Your BYOD Strategy Checklist

Transcription

1 Your BYOD Strategy Checklist A 5-STEP GUIDE TO CREATE A BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE STRATEGY FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION

2 Pieterjan Bouten is an IT entrepreneur and Co-Founder/CEO of Showpad. He holds a Master in Communication Sciences and a Master in International Business. He started his career at Accenture as a CRM consultant after which he joined a technology start-up called Netlog. In 2011 he co-founded Showpad, a mobile sales enablement application aimed at drastically improving sales effectiveness of any company with a sales team. This VC backed start-up raised $2M in March 2013 and opened their New York office in May Showpad is a sales enablement platform turning every tablet into a powerful sales and presentation tool. Showpad is used worldwide by large and small companies to make their sales teams more efficient. Follow Pieterjan on 2

3 What is bring your own device, and what does it mean for your organization? What is BYOD? If you have a tablet, you probably use it to check your business or perform some tasks related to your job. Even if you don t have a personal tablet, smartphone or laptop on your desk, you probably know people who bring their own devices to work. As the number of smartphones and tablets continue to rise, more and more of these devices, even when they are not company-bought, find their way into organizations. Bring your own device (BYOD) means the policy of permitting employees to bring personally owned mobile devices (laptops, tablets, and smart phones) to their workplace, and use those devices to access privileged company information and applications. Source: Wikipedia 1 This bring your own device phenomenon is widely discussed by IT specialists, researchers and media. BYOD is not as evident as it might sound to most consumers. After a long history of having nearly full control over every electronic device employees used at work, the bring your own device trend presents a lot of challenges to employers and their IT departments. The security issue associated with BYOD The most evident problem, which is also most often mentioned by employers, is the security issue. Some consumer devices and applications are not ready to live up to the security standards of IT departments and corporate environments. Others are, but when an organization lacks a centralized strategy to control security on personal devices, there is still a risk of information ending up in the wrong hands, or even exposing the enterprise network to malicious software. The security risk associated with people bringing in their own devices calls for a centralized security strategy 3

4 What does BYOD mean for your organization? An important question to ask is: why do employees take security risks by bringing their own devices to work? Why make life so hard for the IT department? The answer is easy. People are fed up with their professional hardware and software, which is often old fashioned, often slow, often restricted and not exactly user friendly. They ve seen the benefits of easy computing on their own tablet or smartphone and now refuse to settle for anything less. They re even prepared to pay for these devices themselves! 74% of employees in their 20 s bring their own devices to work. 55% view BYOD as a right rather than a privilege. Source: Fortinet, June This should be an important signal for every IT manager, marketing manager, HR manager, and sales director out there. BYOD is here to stay because people want to work with devices that are Easy to work with High performing User friendly With enterprises growing acceptance of bring your own device (BYOD), there is an increase in consumer-owned devices in the computing world. Computing devices bought by consumers will grow from 65 percent in 2013 to 72 percent in This signifies the growing importance of designing for the consumer inside the enterprise. Source: Gartner, June

5 Consumerization as an effect of BYOD Consumerization may very well be the most important and lasting effect of the BYOD trend, when we consider the impact on the enterprise. Consumerization means that employees are more and more expecting business applications to have the same ease of use as the applications they use in a personal setting, such as social media apps. BYOD drives innovation for CIOs and the business by increasing the number of mobile application users in the workforce. Expanding access and driving innovation will ultimately be the legacy of the BYOD phenomenon. Source: Gartner, May Employees are people too: they want to work with easy to use devices and applications both at home and at work. 5 Statements to consider: Employees are bringing their own devices to work. New cloud-based services often are viable, easy-to-use, cheap and efficient alternatives for your enterprise s systems. Consumerization is making your employees increasingly self-sufficient in meeting their IT needs. Valuable business information is being dragged and dropped onto personal smartphones, USB drives, tablets, laptops and cloud services. The IT department s guidelines are no longer the law of the land. Sounds like digital anarchy? It doesn t have to be! Organization simply have to take a new look at how to manage and use IT equipment and services. A good BYOD strategy can really motivate your employees and actually increase efficiency in your organization. 5

