How BYOD is changing work culture across companies

There are now a number of apps which enable accessing office work flow on employees’ personal mobile devices.
The new Samsung Note tablet ad shows a young executive who takes his work along with him on his mobile device and then finishing a presentation on the way and by the time he reaches office he has the presentation ready for his rather grim-looking boss. For once, the advertising isn't too far away from reality.

A survey report by IT virtualization company Citrix showed that about 28% of the work force was using non-company-issued devices to perform their activities. Forrester Research reported that nearly 53% of the workforce use their mobile devices for work. Doubtless, the figures have increased.

"It is now a basic expectation from the corporates as well as the end users that smartphones naturally extend and allow them to stay connected to meet their business requirements," says Rajasekar Shanmugam, CTO at AppPoint Software Solutions, which enable productivity on mobile devices. In fact, the concept of mobile productivity has caught on so much that companies are actively setting up policies for 'Bring your own device (BYOD)' culture.

Emails, which are an integral part of the workflow, were there since the glory days of BlackBerrys. But now every default smartphone and mobile device has an office application capable of handling Word documents, spreadsheets, creating and displaying presentations. While these may represent the most basic units if a workflow productivity, there are a number of apps which can help a company take sensitive data from their systems onto a mobile device.

App developers are now building an entire platform and ecosystem to enable mobility on all devices, including PCs, smartphones and tablets which can take care of a huge part an enterprises' workflow.

Each company have their own requirements for taking the workflow on the mobile device and often developers have to customize the solutions to cater to the requirements of privacy, security and flexibility. "BYOD is not for every company, or every employee. There will be wide variances in BYOD adoption across the world — by geography, industry and corporate culture," said David Willis, analyst at Gartner research in a release.

Developers are now trying to move vital parts of a company's ERP onto mobile devices at different levels. AppPoint Software Solutions, for example, has developed BizAPP Studio which allows users of the company for functions as simple as leave management or to settle financial claims or company inspections based on regulatory requirements. Their customers include the National Stock Exchange, Australian Stock Exchange, Biocon and Texas Instruments.

The challenges
It goes without doubt that taking such sensitive information on a mobile device has its own challenges. "Getting data out of the enterprise to be available to a mobile platform is traditionally difficult. Legacy software including customer resource management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) and line of business apps are not amenable to such information dissemination, and it is a challenging process to get it right," says Monish Darda, co-founder and CTO at ICERTIS, which provide comprehensive ERP-surround solutions for contract lifecycle management, transportation management.

"Security of mission critical data, actions are very key to any business and any data that is shared to a floating device like mobile/tablet increases the risk of it being shared or lost or fall in wrong hands. Addressing the requirement of who can see what and when, when business expose data to employees, customers, vendors, partners, will be a key challenge," says Rajasekar.

In addition, ensuring that the application works on different mobile ecosystems represents a huge challenge.