BYOD: Benefits And Drawbacks, Comparison Of The Experiences Between Michelin North America And Rodendin Electric

Introduction

Bring your own devices, also known by BYOD, is a practice that individual employee should bring their personal devices such as smartphones and laptops to work. BYOD becomes a new type of company policy. It is clear to see the reason why - as indicated by ComScore, smartphone usage in the U.S outperformed 80% in 2016 (Bonderud, 2017). More and more corporations allow employees to use smartphones for day-to-day work. BYOD existed in a large percentages in the 300 corporations surveyed in 2015 reports: 35% of associations officially permitted it and 20% did not officially permit it but acknowledged it (McConnell, 2016). This can result in a large amount of benefits such as boosting productivity due to not depending on a particular work locations and time, reducing IT costs and providing employees more flexible time choices. In today's modern world. Although BYOD’s benefits are undeniable, it is always a debatable issue. Those employees opposed to this say that it causes privacy issues. It is also not a surprise that many businesses are taking precautions with the BYOD. The question for debates usually begins with: “Does allowing the use of personal technology equipment for work reduce the ability to control and create security vulnerabilities for businesses?”. UK Fraud Advisory also advise corporation should consider the risks of BYOD seriously (Fraud Advisory Panel, 2014).

Discussions

A. EXTERNAL FACTORS

Political and legal factors

Legal and political components incorporate government mediation on financial activities or a specific industry. Airlines work in a political environment that is extremely directed and confined. Government intercession can be important to secure the customers' advantages and airline tasks' well-being measures (Cederholm, 2014).

Drawbacks

On the negative side, BYOD also has some disadvantages. As employees use a variety of smart phones, compatibility between devices will be a noticeable issue. For example, android and apple systems, android phones are open and have a lot of apps to use. Apple's system is completely closed, relatively few android apps. Companies need to spend more time developing software to support different devices and systems, and to be compatible with multiple systems requires extra money.

In addition, one possible drawback is that companies need to spend more money on other things such as increasing the company's software development costs, increasing costs of necessary centralized application management. For this reason, many corporations provide funds for mobile management tools to control personal devices and their applications. The company also needs to formulate the strategies and policies needed to implement the BYOD plan and implement these policies after the implementation of the plan. In addition, the corporation have to take the risk and responsibility of educating employees for using their equipment in the workplace. It is anticipated an increase in support costs associated with helping employees comply with BYOD policies. Developers will call on administrators to help plan and implement applications on various devices, and administrators must also ensure that implementation does not put enterprise resources at risk. IT departments must also be prepared to cope with the additional burden on corporate infrastructure from personal devices connected to their internal systems.

Lastly, BYOD's protection of privacy rights for companies and individuals can be fragile when they operate remotely. It could be tampered with. The privacy of corporate data is also under threat. Employees will get the data on their devices, and when they are not in the company, they become a potential vulnerability in the company's data, and the privacy of the company's high-value data is threatened. Workers will get the data on their machines, and once they leave the corporate environment, they become a potential vulnerability to corporate data. (Unuth, 2018) Besides that, if poorly managed, people spend time playing other applications, games or browsing the web. Therefore, it can slow down the company's work flow.

(Source: trendmicro.com)

B. CONSIDERATIONS

With the development of science and technology, smart phones are becoming more and more popular in life. We can use it to surf the Internet, get in touch with friends, and do more and more things on mobile phones.

At present, intelligent mobile devices are not only limited to people's convenience and entertainment functions. More and more companies are now starting to use intelligent mobile devices to work, and the use of intelligent mobile devices can make full use of employees' scattered time and improve work efficiency. But the use of intelligent mobile devices also has many shortcomings, such as employees using smart phones for entertainment and data leakage. We will discuss from 3 aspects: personnel, corporation and technology. If companies use intelligent mobile devices to work, what should they pay attention to?

