Do enterprises save money by making employees provide their own mobile devices? And are there any gotchas lurking down the road?

I've been mulling over some of the points that Michael Finneran of dBrn Associates/UCStrategies and Lawrence Byrd of Avaya made in the webinar we did yesterday on enterprise mobility (if you missed it, the replay is here). Of course, when you're talking about enterprise mobility, you're talking about BYOD (bring your own device), and not surprisingly, we got several BYOD-related questions from the audience.

(As an aside, if you missed Robert Harris's really awesome case study on a BYOD implementation, check it out.)

One of the questions in yesterday's webinar touched on something that's been nagging at me as the BYOD debates have gone on, namely: Is BYOD about saving the enterprise money, in that you're forcing your users to buy their own iPhones, etc., instead of providing mobile devices to them?

The questioner wanted to know not only whether BYOD was about pushing costs off onto the user, but about whether--if that's what it is about--it's even likely to succeed at that goal. In the long term, they wondered, is there not the possibility that it'll be costlier trying to manage a plethora of user-supplied devices, with the attendant security and policy risks?

"It's important that this be approached cautiously," Michael Finneran responded. "A well-executed BYOD strategy involves getting the legal department, the accounting department, and very importantly the human resources department involved, because one of the big things you're going to have to decide is, what is the stipend going to be, if you're going to offer a stipend at all." On top of these questions, Michael noted, you also have to decide whether your IT department is going to provide support for BYOD devices.

"But basically, the answer to the question is, as simply as possible, the economic benefit is, we're dumping some of the cost from the company onto the employees," Michael said.

To follow up, I asked Michael point-blank if the savings from "dumping the cost" off onto the users gets eaten up in support, reimbursements, and other ongoing costs in the new situation. He said no, the savings appear to be there.

In a way, that sounds like a strange situation. When companies go looking for places to cut costs, they don't generally adopt a strategy of mining their employees' pocketbooks--sure, on a large scale they do, in terms of wage freezes and benefit cuts--but getting rid of company-supplied mobile devices to people who need them for work--just for the sake of savings--seems like nickel-and-diming, on the order of getting rid of free coffee in the break room.

Of course, that's not what's going on. Saving money isn't the driver, but rather the result of the BYOD trend. Employees are willingly spending their own money to implement BYOD in an ad hoc manner in many enterprises.

Still, I think the question spoke to the uneasiness that many people feel any time they're supposedly saving money in a fairly uncharted situation: Am I going to be the hero today, saving my company tons of money with BYOD, only to get walloped with some unforeseen costs that result from that policy?

This in turn raises the larger issue of the need to find some certainty in what's been a very volatile segment of the enterprise communications environment.

BYOD on a large scale was probably inevitable when the first iPhone came out, but the iPad is what really took BYOD from a trend to a daily reality. And most of us throughout the industry very much underestimated the likely impact of the tablet as an enterprise device.

So having some visibility about the future of mobility is critical for enterprise managers. What do we know now? Are we at a point of relative stability when it comes to device form factors? Is there anything besides a phone-sized device and a tablet-sized device lurking out there to further shake things up? And even if the device environment stablizes, what are the key variables that will affect those devices--what will be the effect of 4G bandwidth? How widely will video be used on mobile devices? How should enterprise managers think about the application environment on their employees' mobile devices? Or to what extent do they not even need to care?

This is why IT still matters even in a BYOD world. Because IT are the folks deputized to answer those questions and turn the answers into real policies and, where necessary, technology implementations.

I'd be remiss if I closed this little rumination without mentioning that this will be one of the most important topics we'll discuss at Enterprise Connect Orlando next month. But really, this whole thing is just getting started.