The Financial Impact of Consumerization – Does BYOD make business sense?
March 11, 2013 1 Comment
One of the less understood aspects of Consumerization is its financial impact on the business. Is your BYOD program in the money?
Studies* show that an increasing number of organizations allow their employees to use personal devices to connect to corporate networks and data for work related activities – the so called Bring Your Own Device phenomenon. However, a recent study conducted by Forrester Reserach reveals that only a few companies measure the actual financial impact of this new IT model and that even fewer have a clear sense of whether Consumerization actually makes good business sense.
Employees around the globe are increasingly becoming more mobile as wireless devices and mobile data networks become ubiquitous, simple to use and affordable. The business benefits of extending enterprise data and applications to mobile workers are already apparent. These benefits include higher productivity, higher customer satisfaction and higher talent retention, to name just a few. Many recent studies from Gartner, IDC, Forrester and others point out that almost half of the U.S. workforce is already mobile and away from the primary work location for more than 20% of the time. Typologies of mobile workers may include road warriors, field workers, day extenders – checking email from home before going to the office, business travelers, tele-workers and so on. In fact, it is probably fair to say that every worker is already an occasional mobile worker as the traditional boundaries of the office have blurred into homes, hotels, conference centers, airports, busses, trains, airplanes and many other commercial venues such as coffee shops and malls.
