5-14 What are the advantages and disadvantages of allowing employees to use their personal smartphones for work? Just about everyone who has a smartphone wants to be able to bring it to work and use it on the job. And why not? Employees using their own smartphones would allow companies to enjoy all of the same benefits of a mobile workforce without spending their own money to purchase these devices. Smaller companies are able to go mobile without making large investments in devices and mobile services. One IBM-sponsored study by Forrester Consulting found that a BYOD program using mobile enterprise services from IBM achieved a 108 percent return on investment and payback within one month. “Anywhere/anytime” access to computing tools increased workplace productivity and raised effective employee work time by 45–60 minutes per week. According to Gartner Inc., by 2017, 50 percent of employers will require employees to supply their own mobile devices for the workplace. BYOD is becoming the “new normal.”

But...wait a minute. Nearly three out of five enterprises believe that BYOD represents a growing problem for their organizations, according to a survey of 162 enterprises conducted by Osterman Research on behalf of Dell Inc. Although BYOD can improve employee job satisfaction and productivity, it also can cause a number of problems if not managed properly: support for personally owned devices is more difficult than it is for company-supplied devices, the cost of managing mobile devices can increase, and protecting corporate data and networks becomes more difficult. Research conducted by the Aberdeen Group found that on average, an enterprise with 1,000 mobile devices spends an extra

$170,000 per year when it allows BYOD. So it’s not that simple.