With the surge in flexible work schedules and telecommuting in the workplace comes an increase in the use of mobile devices. From smartphones to tablets, the lines of personal and professional property are becoming more and more blurred. In fact, the occurrence of employees brining their personal devices into the workplace for professional use has been named ‘Bring Your Own Device”, BYOD for short (also known as IT consumerization). With this BYOD craze comes many questions, including those around intellectual property and device-related expense and company responsibility.
However we think a recent CNET article raised an interesting, less obvious point about what will happen to the use of traditional PCs within the workplace as BYOD continues to go mainstream. According to a recent global workforce survey conducted by Forrester Research, about 74 percent of information workers have used two or more personal devices for work purposes, and 52 percent had used three or more. Of these devices, 25 percect were mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
Although BYOD is definitely on the rise, there is also evidence that the workforce still prefers to use work-provided devices. In fact, IDC found that only two out of 10 employees want to use their own device for work and personal use. However, this is likely due to the fact that employees don’t want to feel like they have to use their own personal devices within a corporate setting from a financial perspective. In other words, it looks like CNET’s article has answered the question of what will happen to the PC as BYOD becomes more mainstream – as long as BYOD means turning a company expense into a personal one, the workforce will continue to support the use of business PCs.
Do you bring in your own personal devices into the workplace? Does your company have a BYOD program or policy? Does your company offer its employees business tablets? Let us know your thoughts around the growing trend of BYOD here.
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