Since the advent of the BYOD era, enterprise managers have rightly focused on cost as the biggest issue--both in the savings they hoped to gain from cutting users loose, as well as the ballooning growth of mobile usage and lack of visibility that enterprises had into the consequences of this explosion. But now it's time for enterprises to take a step back and look at BYOD differently, according to Dave Snow, Director, Communications Lifecycle Management at Dimension Data
Dave is part of the Dimension Data TEM (telecom expense management) business acquired when the SI last year bought Xigo. This unit's charge now is to broaden the scope of Xigo's flagship NexTEM product to provide "lifecycle management" for an enterprise's mobile users.
Simply auditing bills to track costs is, he said, "like looking over your shoulder. You receive an invoice, and it's almost a surprise event--how come it went up 20 percent? You have to look beyond the invoice--to see a change in user behavior."
Snow noted that many enterprises have found that BYOD doesn't save them money, largely because users are charged at consumer rates rather than better-negotiated enterprise rates; and because help desk support costs tend to go up as the user base becomes wildly heterogenous in its deployment of mobile devices.
"And then the killer cost is in that permanently mobile world, that [employee] is depending on that device to get that job done," Snow added. "So if they drop that device in a puddle, that's an unscheduled day off."
Snow advocates a hybrid BYOD/corporate liable model, in which users in certain positions or departments have full choice, while others have a menu of corporate-liable devices to choose from.
The Dimension Data vision goes beyond just the mobile devices and systems being managed, however. Dave Snow advocates that enterprises be more proactive about things like phasing out faxing. That's actually a somewhat controversial viewpoint; when we do sessions on SIP Trunking, for example, it's usually accepted as a given that you have to support faxing over SIP Trunks, which is not always a straightforward process. Dave Snow's position is that, since a significant chunk of your workforce is mobile now anyway and wants nothing to do with paper, it may be time to start phasing out fax even for those who still currently rely on it.
"That’s a legacy point of view" to say we’ve still got to support fax, he said, adding that enterprises have taken "Maybe not an aggressive enough" position when it comes to phasing out technologies like fax.
And while fax doesn't relate directly to mobility from a technology standpoint, the two ways of working are closely connected--the last thing mobile workers want to deal with is more paper, or the need to receive a particular work product at a single physical location. In other words, enterprise managers need to look at the big picture of how technologies are being used, rather than simply continuing on with legacy technologies and reacting to user-driven new adoption.
This leads to a broader view of TEM, one that encompasses mobile device management (MDM) and other business support systems. The NexTEM system already can accept data from Airwatch and BlackBerry MDM systems, and can integrate into accounts payable and general ledger systems to fully automate the cost allocation process. That helps IT to charge back mobile costs to departments.
Enterprises should also be getting ready to integrate location-based mobile technology into these other back-office systems, Snow said. For example, the enterprise should be able to recognize when a user who's on a domestic cellular plan turns up at Heathrow Airport, and should alert the network manager so that this employee's coverage can be adjusted for cost efficiencies.
BYOD takes the costs of one of the most significant and growing aspects of enterprise communications completely out of the hands of the technology management teams. That's never a comfortable position to be in. So it makes sense that enterprises should be looking at new ways to rein in BYOD usage and refine their strategies for letting end users have the necessary tools to do their jobs, while keeping a handle on cost and governance issues.
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