A five-step plan for introducing BYOD in your organisation

To reap the benefits of BYOD while avoiding potential risks, you need to develop a structured strategy addressing the people, policies and technologies involved. These simple five steps to BYOD success provide a rational approach to planing, defining and rolling out a BYOD initiative in your organisation.

Step 1 – Understand industry best practices

Many traditional IT best practices need to be rethought in a BYOD context, such as those focusing only on controlling devices. While device management is important, a sound approach must also address the content—such as apps and data—that people access. Learning how other organisations approach BYOD will help you shape your own programme.

Step 2 – Get stakeholder buy-in

Key constituents and employees across areas including IT, security, HR and legal should be engaged early in the process to help define BYOD policies and plans. Employees themselves should also be surveyed to get a feel for their level of interest, needs and preferences.

Step 3 – Define your company policy

Your policy should aim to empower people and make the organisation more agile while also protecting the organisation and its business information. Areas to be addressed include employee eligibility, service and app availability, device and user support, costs and legal terms of use.

Step 4 – Develop your solution approach

The technologies needed to simplify and securely enable BYOD on any device include enterprise mobility management, desktop and app virtualisation, data sharing, social collaboration, remote support and secure cloud networking.

Step 5 – Prepare for a successful rollout

o drive successful adoption, you should formalise your rollout plan and create resources that make it simple for employees to learn about the programme, enrol and access everything they need to get started. This should include tools that drive employees towards self-provisioning and establish support and maintenance levels.