By Joe Basili

Employees are demanding more control of the technology that they use at work through bring your own device (BYOD). Enterprises cannot ignore BYOD. Employees may bypass corporate policy and use shadow” technology that can compromise enterprise security and intellectual property.

Most managers that work for enterprises, solutions integrators, system integrators and telecom agents have heard the term BYOD. It is important to understand that there are other approaches to address the consumerization of IT choose your own device (CYOD), corporate liable employee owned (CLEO) and corporate owned personally enabled (COPE) programs.

In the context of telecommunications, BYOD is any employee device (smartphone, cellphone, tablet, notebook or PC) or application (mobile or cloud-based) that accesses corporate networks through the use of telecommunications services. The corporate network includes corporate Internets, corporate intranets and carrier services purchased by the corporation, local networks, guest networks or core networks with SIP or VoIP services that are controlled by enterprise, ISDN or next-generation MPLS services.

CYOD is similar to BYOD, but employees can only use devices and applications from an approved list provided by their employer.

With CLEO, employees own the devices, but the employer is responsible, or liable, to pay for monthly service costs.

COPE is the opposite of BYOD. Instead of making corporate functions work on personal devices, COPE enables personal use of company devices for personal activities including social sites, email, calls, etc. Employers provide employees with devices and applications and the company maintains ownership. With this approach, employers are able to leverage volume discounts for purchase of the devices, services and management. The employer also has more control to secure devices.

Of the four approaches discussed above, BYOD is the most widespread. TEMIA members report that 48 percent of their clients have adopted it and another 20 percent are evaluating it.

BYOD also presents a contradiction. It would appear to release employers from expenses associated with providing and managing devices and applications, but it doesnt. TEMIA members have found that for clients that implement a BYOD strategy, 69 percent report that enterprise costs for mobile services are either rising or about the same.

The key challenges of BYOD are:

Firms that adopt BYOD must keep in mind that:

TEMIA’s free paper BYOD: Dos and Don’ts provides insights into the challenges of BYOD for telecommunications devices and applications with specific recommendations for managing expenses, security, legal matters, privacy, employee productivity and technical issues.

Joe Basili is managing director for the Telecom Expense Management Industry Association (TEMIA), a non-profit industry trade association founded in 2006 by TEM solutions providers. Since then, TEMIA has grown to 40 members with locations in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pac regions who manage more than $61 billion of telecom and data spend. Basili conducts research, writes and presents findings on the industry. His focus areas for TEMIA include program management, advocacy for telecommunications management, TEM, WEM and MDM solutions, recruiting new members, and an industry ethics code.