As consumer tech continues to develop, more and more employees are using their own smartphones and tablets in the world of work, while resisting—or simply not making use of—corporate devices that their organisation has supplied.
While employees may find they are more productive, this phenomenon poses a number of questions to a business, the first of which is: “Do we embrace building an environment in which BYOD (bring your own device) is accepted?” This decision will determine whether BYOD becomes the thorn in the side of a business or something that liberates it.
That is not to say that there are no issues to overcome when fully integrating a BYOD culture. For example, many business applications are the legacy of years of development, involving ageing client-server applications that require a Windows terminal to access, and which are more or less unusable on modern mobile devices. Furthermore, when people do find a way to access those applications from their personal devices, the business then has to cope with a range of security and compliance challenges, including data protection regulations and controlling who has access to what data within the company.
This is where NetSuite comes into one of its strengths. Web-based portability and dedicated smartphone and tablet apps means that NetSuite is just as useable on the move on a personal device as it is on a desktop in a corporate IT environment. And because data access and security policies are set in the application, you can implement a framework for security that governs all users, including those accessing the application from personal devices.
Take the Super Yacht Group, a publishing and media company focused on the super yacht industry, as a prime example of a company that is adapting to modern times. Thanks to NetSuite’s iPhone and iPad app, SYG staffers have real-time, secure access to in-depth business analytics anywhere in the world on their own devices as well as corporate devices. They can keep their fingers on the pulse and react quickly to any issues that arise.
Pedro Muller, Strategy Director at SYG, told us that the accessing this data on the move has proven invaluable to the business, as staff can react quickly to any customer demands regardless of their location. This more open and integrated approach has led to increased revenues of 20%, simply because sales reps can now handle an increased volume at any given time and place. Productivity of sales reps has also increased as much as 80% due to increased efficiency.
The example of SYG shows that there is a clear benefit of cloud systems in supporting BYOD strategies. If your systems are open and web-based, you can have productive staff, regardless of your users’ choice of device. This is where cloud-focused resellers have a huge advantage as long as the provider has a universal interface that will work across different devices.
It's now becoming imperative for people to cast off the shackles of Stone Age software and embrace the cloud, because this is what the modern world of work looks like.
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