Why Hong Kong firms should look beyond the BYOD strategy

The quest for productivity is the main driver for the adoption of new mobile solutions. And in practice, there are quantifiable results: Intel has expanded its bring-your-own-device (BYOD) program, which has been a resounding success, providing around 5 million hours of annual productivity gains last year. Tablets and smartphones are set for a bright future, especially within organizations' mobile workforce (sales, support team, etc.). 

The recent global survey of CIOs by Gartner indicated that 38 percent of companies expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2016¹. The survey also showed that employees in India, China and Brazil are most likely to be using a personal device, typically a standard mobile phone, at work. However, in my opinion, implementing a BYOD strategy is only the first step for companies to fully deliver and leverage mobile productivity. Beyond this basic trend – promoting the use of personal mobile devices to access corporate data, new practices are sure to emerge: "Bring your own Application", "BYO Cloud" "BYO Data", etc. 

According to a recent research by IPSOS Hong Kong, 71 percent of smartphone owners in Hong Kong use social media apps on their phones, followed by game apps at 46 percent, and news related apps at 43 percent².

Beyond data alone, the whole point of these practices lies in providing enterprise applications via mobile devices, wherever they are. Thus, for today's CIOs, the question is to determine how to "make" business applications mobile. Not only will corporations benefit from the productivity increases described above, but in addition, the IT department will benefit from soaring adoption rates, which is only fair considering the deployment costs involved with these applications.

Thus, the challenges lying in securing content and applications that are accessible via mobile devices can be transformed into opportunities for CIOs, who can then fully demonstrate their contribution to the value creation of the company. Gartner predicts that by 2017, 25 percent of companies will have internal "AppStores"³. These applications stores will help promote companies' application portfolio, mitigate security risks, and reduce license and administration costs.

The third step is to create new mobile applications, which will become sources of productivity for the company. After having first promoted access to data and then access to existing applications via mobile devices, the IT department can once again take an important step forward by developing new value-creating mobile services – management of expenses, travels, claims and fleets, social collaboration, etc. – and integrating these services into a secure workflow. The ultimate goal is to increase market share and improve business profitability.

For example, French postal services company La Poste will give smartphones to their postmen under the "Facteo" program aimed at "facilitating daily operations and services delivered by postmen, including by simplifying procedures and providing new services".
If BYOD initially enabled to address the needs of employees, the result of the second step is improved adoption of enterprise applications, and the third step contributes directly to the digital transformation of the organization.

While most companies in Hong Kong now understand the benefits of BYOD in terms of productivity, they must now realize that their journey cannot stop there if they are to fully leverage mobile technologies. 
  

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¹ Gartner : Bring Your Own Device: The Facts and the Future
² IPSOS Hong Kong: Hong Kong Smartphone Landscape
³ Gartner: Enterprise App Stores Can Increase the ROI of the App Portfolio