According to Gartner, the concept of bring your own device (BYOD) is not just a purchasing policy and needs to be approached more broadly with the applications and strategies designed to meet growing communication requirements of the users.
Today, a majority of the organisations want to implement BYOD in their premises but do not have the knowledge to successfully implement the concept. The key decision regarding implementation of BYOD has to be taken on the basis of factors such as applications architecture and solutions design.
Darryl Carlton, research director, Gartner, says, ?Designing applications to meet the demands of BYOD is not the same as setting usage policies or having strategic sourcing plans that mandate a particular platform. Instead, BYOD should be a design principle that provides organisation with a vendor neutral applications portfolio and a flexible future-proof architecture. If the applications exhibit technical constraints that limit choice and deployment, then the purchasing policy is irrelevant.?
Gartner states that majority of the organisations have diverse workforces, comprising of full-time staff, external contracting agencies, independent professionals, and part-time workers. Currently, the community of users has expanded to include suppliers, customers and employees. Industry stakeholders are no longer developing applications to be deployed for the use by exclusive user base over which an organisation can exert standards and control. Therefore, it is becoming clearer that IT teams no longer have absolute control over the tools used to access the corporate systems and data.
Such developments are leading IT companies to look into the techniques and practices of what Gartner calls ?global class? computing an approach to designing systems and architectures that extends computing processes outside the enterprise and into the cultures of the consumer, mobile worker and business partners. The global-class approach uses the characteristics of Internet-enabled computing, and employs applications and services that are more flexible and inclusive, simpler and less-expensive than those designed for enterprise. The only way to address the impact of global class is to mandate it as a principle in the applications strategy.
?BYOD is an indication that internal IT is not providing adequate support for a segment of the user population and they are seeking alternatives elsewhere,? says, Carlton. ?It?s important to recognise that BYOD, bring your own application and cloud adoption are leading indicators of long-term structural change occurring in the industry.?
The research firm points out the user community across businesses are growing to include suppliers and customers, and organisations must make provisions for accommodating these new user classes in their organisational set-up. A large number of customers are going to access online inventory and purchase order systems, taking control of their own interaction with the organisation. These are users over whom the business will have no technical control. Applications within the business now need to support a diverse and demanding community of users both within and outside of the organisation. Different groups of users are becoming increasingly demanding when it comes to the capabilities of their devices and solutions to support them in delivering outcomes for the business. Therefore, the IT organisation cannot set standards or implement solutions that require proprietary controls.
