The Importance of BYOA


The debate has gone back and forth inside of organizations for the past year in regards to what to do to formulate a proper “Bring Your Own Device” strategy.  What organizations often miss is the fact that mobile workers, already using their own smartphones and tablets, can cause more of a concern regarding the applications they use that are almost always not sanctioned by the organization they work for.  In situations such as these, companies would fare better testing and approving apps used by their employees rather than striking access to the application itself.  Said application was most likely chosen by the employee as it provided an easier way to access information and/or content required by the employee to accomplish their day-to-day tasks.  Stopping them from using that application might cause more harm than good and it sends the message that they are not trusted to think on their own.  To add, the application chosen by the employee might actually be beneficial to the organization and would be a huge miss if further testing was not conducted.

To avoid this issue, IT departments show take into consideration these five steps to would make a concerted effort to empower employees through involvement of how daily tasks are completed.

  1. Identify the business opportunity.  Investigate as to how specified application benefit the company.  Understand from the employee why he or she feels this will make a difference in getting work done.
  2. Initiate the evaluation. Create a group composed of business leaders and employees of said team.  Be sure to take into consideration all needs, desired outcomes and potential barriers.
  3. Test and evaluate.  Have said group run through scenarios as to application utilization.  Have the employee who submitted the application for review on point to relay any tips or tricks.
  4. Implement the solution. After all testing has been completed.  Ensure findings are agreed to by the business leader who participated in the evaluation.  With their support, plan and deploy the implementation.
  5. Evaluate the outcome.  Showcase the uplift of utilizing the approved application for use against the old methodology previously used.  Be sure to recognize the employee who brought said application to your attention amidst the organization.

Bring your own application is a trend we will see more of in 2013.  Who better than employees who constantly view how daily tasks are carried out to provide suggestions as to applications that could better server the company.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s