We’ve been told that letting staff use their own phones and laptops – Bring Your Own Device or BYOD – can save firms money. But actually it’s more complicated than that.
BYOD may mean you aren’t paying for phones and tablets, but there are plenty of other costs that go up, warns Intel’s business marketing manager, Stuart Dommett. But even so, he’s still emphatic that you should consider the idea.
“For a lot of companies, BYOD provides a lot of choice and improves productivity, but in fact it is cost neutral or even slightly more expensive,” he said in a TechWeekEurope video (below).
Supporting more mobile devices, and different kinds of devices will be more expensive, and firms may need to spend more on software licences for those machines. There are also tax implications, which may make it more expensive to pay your staff’s phone bills as a “perk” than to add them to a corporate account.
Despite this, letting users access company systems more widely will provide productivity benefits, and unexpected bonuses, such as the ability for people to go home on time – and then finish stuff off on the train.
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This is a difficult subject to weigh up. BOYD can mean spending more on software licencing and bring the obvious security issues etc. But if staff are more motivated and therefore productive this can't be a very positive outcome. Similar issues are brought by students using their own devices etc. Be interesting to see how big educational establishments deal with this issue in the future with more and more pressure being placed on budgets.