Leaving office workers to their own devices

THERE'S a new kid on the BYO (Bring Your Own) block, and it's proving to be far more potent than the booze or food usually associated with that acronym. Increasingly, organisations are having to face up to the reality that a growing number of employees want to use their own IT devices at work.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is the buzzword du jour, but by all accounts it is a trend, not a fad. And CEOs and their IT administrators are just going to have to deal with it.

The good news is that there is a strong upside to the phenomenon. According to a recent survey by Accenture, reported in this newspaper, two-thirds of Singapore workers surveyed said that being allowed to bring their own devices raised their job satisfaction significantly. Among the reasons they gave were increased flexibility and freedom.

This supports the findings of a broader study commissioned last year by US tech firm Citrix. The survey in seven markets across the globe found that the majority of organisations polled were looking to implement their own BYOD policy.

Significantly, the respondents cited factors like attracting and retaining the best talent, higher worker productivity, greater employee mobility, job satisfaction and lower IT costs as the primary drivers for BYOD adoption.

However, wouldn't such a liberal - some would say, anarchic - policy compromise the security of the organisation's computer and communications systems and the data they handle? The concern is a legitimate one, and it would have to be addressed satisfactorily in any BYOD policy.

But to do that we first need to take a step back and consider the reality of the situation. BYOD has in fact been with us, albeit mostly unsanctioned, ever since the personal computer, and then the Internet, became part of the office environment.

Floppy disks, thumb drives, Web mail - all these and more have enabled the downloading of office data; and, tellingly, not for nefarious reasons in the vast majority of instances, but because people wanted or needed to continue working after leaving the office.

Today, that blurring of office and personal access is vastly accentuated by the explosion of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs. Rather than waste valuable time and resources trying to stem the inexorable BYOD tide, wouldn't it make more sense to go with the flow?

Most organisations are already doing that, eagerly aided by a growing army of IT firms offering solutions that allow the freedom of access demanded by today's knowledge workers while protecting the integrity of the organisation's data and systems.

Indeed, experts say that technology is only 20 per cent of the challenge; non-tech factors such as governance, defining levels of access and human resource issues make up the remaining 80 per cent. Collaboration across departments is crucial. But it's well worth the effort because the payoff is so high.