At the July 10th MobileBeat conference in San Francisco, a panel of experts with IT organization experience reported on the changing demands of the mobile workforce. Key trends reported were that organizations were moving away from requiring corporate-owned smartphones and tablets that are heavily locked down and restricted for business usage. More companies were moving to a Corporate-Owned But Personally Enabled or Bring Your Own Device model.
According to moderator Scott Davis, CTO of End User Computing of VMWare, he sees four categories of enterprise mobile device users:
1. Corporate-owned devices that are tightly managed to only allow business usage and no personal usage;
2. Corporate-owned but Personally Enabled devices purchased by the company but the employee is allowed to use the device for limited personal uses;
3. Bring Your Own Device where the employee owns the device and brings it in to also use for business purposes;
4. Completely unmanaged devices chosen by the employee.
Davis joked that the theory behind BYOD is to “let employees bring devices that makes them feel younger.”
Chris Hazelton, an analyst with 451 Research, said he has found that 35% of companies he has advised allow Corporate Owned but Personally-Enabled Devices, and 69% have Bring Your Own Device policies. 65% allowed corporate email to be placed on the personally-owned devices, and more than a third of the companies allowed corporate data on those personal devices.
Raj Singh, CEO of Tempo AI, an advanced mobile app, highlighted that the concern is safe guarding corporate data. He felt that it is better to provide access to data by employees in a secure way because if an IT group says no, the employee will just do a workaround to use something like a personal Dropbox account to accomplish what he needs. Davis agreed with Singh, noting that these days, employers expect 24/7 availability of employees. Thus, during off hours, the IT department needs to provide access to necessary corporate data to users on personally-owned devices.
Davis noted that users typically have multiple devices: work smartphone, tablet, PC and a second personal phone. Users want to be able to get their work email and work data on all these devices. Davis acknowledged that data leaks need to be prevented, but you don’t want to lock your users down. There is a tradeoff to enable both, he said. Rigid IT policies drive people to do things that are insecure like use a personal Dropbox or Evernote for confidential data. Singh suggested that a better approach may involve an organization buying a small secure cloud on Amazon, Rackspace or a private cloud.
On the mix of devices that are being used by the mobile workforce, Singh reported that 70% of the market is composed of Android devices, while the bulk of the rest is iOS. Hazelton added that since 2008, his company has seen a gradual decline in Blackberry devices, with a slight increase after the release of the BlackBerry Z10 Flow handset. He said 61% of the companies are buying iPhones or iPad devices, 4% are buying Android phones and tablets, and 33% are buying BlackBerry devices.
On operating systems, the panel agreed modern IT departments have to support iOS, Android, perhaps Blackberry 10 and now Windows Phone 8, the latter of which Suzan Pickett, Columbia Sportswear Manager of Systems Engineering, reported is popular in parts of Asia. The panel agreed with Pickett who emphasized that it is easy to get caught up in the hardware, but what’s important is to enable the user to have a device that is effective, productive and helps her do her job.
Singh said that he has tracked ratios between calendar events that are entered on the PC versus entered on a smartphone or tablet. He reported that users are adding more and more events on the smartphone as opposed to using their PC each month. A small number are only using their smart phones to manage their calendars.
Davis highlighted how smartphones have enabled users to have more inputs to enhance their work, such as camera input, speech input and Global Positioning System (GPS) inputs. He gave an example of a county government employee who is out inspecting roads can now take photos of potholes and record an exact GPS location of the pothole. Another example he gave was that while an employee is out in the field performing maintenance, he can use QR scans of a part to obtain the inspection schedule for that particular part from the company’s files back at headquarters.
Hazelton talked about how in the future Internet of Things, business apps will need to take into consideration that devices surrounding the user will self-identify themselves. There will be: (1) data centers that control inventory and apps; (2) users with mobile devices, and (3) sensors.
