spoke about BYOD device choice and trust policies. In this posting, we will discuss some other subjects to consider in your BYOD policy creation.
App Design and Control
Your trust and device management rules will obviously affect your apps strategy for BYOD. Employees will expect internal apps to be supported on all the approved BYOD devices, not only a subset. This means that your organization must commit the resources to testing of your your required enterprise apps.
- Your enterprise mobile apps must match the trust level of personal devices.
- Create different app catalogs, depending on device ownership, due to security reasons.
- Employees need to understand why some devices are supported and others are not: limited resources for app development.
- Employees will think that the company shouldn’t be able to tell them what they can install on their device. They need to understand that “App XYZ is known to access and transmit personal contact lists to unknown third parties. We can’t permit this.”
- Define how you will enforce app violations: notification, access control, selective wipe.
User experience and privacy
BYOD’s goal is employee satisfaction with IT security. These are often conflicting interests. For instance, you will fail if you require complex authentication, lockdown of key features or privacy issues. Open communication is vital for trust with employees.
- Identify what activities and data that IT will monitor. For instance: monitoring of app inventory on personal devices to protect from rogue applications.
- Clear understandings of the actions that IT will take for violations.
- Take care of policies that might hurt acceptance: lockdown policy for apps, browsers, media downloads and cameras.
- Preserve the native device experience
- How will the employee know when his device or actions are out of compliance? What are the consequences? A closed-loop, automated notification process ensures that the employee, who will likely never fully read the user agreement, knows immediately when there is a compliance issue and what actions the company is about to take. BYOD users expect to be given the chance to self-remediate.
Costs
Most companies look at BYOD economics as being based on eliminating the cost of purchasing devices and moving to a fixed monthly payment.
- BYOD drives individual responsibility – full visibility into usage and overages leads to more responsible behavior.
- Deals with wireless operators should still leverage the company relationship to maintain discount structures.
- Employees can be more productive using tools that they prefer.
- Employees using their own devices actually can reduce some helpdesk load, becoming a last resort,while they resolve problems themselves.
- If the company no longer is liable for billing, costs come down as a result
The hidden economics of BYOD center on increasing productivity, managing the cost of complexity, and realizing the value of more responsible employee usage.
Internal Marketing
BYOD is as much an HR project as it is an IT project. Be sure the perception is that BYOD is to allow employees to use their favorite devices at work, NOT that your company wants to shift the cost to the employee! With BYOD, IT has the opportunity to prove itself as progressive and supportive of its employees. But it must be implemented carefully.
These blog postings have been brief summaries to address the subject of BYOD. While many organizations look at BYOD as a possible way to reduce costs, the real value of a well-designed BYOD program is increasing employee satisfaction and productivity, while speeding up the rate of technology adoption in the enterprise. We will be addressing the wireless network in future blog postings, since manageable wireless networks are vital to performance and security of the enterprise. The right wireless infrastructure will allow you to have a clear picture of every wireless device on your network.
