At a well-known investment firm in New York, workers are getting frustrated with their non-BlackBerry managed Smartphones and work is not being completed. It’s gone to an extent where these workers are requesting their corporate BlackBerrys back – point blank.
The firm has said to have tried 4 different MDM providers and all which have fallen short in providing the company a decent experience in mobile data management. From architectural issues, messages not being pushed instantly and not being able to send emails from within an app has caused frustration amongst the employees and employers.
These same MDM providers were also a burden to the non-BlackBerry smartphones, causing battery drainage up to the point where the phones would only last a couple of hours.
It doesn’t end there, privacy issues have also raised a concern between employer and employee. IT executives have had to push BYOD policies which resulted in the blocking of such simple smartphone capabilities such as text messaging.
IT executives unwillingly ended looking like Big Brother, all to just make sure company data wasn’t compromised. In the end, these workers requested their corporate BlackBerrys back.
“Maybe 60 percent of the people requested to go back to a BlackBerry and carry two devices,” the IT executive says. “We were shocked, blown away, by the privacy reaction.”
Quite interestingly, you might have heard of the recent announcement of Apple teaming up with IBM to provide enterprise users iPhones and iPads, bundled with IBM’s enterprise offering. The following excerpt from the original article shared the statement from the investment firms view on the iPhone:
The problem is that iPhones are consumer devices never designed for the enterprise. The iPhone was meant for just the user, not a user and an admin. So when an admin has access to a device, the admin has access to everything.
I think it’s very interesting hearing one business’ viewpoint on the whole BYOD trend. When it comes to work, the cool factor is not a spec and it should not be considered at all, especially if privacy is at risk because of it. Sure, there’s smartphones which the employee might want to use, but that should be coupled with a top-notch MDM provider – what better than BES 10?
Source: CIO