Today leaders have dealt with some of the key service values that customers and employees have risen up regarding their perspectives of wireless access.
Leaders, caught in between these two stakeholder groups, vacillate between the customer demand for wireless alternatives to gain access to products and services while employees who want wireless access to gain productivity enhancements. In the latter case, to meet employees’ perceptions, organizations defined a mobile policy that outlined entitlements, device selections and preferred supplier rate plans. This plan is generally managed by small disparate internal teams who cull together in an effort to develop best practices. Many strides were made to mature best practices to control this pattern of business activity by standardizing the variable devices, rates and plan choices.
Employees continue to have a strong desire to determine the selection criteria for mobile devices which has led IT to relinquish a B.Y.O.D. program – Bring Your Own Device.
This program has been quickly hailed as part of IT’s value to embark on the “consumerization” of IT. Basically, employees can bring their personal computing devices, predominately smartphones, to the workplace and have the device connected to the corporate network.
Yet, leaders have not evaluated the many risks associated with B.Y.O.D. programs. To create new best practices leaders must assess their current approaches and mitigate the implications to corporate policy, service delivery capabilities and supplier management.
While corporate leaders face challenges in gaining consensus on a mobile policy and a governance model to ensure strategic alignment, they have inadvertently added more complexities that lead to increased risks. Some observations on risks include clarifying:
- What mobile ownership option will employees be required to subscribe, personal or corporate liability
- What types of devices will be authorized and who determines who is entitled to gain access to the B.Y.O.D. program
- What needs to be done to maintain legal and regulatory compliance for retention related functions such as, legal hold notifications, clinical trial data and other types of corporate information
- What is the security control when a device is lost or stolen and the wipe feature is used to erase personal information
Service delivery organizations may see B.Y.O.D. as a function of a few team members across several functional groups that can be marshaled quickly to execute a mobile deployment. IT leaders should consider how B.Y.O.D. fits into the service portfolio and address the service management of B.Y.O.D. that include:
- What is the architecture platform to be designed to align the organization’s policy and the it’s expected business outcomes
- What applications will be required to be customized to enable mobile CRM, ERP or productivity tools
- What are the mobile OS criteria to determine between iOS or Android
- What is the investment required to support the wireless infrastructure
- What is the organizational structure required to support a mobile service delivery model
Sourcing and procurement management leaders need to determine the implications of the service value and the provisioning requirements to manage B.Y.O.D.
- What is the supplier capability required to provision a reliable service with a level of assurance to meet the geographic, security, availability and compliance need of the organization.
- What Service Level Agreements can be used to ensure contract management and performance expectations for the offered service.
- What are the best practices for expense and audit controls of wireless cost management to drive budget transparency. In many cases, wireless expenses outpace traditional voice and data expenses. This expense is usually part of individual departments T&E budgets. These expenses go unnoticed at the aggregate level and are not evaluated as part of the IT cost index.
Lastly, leaders need to determine if the B.Y.O.D. program is too internally focused on the employee needs and does not support the strategic objectives of the organization.
Leaders should be careful not to tout B.Y.O.D. as an employee productivity enhancement that may provide intangible benefits that is weighed down by new business risks that invariably lead to increased operating efforts.
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Peter Tarhanidis 