An examination of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) in the workplace

BYOD and Its Impact on Companies

BYOD is a human resource term that has been questioned because it argues for a significant benefit to the employee without respect for the employer's concerns. Business executives all over the world are suspicious of BYOD's importance to a company's overall success.

The Benefits of BYOD for Companies

Allowing workers to bring mobile devices may provide a lot of benefits for the company, but there are certain drawbacks if there is no careful oversight of what it could translate into if those freedoms are not monitored. This paper would examine the effect of BYOD on companies and how executives should capitalize on their benefits. According to executives, BYODs will help the employees to collaborate ideas for the benefit of the companies they work for. The aspect of freedom brought about by the adoption of BYOD is important to the employees and it further reinforces the fact that employees can do real work using their mobile phones (Susskind, 2014). Essentially, introducing mobile technology at the workplace is a change that is desired by a lot of stakeholders in companies. The employee working experience is improved due to such services as cloud sourcing and applications that enable to collaborate in brainstorming ideas and establishing close relations with the clients. The idea of enterprise mobility is made practical by enhancing BYOD usage in organizations. The employers should have a new perspective where IT is treated as an enabler instead of a gatekeeper hence enhancing the capacity of the employees to innovate better ideas for the enterprise.

Safeguarding the Adoption of BYOD

The operationalizing of the IT strategies with better governance systems is necessary to ensure that there are safeguards in the adoption of BYOD in organizations (Micro, 2012). The end users of the mobile applications in the work environment focus on the trend of the device, hence, the management must institute control to ensure there a sense of responsibility among the employees. Rogue IT department employees have made it a risky undertaking to engage clients using mobile IT tools due to the possible negative consequences (Garlati, 2012). This can be exemplified by a non-profit organization that suffered hacking due to the irresponsibility of their employee using the Drop box without the authorization by the IT department. The organization suffered the hacking because a phone rep gave out important enterprise version of a list of clients without due regard to the rules and regulation necessitating her to authenticate the person making the requests.

Governing BYOD and Maximizing Its Benefits

Personally, I would consider adopting BYOD in a real organization because if there is proper governance all the risks can be reduced and the impact of a breach in the IT regulations identified before there is considerable damage. The benefits of employing BYOD in an organization outweigh the risks and there must be a proper governance structure in the IT departments to ensure that the freedom attached to this change in the work environment is not abused. Conclusively, mobile technology acts as an enabler and continued innovation in this niche of technology will revolutionize the workplace.

References

Susskind, N. G. (2014). Cybersecurity Compliance and Risk Management Strategies: What Directors, Officers, and Managers Need to Know. NYUJL & Bus., 11, 573.

Micro, T. (2012). The Dark Side of BYOD–Privacy, Personal Data Loss and Device Seizure, viewed May 3, 2014.

Garlati, C. (2012). The Dark Side of BYOD–Privacy, Personal Data Loss and Device Seizure. Trend Micro, Tillgänglig:< http://consumerization. trendmicro. com/consumerization-byod-privacy-personal-dataloss-and-device-seizure/>(hämtad 2013-05-22).