BYOD: the case for and against

Australian organisations are approaching bring your own device (BYOD) in a variety of ways. Some are adopting BYOD and report benefits from doing so; some reject it outright, feeling it’s not appropriate for their organisation; and many more have not addressed the issue at all.

We assembled a panel of experts to discuss the issue, including:

• Simon Spencer, IT Manager, Master Builders
• Henry Tan, CIO, TransGrid
• Amy Cheah, Senior Market Analyst, IDC Australia
• Adrian Leow, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner

According to the analysts, many employees are bringing their own personal mobile devices into the workplace, but a large proportion of organisations don’t have a policy to manage these devices.

These devices introduce several forms of risk to the company. Data leakage is one - if an employee stores company information on their device, that device may be lost, stolen or compromised by malware or a malicious app, and the data goes with it.

Infection is another risk. If an employee’s device is infected with malware, and they introduce that device onto your company’s Wi-Fi, that malware may be able to make its way onto other machines by way of the network.

Formal BYOD policies and solutions can help mitigate these risks. Such policies can also have positive effects on your business.

Gartner analyst Adrian Leow said: “One of the top benefits of doing BYOD is employee satisfaction. You’re creating a favourable perception of yourself as a CIO or CEO … by allowing employees to use whatever device they want.”

IDC’s Amy Cheah described the case of one school that deployed tablets to all its students. “The biggest result they’ve seen is in the productivity of the students. [The school sees] an increase in participation between teachers and between students. And it helps students access learning tools and learning solutions.”

Of course, BYOD can have different results in different verticals, Cheah said. “If it is deployed properly, with a clear strategy and policies in place, there will be productivity results that they can achieve.”

The case for

TransGrid - the owner, operator and manager of the high-voltage electricity transmission system in NSW - is one Australian organisation that has implemented a formal BYOD policy.

The company began working on its BYOD program a few years ago. TransGrid currently allows between 250 and 300 employees to access the corporate network on their smartphone or tablet, in a limited fashion.

“They can pick up their email, their contacts, all those things,” said TransGrid’s CIO, Henry Tan.

He said that allowing employees to use their own devices increases discretionary effort - the effort an employee puts in above and beyond the bare minimum to do their job.

While TransGrid does not currently allow contractors and guests to jump onto the corporate network with their mobile devices, testing of a system to facilitate this is complete and waiting to be rolled out.

“Right now we have about 200 contractors working here. I have to give them typically a laptop or a desktop. And guess who pays for the device and support?” Tan said.

“If you’re a tradie on a building site, should I give you your tools? No. You bring your own tools. This is what we’re trying to do. What we have now is a network access control point, what we call a ‘self-defending network’, whereby we will allow contractors and guests to connect to our network.

“So if you’re a contractor, you come in, I expect you to have the right level of virus protection. You should have Outlook at the right version, Office, and all the tools that you need to do your work. You bring your laptop, you connect and away you go.”

TransGrid monitors and logs what websites employees in the BYOD program visit on their mobile devices. Interestingly, employees using their own devices in the office, but not on the company Wi-Fi, must still abide by the company’s code of conduct.

Pornographic or offensive material, for example, is forbidden in the office. And while an employee may feel they can view whatever they want because they’re not using the company’s network, viewing offensive material on their device is akin to bringing it into the office in printed format, Tan said, which would not be permitted.

“If you use your tablet to do that, it’s the same. You’re just using a different medium. Even if it’s your own device, and your own 3G service, you still have to abide by the code of conduct,” Tan said.

The company has to consider the potential legal liability of other employees being offended, even if the material in question wasn’t downloaded via the company’s own network.

The case against

Masters Builders, a Queensland building and construction industry association, has consciously rejected BYOD.

Simon Spencer, IT manager at Master Builders, explained that the company looked at BYOD about two and a half years ago. After investigating the trend and specific technology solutions, the company decided against implementing a BYOD program, for a few reasons.

For starters, a BYOD program would require IT staff to support and administer a multitude of different devices. Staff would need to become familiar with the different handsets that employees may bring into the company, learn how to set up multiple applications on different mobile platforms and teach end users how to use different apps on these multiple platforms.

This could have ended up being too much of an extra burden on the busy IT department, Spencer said. The department comprises four staff and covers 120 Master Builders employees spread across 10 sites dotted around Queensland.

The company also felt that budgeting for mobile usage would be simpler if it opted to provide employees with devices, instead of going down the BYOD path. This is partly due to competition in the mobile voice market, which Spencer said “has really driven down the pricing for the unlimited voice plans”.

Master Builders identified which employees needed a mobile phone to do their job - about 50% of staff - and provided them with phones on unlimited voice plans.

“We felt that that allowed us to budget on a capped cost, and we know what our capped cost is - we don’t have to worry about staff using their own devices on their own plans, and submitting all sorts of bills at the end of the month for the voice calls that they used for work purposes,” Spencer said.

On top of that, “We don’t need to put that burden onto our finance department - having to sift through and check all of that and make sure it all seems valid.”

Spencer is also sceptical of the idea that BYOD saves money because it puts the burden of cost on the employee.

“The idea is ‘the staff are paying for it, it’s their device’, but I don’t believe that’s the way it works in the real world,” he said.

If you allow your staff to use a device for work purposes, Spencer said, some may expect the company to take on some responsibility for the device and its costs.

“We could see that it wouldn’t take long for a situation to arise where somebody said, ‘Well my phone was broken during work time and as you’ve given me the capability to work on it, I see that you should take some responsibility for the replacement of my phone’”, Spencer said.

Spencer emphasised that “not all [staff] would behave this way”, but that such a mentality does exist in some pockets of the workforce.

Master Builders has standardised on iOS for its mobile fleet - iPhones and iPads. “We don’t stray from that platform for a number of reasons, and training is one of them.”

“We’ve got a lot of older guys in our industry and within our organisation. These are guys for whom their first smartphone was the phone that we gave them,” Spencer said. “We knew we were going to have a bit of a challenge ahead of us in terms of training these guys in how to use the basics of a smartphone - mail, calendar, contacts. So we thought it’d be easier to work on one platform.”

This standardisation means that if one employee doesn’t know how to use a particular function on their phone, they may be able to ask their mates for help. This is “as opposed to having a myriad of platforms out there where no one can help each other, and everyone comes back to IT”.

Image credit: ©iStockphoto.com/kyoshino