People

If the enterprise adopts the BYOD strategy, because of the diverse functions of mobile intelligent devices, many employees will play games, brush micro-blog and other entertainment functions through mobile phones. Today, the office of smart phones basically takes the place of PC office. At present, there is no effective supervision of mobile intelligent office, which means they evade the management of enterprises. It is no longer under the control of the company. Therefore, with the use of smart mobile devices, if the staff's poor self-restraint may lead to less efficiency, the company should formulate effective rules and regulations to encourage employees to use smartphones to work and cultivate their employees' self-restraint.

With the popularity of BYOD and intelligent mobile devices, more and more company information can be obtained from the office software of the mobile phone such as company's business secrets. All the people are working hard for the company but there is always someone selling the company's confidential content to get extra income. This has led to corporate secrets leakage and even serious consequences. Companies should generally examine employees' personal behavior and set up browsing privileges. Higher level employees can browse more in-depth company information.

Organization

If a company wants to use BYOD to do its work, it is better to conduct a questionnaire survey on the staff first, and to figure out the mobile operating system that employees use like give the same handset and mobile phones. It will not have extra financial burden on employees, but help them facilitate the unified management of the company.

The company carries on the training to the staff to carry on the intelligent mobile equipment office, enhances the company staff to use the intelligent mobile equipment office efficiency and formulate relevant regulations for the use of mobile intelligent equipment office, which results in more effective management and supervision of employees. The Company has set up a special supervision team and a technical processing team for intelligent mobile office to make the intelligent mobile office more standardized, effective and safe.

Technology

Mobile intelligent offices are less likely to infect viruses than computers. But we can see that now intelligent technology is more and more developed, and viruses and malicious code are also increasing on mobile platforms. At the same time, intelligent mobile office equipment is becoming more and more popular. More hackers and company competitors will steal corporate secrets in various ways. The company's technology department should provide special security protection for mobile phones and office software to avoid data theft.

Companies should constantly upgrade and improve mobile intelligent office software. Avoid loopholes in office software. It is easier for employees to use software to improve efficiency. When employees' office software is questioned, professional technicians answer these questions and restrict the installation of non-office software on public phones, which can not only avoid employees' use of smart phone entertainment, but also reduce the risk of working efficiency and virus I. The theft and theft of information.

The company should set up the login password and upgrade the software to grasp the location and browse the data. If suspicious login is found, the login and lock of the phone are rejected immediately. In order to avoid information leakage regularly upgrade the software maintenance, if an employee lost the phone, the company first locked the cell phone, and then as much as possible to find the cell phone. If you can't find a cell phone, the company should erase the contents of the phone in time, avoiding information leakage.

C. BYOD CASE STUDY

BYOD Experience in Michelin North America

Michelin North America had become a successful mobile-first enterprise after implementing BYOD business strategy and made series of key revolutions on built up a new mobile strategy team, used hosting service of Cass Information Systems, consolidated human resource and general ledger systems, etc. (Laudon, 2015)

Following picture clearly illustrated seven processes that Michelin successfully achieved its BYOD strategy with Cass Information System’s support.

(Source: Cass Information System, 2016)

As Michelin had vision with BYOD, it started to build up a new mobile strategy to motivate staffs’ working autonomy and enthusiasm, by performing under the cooperation from HR, legal, IT, Finance and business units departments. It also decided to implement BYOD as a long term strategy. Then Michelin exploited new policies to motive staffs’ working autonomy and enthusiasm, which aims to transit corporate’s mobility business model to personal liable.

Followed by the most important step, Michelin chosen to implement hosting service of Cass Information System, which helped Michelin to register employees, ensured policy acknowledgement and stipend management. Besides, Cass Information System provided scientific management on payments that helped Michelin deliver BYOD stipends and claims directly back to staffs’ device account as credits. Moreover, this strategy also benefited staffs to use of the credits as staffs welfare.

