From BYOD to CYOD

Bring your own device (BYOD) certainly involves all kinds of challenges in managing the security, infrastructure and support costs, which can be a burden for CIOs and IT departments.

Speaking at a RIM BlackBerry event in Sydney, CIO of Dematic Asia-Pacific, Allan Davies, and IDC associate vice president for Asia-Pacific, Tim Dillon, said BYOD can mean workers bringing all sorts of devices into the workplace posing a lot of risk and creating a lot work for IT.

However, BYOD doesn't necessarily have to mean that anything and everything has to be supported in the workplace. Choose your own device (CYOD) means organizations limit the range of hardware they can support where workers choose from a selection of devices that can also be easily replaced if something were to happen to a device.

"I think choosing your own device is that you can at least prepare for those breakdown situations," Davies said.

"If an employee said, 'I want to bring in this Android device', we could say, 'OK, we have those in our choice. You can use your own but if yours breaks we will temporarily give you ours.'”

Dillon said a CYOD strategy could mean organizations having their own corporate architecture, where workers don't necessarily need to bring in an external device to help them carry out their work.

"We could create a flexible architecture for our workplace that enables us to do everything that we need to do better than what we are doing right now with a corporate architecture," he said. "You could have chosen you own device for employees, it doesn't have to be BYOD."

"[Some] organizations don't necessarily have that architecture in place to let their employees work properly so that's why you have BYOD, that's why you have bring your own apps, bring your own device."

A recent study by Intel revealed that more workers in the organization would rather choose their own device than bring their own device to work.

"Employees today aren't making the preference around OS, but they are very much wanting to see more consumer-type operating systems," said Stuart Dommett, business development manager at Intel. "They're looking much more for Intel IT to provide them with something that meets those expectations, but is managed and provided to them."

Davies said he sees there will be more of shift towards CYOD in the future, as it is more manageable than workers bringing any kind of device into the workplace.

"I think getting to that choice of device is where we are going to be driven... But we haven't got to that point in the mobility space yet. I think that's where we will be going," he said.

CIO Australia