Budgets force BYOD rethink: report

Tight budgets and an inability to force employees to standardise on a single mobile device is forcing a rethink of bring your own device (BYOD), a new report has found. 

The report, The Accenture CIO Mobility Survey 2013, polled over 400 IT executives from around the globe.

The BYOD finding was predicated on IT budgets still being constrained after significant mobile investments over the last few years.

In essence, write the report's authors, companies are generally more positive about BYOD than first thought. It also noted an encouragement of BYOD to alleviate budget issues. 

The report found mobile investing was all over the shop. Some companies were investing, others holding back. This was mainly dependent on their past mobile investment track record. 

“Companies that invested heavily in mobility in 2011 decreased their investment in 2012,” the report’s authors wrote. “Conversely, companies that spent little in 2011 …. increased their investment in 2012.”

The report also noted this investment pattern as being a positive development, because it demonstrated organisations were willing to experiment with mobile deployment and strategy.

Of the companies surveyed, 59 percent had implemented a company-wide mobile strategy, up from 53 percent in 2012.

A full one-third of executives surveyed indicated mobile is one of their top two priorities, while 75 percent said it was a top five priority.

The reason for the focus on mobile is the executives and their companies realised the simplicity of mobile interfaces increased productivity, and they also realised mobile could drive new revenue streams.

Thirty-six percent said they could increase revenue by driving customer engagement through mobile.

One concern for the surveyed executives was the compatibility between the modern mobile hardware and software, and the legacy back-end systems many users wanted to access.

Of those surveyed, 54 percent said they were implementing APIs to allow access to legacy data.