It’s 26 pages long and at times controversial, but today I am pleased to finally release into the wild iTnews' latest research report, ‘The True Cost of BYOD’.
For those new to the study, I set out to interview close to 50 CIOs and moderated roundtables around Australia and New Zealand probing for information on how organisations are tackling BYOD.
The report attempts to quantify the relative cost of devices, plans, software, set-up and support to gauge whether much-hyped BYOD strategies deliver the cost savings that the bean counters are banking on.
I've come out the other side with some strong views on whether BYOD fits for any Australian and New Zealand companies outside of very large enterprise.
The report concludes that without significant scale and a large percentage of workers employed in ‘commodity roles’, a mobile free-for-all is not going to be worth the effort and risk.
Instead the report validates a ‘choose-your-own-device’ model, under which the dual drivers of employee choice and CapEx savings can be balanced.
I would like to offer a big thank you to our partners at VMware, who hosted me on their ANZ ‘Touch Tomorrow’ roadshow. These roundtables with senior IT managers from across the region helped to validate much of the report’s content.
I would also like to wholeheartedly thank the many CIOs that gave their time for this study.
The report is available for download here. I'm very interested in your feedback on email or Twitter.