Lastly, Michelin consolidated human resource and general ledger system for further motivating staffs’ mobility to achieve “hands-free” management. (Cass Information Systems, 2016)

By performing BYOD in Michelin, the employees’ satisfaction and engagement had been increased obviously as BYOD provides more flexibility and choices, as well as more staff welfares. Furthermore, their productivity and efficiency had been gradually improved because of the constantly updated technology and more flexible working schedules and locations. (Laudon, 2015)

No BYOD Experience in Rosendin Electric

According to Tom (2014), there are few considerations such as security risks, high cost of IT maintenance, staff’s personal privacy concerns, etc. that lead Rosendin Electric more preferred to use of company-owned devices.

Firstly, regarding about the security risks. Rosendin Electric’s CIO Lamonica does not trust BYOD as it may expose company’s sensitive data when staffs open company’s account through their devices under public WIFI environment or loss of their devices. Secondly, Lamonica believed there will be a huge IT maintenance cost for protecting company’s applications, remoting and controlling the BYO devices, as well as the hosting service fees of BYOD. Thirdly, some extent of staff’s personal privacy will be exposed to company if applying BYOD strategy which may result in more complicated relationship between enterprise and employees, that Lamonica was tried to avoid.

Therefore, Lamonica was more willing to perform company-owned devices strategy to instead of BYOD. Lamonica chosen to wrap Mobilelron software which can provide the detailed information of the devices to IT department to remote, control and manage. It also can remotely wipe the data of lost or stolen devices to protect company’s sensitive information or privacy. Lastly, Rosendin Electric no need to worried about staffs’ personal privacy concerns, but earned volume discount for bulk booking of the company-owned devices. Overall, there are no BYOD environment in Rosendin Electric.

Why did BYOD at Michelin work so well?

To sum up, Michelin had fully confidence with BYOD to achieve its management vision on improving mobility to personal liable. However, Rosendin Electric had much doubts with BYOD that failed to implement BYOD strategy.

In summary, Michelin employees’ engagement, satisfaction, productivity and efficiency had been improved because of the implement of BYOD and the key revaluations. BYOD worked so successful at Michelin as employee demand meet company’s management vision eventually. (Cass Information Systems, 2016)

D. OPINIONS

Despite of concerns about security and privacy issues, we are finding the pros outweigh the cons. In our view, BYOD movement is a solution to reduce company cost for various aspects such as: hardware costs, IT support costs, telecommunication costs and time savings.

Hardware costs

Devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops are expensives. Adopting BYOD in business, cutting cost in corporations has become much easier than before. They can invest in in more profitable projects instead of spending a large amount of money on technologies to stay up-to-date. All the costs such as device purchase and upgrade costs now are paid by their employees. That means BYOD saves hundreds of dollars for corporations annually.

IT Support costs

If employees bring their devices or equipments to work and use their own applications that they are comfortable with, the support and training cost will be no longer necessary and can be eliminated. For example, corporations can save $26 per user in the US and $8 per user across all the countries (Chen, 2014).

Telecommunication costs

By implementing BYOD programs, phone bills and data plans which can easily cost hundreds of dollars now are also paid by employees. Data plan savings are estimated at about $734 per year, per user (Paretsky, 2018).

Time savings

Besides, BYOD has a positive effect on productivity because employees work longer and faster by using their own devices. They can have more flexible work schedule, work at home or anywhere due to BYOD. For instance, BYOD provides an estimated hour per day, which means extra productivity, or an increase of 17% in productivity (Paretsky, 2018).

Conclusion

It is a fact that implementing BYOD policy in corporations is a norm and nothing can change this trend soon. However, it appears that BYOD is an opportunity and a challenge at a same time. BYOD has improved productivity, satisfaction of employees and flexibility of businesses. Despite the fact that there are numerous advantages it can bring to corporations, deciding to participate in BYOD movement should be considered carefully. Corporation’s business sensitive information will be at risk if managers don’t have effective solutions to deal with security issues. There is also a good example of BYOD experiences in Michelin North America that illustrates a good approach for other businesses to follow. While there are issues that may affect business performance, recognizing BYOD risks and adopting BYOD in a right way are what a CEO should notice, which results that BYOD security policy is a must (Lord, 2018).