What’s in a stat – BYOD?

I’ve been having a number of twitter conversations this week about BYOD and have seen a number of papers and reports referring to the pervasiveness of BYOD in the modern enterprise. Until recently you were seeing statistics of 20~25% as the number of enterprises that had starting allowing employees to bring their own devices into work. More recently those numbers have leaped to anywhere from 60% to a recent report that had it as high as 78%.

Let me be the first one to call Bullshit on these stats. By the same way that BYOD is now being incorporated into the phrase the Consumerization of IT or CoIT, BYOD has become the gospel for any company that has moved away from just a strategy of using Blackberries. While this may be a case of CoIT it certainly is not a case of BYOD.

Let’s break down what BYOD truly means first so you can get a better understanding of how the statistics are being gamed to write sensationalistic stories. Bring your own device started to become the commonplace story as more companies saw their C level execs starting to bring their iPhones into the enterprise in late 2007. They wanted to be able to get their mail on a user-friendlier device. Enterprise IT discovered that they weren’t being left much choice and started to look at incorporating these devices into their strategies. Being enterprise IT, they didn’t want to really open their kimono so they started off slow. They brought up security concerns and slowed things down for about a year. When Apple introduced the App store, the gates swung open, as there were just too many requests to use these devices.

So, if these devices were going to be used in the enterprise to replace blackberries the simplest thing to do was to enable email on them. This was very easy to do and encouraged by the fact that Good Technologies had released an iOS app that secured the email similar to the way that Blackberries did. This was a boon to all those users that wanted to use their own device and many of them were soon enabled for email. You could now read your email at the end of the workday on any device you chose as long as it was an iPhone. Not long after that, Good Technologies released a client for Android devices, which opened the world to the two major device types that weren’t Blackberries.

The sad state of the enterprise right now is that is where many of them still remain. They have enabled any device to access the owners work email and it still remains protected. Let’s be clear though, this is not the same as BYOD. If we were going to define BYOD it means that you are using your own device, not purchased by the enterprise to perform work tasks. These are tasks beyond email. It means that you can edit your documents, work on your presentations, access your CRM, and use any other tools that you need to perform your job. When you start looking at corporations that are truly doing this the numbers begin to dive precipitously.

Be aware that this does not include companies that have decided to give out corporate iPhones or iPads, Motorola Droids or Asus Transformer Primes. BYOD requires that the user pays for at least part, if not all of the device, and that they are free to choose whatever device they want. The issue that many enterprises have seen with allowing their employees to bring their own device is that they haven’t figured out how to move from the old way of thinking, each asset is a corporate asset that the enterprise has complete control of, to the new way of thinking that each device is a gateway to an employee being more efficient and being able to do their work anywhere. They will cite compliance reasons, legal issues, government regulations and just plain HR issues to why they can’t move to this way of thinking. These are all things to be considered. They can be either barriers to change or stepping-stones to a new environment.

This is why you are starting to see managed BYOD, which I will address in another post, starting to emerge but also why almost every enterprise I talk to are not engaging in true BYOD.

As a recent person who retweeted me said, 97% of all statistics are made up. He is most certainly right and until the reporters and surveyors starting asking the appropriate questions, we will continue to overestimate the reach of BYOD into today’s enterprise.