Category: BYOD

Kenny Sahr

Do you want to be able to predict the future of BYOD? All you need is a mirror and a few friends who own mobile devices!

BYOD – a Consumer Revolution

For starters, BYOD is a consumer revolution. It begins with you. IT and enterprise management would never have invented a scheme in which consumers bring their personal devices into the office and use them for work. You can take that to the bank!

BYOD is all about you – what you buy, why you buy it and which devices you choose to bring to work.

Smartphone, Tablet or Laptop?

Even if you own a smartphone, tablet and laptop, BYOD allows you to choose which devices to use at work. The most obvious choice is to check mail at home or while away from the office with your smartphone. Some things just can’t wait for the work week to begin.

If you fall in love with your laptop, you might choose to bring it to work every day as your main work device. Why settle for a user experience that doesn’t cut it on a desktop or laptop that IT gives you? You know better than anyone else what works for you at work. You’ll be happier and it will improve your productivity. That’s what they call a win-win situation.

If you do a lot of reading at work and home, you may choose to BYOD with your tablet. A tablet is good for reading, emailing and light text editing. If you have a tablet keyboard, you can do heavier work on your tablet-laptop.

Respect IT for the BYOD Win

The one caution I will leave you with is to respect IT. No one owes you a BYOD program. If your company offers one, read the rules and don’t hesitate to ask questions. If IT asks you to use the guest wifi with your BYOD device, then that’s what you should do. If they ask you not to access certain financial documents, don’t test them by opening them.

BYOD works best when you and IT meet in the middle and respect one another.

Ask Your Friends

Do you have friends who BYOD? What devices do they bring to work or work on while at home? This is the best way to learn where BYOD is heading. What types of companies (high tech, service, hospitality) have the most liberal or stringent rules?

You, the BYOD consumer, your friends and colleagues know more about where BYOD is going than the Harvard educated analysts ever will. Look in the mirror for the future of BYOD!

Kenny Sahr

Just when you thought you were in control of BYOD, Bring Your Own Wearable Device enters enterprise. You and your IT team had better start discussing your BYOWD policies before it is too late.

The Smartwatch

The smartwatch is the most common wearable device. Whereas two years ago, few people took them seriously, today smartwatches are catching on. Here at Nubo, two of our Android developers have smartwatches. One owns the Sony Smartwatch 2 and the other owns the Garmin Forerunner 620.

The Sony Smartwatch 2 has Gmail, Facebook, sms and phone notifications. You can turn the phone ringer off and receive notifications on your arm when calls come in. The Garmin Forerunner, on the other hand, is a top-of-the-line sports watch. It tracks your exercise progress – from your running route to your pace and of course your best times.

The sports smartwatch is more practical but has a smaller market. The notification smartwatch may not be “ready for prime time,” and is a work in progress, but it could end up beating your wildest sci-fi dream in a few years.

Smartwatch at Enterprise

What do you do when your first employee comes in the office one day, showing everyone his or her new smartwatch? “Can I connect it to the wifi?” Your answer is simple – “Yes, but ..” Your office should have (at least) two wifi networks – one for serious work-only devices and another for everything else.

The smartwatch fits in the “everything else category.” Allow the giddy wearable gear owners to connect their toys to your less vulnerable wifi network. Today there are no known ways that a smartwatch can hack your network, but one day there will be. There’s no need to allow a watch to have access to your critical data.

Be Smart About Smartwatches

Don’t wait until half of your employees own smartwatches. Now is the time to be smart about smartwatches and wearable devices. Do you want them to connect to your guest wifi? Or should they only connect to your employees’ data carriers? Open the discussion now! The answer depends on the level of critical data your organization handles. Government and military organizations would be wise to skip allowing wearable devices to connect to the enterprise wifi; unlike tablets and smartphones, there’s no reasonable productivity or work claim to an exercise watch. The guest wifi is the perfect place for wearable devices.

By the end of 2014, we will know a lot more about the wearable device trend. Is it a niche market or something everyone is going to jump in on? How many of your friends and colleagues own a wearable device and are you considering buying one?

 

Kenny Sahr

So you’ve just launched your company’s BYOD program and employees are starting to bring their personal devices to work. How do you ensure compliance? In a word, communication!

Do Your BYOD Homework

Before you even launch your BYOD program, introduce your IT team to your marketing writer. IT needs to express your company’s BYOD rules and procedures to your writer. A good writer will be able to write your rules in understandable English; a mix of technical terms with a bit of charm. If your BYOD rules read like a technical document, no one will understand it. Remember – the people reading your BYOD rules don’t all come from the tech side of your company.

Distribute Your BYOD Rules

Now that you have your BYOD rules, it is time to distribute them. The rule of thumb here is – “the more, the better.” Hand out printed copies, email a digital version, mention it on Yammer and your internal social media with a link to your company’s BYOD page. Make it hard for employees not to run into your BYOD rules and procedures!

A BYOD Meeting

Written rules just aren’t enough when the stakes are this high. Organize a BYOD meeting at your company. Your IT team can do the presentation, but make sure they are good communicators. If not, pass it onto marketing. A boring reading of the rules is a waste of time. Start off with the good news – “Starting next week, you are welcome to work at home and here in the office on your personal devices! There are important rules for you to follow, but if we all work together, you will have more freedom than ever when it comes to your smartphones and tablets.”

Allow BYOD Confessions

Finally, the most important BYOD compliance tip. Expect your employees to make mistakes, especially during the initial launch of your program. Make it very clear to them that you are more interested in learning about their mistakes and problems than you are reprimanding them. It won’t do you any good if they hide things from your IT department. You need to know of any security holes and you won’t discover them without open lines of communication with your employees. If someone brings a device to work and is able to connect it to your office wifi without going through procedures and IT doesn’t detect it, you can’t afford to scare employees into not informing you. A bit of tolerance towards both IT and employees will go a long way.

Good communication is no less important than smart security in a successful BYOD program. Plan and implement your communication and you will do wonders for BYOD compliance!