The Concept Of BYOD For mLearing Providers – The Challenges & Opportunities

With the concept of enterprise Mobility in India, many organizations are considering the mobile devices as their learning delivery media of choice. Well, going with the wind is not a bad idea, but such preferences are impeded by the various budget constraints, specifically providing costly technologies and mobile devices.

This is the reason why the concept of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is rapidly emerging as one of the cost-effective alternatives for the enterprises or organizations willing to embrace a mLearning approach without even providing the devices. But in reality, still there many organizations who feel safe being away from the concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).

As more ‘n’ more organizations are increasingly looking towards the mobile devices as a learning delivery channel, it has become imperative to highlight both the most commonly know challenges and the future opportunities associated with the concept of delivering learning through the employee’s personal mobile device.

Let’s have a look at the major concerns:

Do you think one-size-fits-for-all will work?

Well, enterprises and mLearning service providers are nailing their heads with the thought of developing a single system to support almost every type of issues arising on the tons of different mobile devices having different configurations and features. Moreover, starting from the support for enterprise applications to the software installation quirks, there are tons of other issues that you will have to face.

Poor compatibility between the different mobile operating systems is one of the major challenge that is being sited by the organizations. With such a huge number of new devices in the legacy systems, integration issue is quite valid. Mobile learning solution or service providers will have to cope up with such fragmentation issues. 

However, if the organization or users won’t find the system useful and reliable, they will simply discard it on the go. After this, it would be quite impossible to regain their trust back. Therefore, an effective communication between the IT department of an organization and the mLearning service provider is essential in order to implement the mLearning solutions or systems successfully. And this becomes more important when you are dealing with the BYOD environment.

Loss of data and security is another major concern. Both the data security and data loss are always a prime concern for the enterprises when they are planning to implement BYOD. Most of the organizations are concerned about how much control they would have on their employees’ personal devices. Moreover, they are also worried about the security issues or vulnerabilities caused due to the mobile devices.

Now what are the opportunities? Well, one of the biggest opportunity that organizations or corporate world can leverage is the technological advancement taking place every now and than in the consumer products. Consumer market tends to take big leaps and moves far ahead from the corporate market. Moreover, one should not overlook the strong bond of users with the mobile devices and technology. 

The concept of BYOD will open new doors of opportunity for the mLearning solutions and service providers to serve to the SME’s training requirements. Most of the small or mid-sized enterprises have very limited budget to offer the training material and all. BYOD and the mLearning will boast such SMEs by reducing the cost overhead.

So, BYOD and mLearning brings a great opportunity for the learning service providers to leverage from them while reducing the other issues. However, they will have to learn to deal with the concerns discussed above. What’s your view on this? Do you really think BYOD can bring ease of training or learning?

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Enterprise Mobility Helps Save Money – If You’re Thinking The Same, Think Over It Again!

With the concept of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), more ‘n’ more employees are bringing their own personal devices like Smartphones, Tablets and other Android devices instead of using the ones offered by the organization. Evolution of enterprise mobility in India has transformed the way organizations were carrying their business operations. While the CIOs of the organizations thinks that BYOD helps them saving costs as they won’t have to buy specific devices for the employees. But it is not always a truth.

According to the recent survey, the enterprises that simply say BYOD is all about productivity and have completely overlooked the cost structure are playing with a blank check, which has created a huge question mark on the current trend of enterprise mobility. Enterprise mobility was supposed to help CIOs overcoming the conventional hardware-buying cycle or at least reduce the cost. For some of the popular technology giants, the concept of BYOD costs more than the long run than the company-owned devices.

So where is actually all the money is going? In this post we’ll try to take a look at a few of the hidden things that actually consumes more money.

-          Expense Reports

Most of the organizations spend an average of $80 for the company-owned mobile devices, or $10 more than the concept of BYOD. Initially, you may feel that the enterprise mobility solutions helps you save a lot money, right? Well, unfortunately that is not a truth. You will have to take a look at the hidden cost of reimbursing the BYOD workers as the employee will put a monthly expense report for his/her personal wireless device’s bill.

Moreover, preparing a single report will cost at least $18 to process, says Aberdeen, which at the end drag the cost of the BYOD mobile device bill around $90/month. Sometimes, employees often expense their entire wireless bill rather than the itemized bill as it would be almost impossible for the organizations to filter their personal and professional usage.

-          Security, management, data loss and more

With the concept of Bring Your Own Device, the IT person within an organization will have to input every device into a system, punching the phone number, IMEIs and other employee details manually. It could be a major pain point for the organizations to deal with the BYOD on an ongoing basis.

Also, there is a huge amount of costs involved in security and compliance with the BYOD. CIOs of the organizations will have to invest in a multi-platform mobile device management solutions and other softwares.

-          Help desk support

You will have to invest in the help desk support as well. With the BYOD, IT departments are unable to control the actions of the carriers or the devices. However, they are still responsible to support the BYOD employees without getting any additional resources. Moreover, the employees can easily fix the problems faced within their wireless devices. So, the organizations will have to invest in the help desk support.

-        Multi-platform & multi-department

It is a fact that the concept BYOD brings more platforms to develop          applications for and support. Opting for the enterprise mobility may lead your organization to develop a dedicated app for the iPhone or iPad devices. Developing an internal app can drastically rise with the bring your own device concept. Moreover, it requires multi-department support as well. So, the company will have to invest in the multi-department communication process to handle the issues created in BYOD.

After going through the above details, do you still think that enterprise mobility will help you save a lot of cost? Share your views on this!

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