A third of BYOD use is invisible to the organisation, claims new report

In spite of the ongoing effort by companies to manage the use of employees’ own technology through Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, around a third of all BYOD activity is invisible to the IT department, according to new research from Ovum and Samsung. The report also claims that while over half of employees now use their own devices to work and access information, nearly two thirds of them are not subject to any formal IT policy. According to the report, the problem centres on the issue of ‘multi-screening’, whereby people decide which device is appropriate for whatever they are doing and don’t much care what the IT department thinks. In addition, nearly a quarter (22 percent) of employees use their own software and apps to work, which means that this is not a problem restricted to hardware. The upshot is that between 30-35 percent of BYOD is invisible to the organisation, although that represents a marked improvement on the situation a couple of years ago, when the proportion was around half.

“Employees are finding ways to do it whether IT knows about it or not,” claims Adrian Drury, consulting director of Ovum.”What we are seeing is enterprise multi-screening in exactly the same way as we see multi-screening in the home. We are seeing multi-screening in the workplace [because] people just want to use the right screen at the right time to get the job done. The big challenge for IT is that you are in a competitive market now; people had to use what you gave them because there wasn’t any other choice. That, of course, has all changed. If you’re not being given the tools you need to get your job done, you’ll go and find a way around that.”