6 A 5-step guide to create a BYOD strategy Tablets and other devices that employees bring to work, can really benefit your company if you have a good strategy and a clear mindset about BYOD. Follow this guide on where to start, what to keep in mind and how to implement your Bring Your Own Device strategy. BYOD strategies are the most radical change to the economics and the culture of client computing in business in decades. The benefits of BYOD include creating new mobile workforce opportunities, increasing employee satisfaction, and reducing or avoiding costs. Source: David Willis, vice president at Gartner, Step 1: Consider a Mobile Device Management tool Let s start with a comforting thought: there are great tools out there to help you implement your BYOD strategy. These tools are no out-of-the-box solutions. You have to create your own strategy and policy, but a Mobile Device Management tool or MDM will allow you to execute your strategy, and to secure and control mobile devices used by your employees. Some of things you can do with a Mobile Device Management tool: Lock devices Remote wiping Enforce a password policy Use authentication certificates Detect the device s operating system Control software and hardware components Restrict access to certain applications To learn more about the different MDM vendors, consult the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Device Management. MDM solutions are especially useful for larger organizations. If you work in a smaller company, you might want to skip this step and move directly to step 2. 6

7 Step 2: Create a policy (and define your company) Steer a middle course regarding restrictions: It s possible to impose a lot of restrictions on devices, but do you really want to? Remember that your employees are often bringing their own devices to work, so they won t respond well if you lock them down completely. Try to find a middle ground and only block applications that are dangerous to your network or business. Company owned devices facilitate restrictions: You could also consider purchasing (new) devices for your employees. That ll make it easier to explain the restrictions. Or you can motivate employees to accept a user policy with various incentives, like a phone bill compensation or a list of devices you will partly reimburse. Get management buy-in on policy: Creating this policy is a task for the company s management. Dealing with BYOD in enterprise environments is more than a technical challenge. In fact, your choices will in part define what your company stands for. 10 questions to guide you when building a BYOD policy: 1. What is the company policy on personal mail accounts, applications and websites? 2. Do all employees (and devices) need the same security level and restrictions? 3. Are your employees paying the phone/ data bill or is the company? 4. If the company is paying, do you want to implement restrictions on spending? 5. Which company or business software should be accessible on mobile devices? 6. Do you want to impose hardware and software restrictions inside and/or outside the office? 7. What password policy should be implemented? Remember that it s not as easy to enter a complicated password on a cellphone or tablet. 8. Do you want to implement extra security on company data like or calendars? 9. Do you want to encourage or support your employees to bring their own device or will you buy devices for them? 10. Which devices do you want to support? 7

8 Step 3: Manage expectations, and manage applications Communicate clear guidelines to your employees so they know what s allowed on company and/or personal devices. Make sure to include rules on where employees can store data, including cloud services. If you are restricting access to certain software or hardware, explain why these measurements are required. Keep an eye on the most popular applications among your employees. This can help you track security hazards, or bring your attention to an interesting new software alternative. Try to keep things as open as you can, if your type of business allows it, so you don t end up in the same old IT-dictated environment your employees wanted to get away from in the first place. Approximately one-third of IT managers think BYOD programs position IT as a stronger partner in the business. Source: Intel, Step 4: Update your IT department Provide the IT department with enough resources to execute and support your strategy. The management of a company needs to make decisions on the policy and BYOD strategy, but the IT department is responsible for the implementation. This also includes the support of all these new mobile devices. Consider assigning a responsibility role for BYOD management. Your strategy will not be a project with a predictable time frame, since there are major changes in mobile technology every year. In bigger organizations, you preferably have someone who is on top of the latest developments and continually on the lookout for better ways to execute the strategy, while improving user experience. Empower your IT department to research, execute and support your company s strategy Almost 70 % of employees expect IT to provide them with the right technology. Source: Intel,

