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If your company’s IT department is having any troubles wrestling with the “bring your own device,” or BYOD, trend, here is a handy new hook on which to hang the blame: The young people you just hired.
A new survey released last week from the company Trackvia, which helps companies build their own custom line-of-business Web and phone apps, finds that when it comes to employees and their attitudes about using third-party Web apps at the office, there’s precisely the kind of generational split you might expect.
It’s one thing for people to bring their personal iPhone or Android device to the office and to except the company to support it with access to email and calendars. It’s another to give them unfettered access to corporate data from any one of the millions of apps they might want to use, even if those apps go against company policies. That gap is the source of BYOD concerns. It’s also a new generation gap.
TrackVia asked 1,000 people via a Web survey about their use of third-party Web apps at work. Among the respondents, 70 percent of millennials (adults aged 18 to 33, per the Pew Research Foundation) admit to breaking corporate rules around using outside apps. Half of them said the approved apps aren’t good enough. And 60 percent of them said they didn’t think that by doing so they’d create a security problem for their employer.
That’s the sort of thing that makes CIOs nervous. While in general they’re opening up to support the BYOD trend, they also like to maintain as much control over the apps that run on their networks as they can.
While it’s perhaps not an entirely surprising set of findings, it’s interesting in part because so many newer cloud software companies tend to rely on people using them at the office without company approval. I’m thinking specifically of DropBox and Evernote, but those are only two examples. DropBox specifically went on to penetrate most of the world’s companies which helped it build a base of users 300 million strong. It’s now building an enterprise strategy on the back of that popularity. Evernote is too.
Those nervous CIOs will likely be happier with older workers, 69 percent of which say they don’t break the rules the way the younger folks do. But as you can guess, that will matter less over time as millenials grow into the majority of the work force, which is expected by the end of next year.
Of course some companies are embracing the BYOD trend so strongly that it has evolved into a requirement. A report by Gartner last year suggested that more than half of companies will require their employees to bring their own phone or computer to work.