9 Step 5: Incorporate BYOD in your company s HR strategy. BYOD is a great opportunity to change your whole company for the better. Your employees are asking for tools to make their work easier and more satisfying. A good BYOD strategy can do so much more than introduce a new IT policy: it can literally change your whole company for the better. Increase employee satisfaction People use their own devices at work because they like them. Your goal should not be cost reduction. The goal of your BYOD strategy should be to increase employee satisfaction and efficiency while meeting your requirements such as data protection and network security. Nearly half of IT managers in the United States feel that BYOD programs improve worker productivity. Source: Intel, Boost motivation Make sure your employees have devices and software they love to use. Forcing employees to work with devices and applications they consider old fashioned or inefficient will demotivate them. Over restricting the use of (personal) laptops, tablets and smartphones will also demotivate your employees. Allowing people to use devices and software that they love, boosts employee satisfaction and motivation. 77% of companies who implement a BYOD strategy did so by Employee Demand (they will bring their own devices anyway), 60% state Employee Satisfaction as the main motivation for a BYOD strategy. Source: HDI,

10 What enterprises can learn from consumer software to delight their employees at work! When employees started bringing their own tablets or smartphones to the office, they also brought in a new set of expectations towards software. Most enterprise software, like planning tools or clients, can suddenly seem too complicated. Consumerization is a trend that goes beyond changing hardware at work. It s changing software too. What should companies, looking to introduce new professional software, learn from consumer software? Skip the clutter to boost efficiency People are fed up with using slow or inefficient software at work. They want the same smooth user experience they are used to using tablets, smartphones, mobile applications, social network sites, etc. Most enterprise software offers endless lists of functions and features, which baffle most users. Enterprise application builders should now focus on offering basic functionality as well as user delight. Focus on basic functionality to reach high adoption rates and increase ROI It s not just users who benefit from clutter-free software. Complex applications are harder to comprehend and to work with, resulting in low adoption rates. Low adoption will, in the end, decrease your return on investment. It s better to focus on getting the basic functionality just right than to add more and more functions and features. Move to the cloud to facilitate mobile working Besides mobile, social and Big Data, the biggest shift in enterprise software is the shift towards the cloud. Consumerization of IT has boosted the rise of online services that are an excellent alternative to the old enterprise software. You often don t need the IT department to approve or install software on your computer. These services are extremely focused on creating the user delight mentioned above. Conclusion: BYOD and consumerization are part of a larger movement that greatly improves professional efficiency. Consumerization is changing the way we work. BYOD is changing the hardware we use and it is starting to change the software we install, or no longer install, on our devices. There is a bigger movement towards making work a lot more efficient and a lot more fun! 10

11 Pleased to meet you! At Showpad we are very focused at usability and ease of use. There are no excess options or functionalities in Showpad. We focus on simply having the best user experience for sales people and administrators. Showpad is easy to set-up, deploy and easy to manage. There are no complicated setup procedures or fees. An exciting change. Consumerization is changing the way we work. It s changing the hardware we use and it is starting to change the software we install, or no longer install, on our devices. At Showpad, we are getting more excited about these changes every day. It s fantastic to get satisfying feedback from our users. And it s very exciting to be part of a bigger movement towards making work a lot more efficient and a lot more fun. Showpad s focus? How you can make tablets work for your sales team. How to make tablets - BYOD or not - useful for your sales team: Give sales reps easy access to up-to-date sales support material on their tablet. Provide offline functionality. Optimize all sales support material (presentations, spreadsheets, videos, pricelists, catalogues, photographs) to be viewable on a tablet. Make sure sales reps can send sales support material to their contacts straight from the tablet. Capture sales reps feedback on sales support material. Use reports on content and users to gain insights in what material isuseful in the field. If you would like to learn more about how Showpad can assist you, or if you would like a free trial, please visit 11

12 Sources: 1 Wikipedia: 2 Fortinet June : Fortinet Global Survey Reveals First Generation BYOD Workers Pose Serious Security Challenges to Corporate IT Systems 3 Gartner Press Release June : Gartner Says Worldwide PC, Tablet and Mobile Phone Shipments to Grow 5.9 Percent in 2013 as Anytime-Anywhere-Computing Drives Buyer Behavior 4, 5 Gartner Press Release May 1, 2013: Gartner Predicts by 2017, Half of Employers will Require Employees to Supply Their Own Device for Work Purposes 6, 7, 8 Intel October 2012: Peer Research Report: Insights on the Current State of BYOD consumerization-enterprise-byod-peer-research-paper.pdf 9 HDI Research March 2012: Bring Your Own Device (BYOD): Hot or Not? 12