Proposal For Byod Policy At Infosys Information Technology Essay

The companys weak financial performance over the past few quarters has brought infrastructures costs to the forefront. Some of the ongoing concerns related to our internal operations are as follows:

Increasing number of workstations: Our infrastructure is almost completely dominated by physical workstations. Only about 5% of employees below level 5 are allocated company laptops. This model suited us fine in the past but now it is thought of as one that lacks flexibility and curtails productivity.

Growing administrative costs: We are installing workstations at a much higher rate than we did in the past, owing to addition of about 20,000 new hires each fiscal year. As per Computer and Communications division, installation/maintenance costs are growing at approximately 7% each year.

Rising support projects: With an increasing trend towards more maintenance/support projects, we need more employees in a 24/7 environment where a considerable majority works in shifts. The late night cab service to ferry employees has been a matter of continual discussion over employee safety and costs. At almost every annual business meet, this issue has come up.

Expanding technology renewal costs: The rapid change and obsolescence of technology is also contributing towards increased IT costs. Frequent hardware and software upgrades lead to cost overheads.

Alarming employee turnover: The Human Resource department has taken cognizance of the fact that a large number of outgoing employees had concerns over work flexibility and find flexible work options offered at other firms more attractive.

Benefits from BYOD

Bring Your Own Device or BYOD is a fast-growing trend. By allowing employees to carry out enterprise work on personally chosen and purchased mobile devices, enterprises are increasingly adding flexibility to the workplace, while reducing costs. Some of the major benefits from BYOD are discussed below:

Reduced IT costs: By transferring the ownership and associated costs of a mobile device to the employee, our IT spending can reduce drastically.

Increased employee productivity: The ability to work on a mobile device of choice provides convenience to an employee as the device better suits their working needs and integrates better in to their lives. According to a recent survey by Dell that interviewed 1,485 IT heads across the globe, 74% of companies believe that BYOD can help their employees be more productive. (Dell, p. 6)

Enhanced customer satisfaction: BYOD can help us increase responsiveness to customer issues by enabling a mobile workforce. This will be especially useful for large accounts for which we provide round-the-clock support.

Better collaboration across teams: Our Global Delivery Model will receive a major boost through more effective collaboration across geographical teams. The Dell survey points out that USA, India and China benefit the most out of BYOD-enabled communications. (Dell, p. 6)

Lower employee turnover: The flexible work arrangements that result from a BYOD scheme can help lower employee attrition to a large extent. It must be noted that a major competitor to our India operations, IBM has a flexible work arrangement program which is generally attributed to for IBM’s relatively lower turnover figures.

The BYOD scheme overview

The BYOD implementations differ across organizations. Most companies follow hybrid schemes where some sensitive roles such as finance may require a regular workstation while a consultant may be given the BYOD option. Some companies allow procurement of devices through specified vendors while some merely require registering a pre-owned device with the IT department. For Infosys, I recommend a hybrid approach which allows employees to purchase mobile devices from pre-determined vendors. The details of the scheme are discussed next.

Figure : BYOD scheme overview

Planning stage

The planning stage would involve the IT operations, Human Resource team, employees and vendors. A three week workshop shall be conducted that would bring together department heads, vendor representatives, account managers, consultants and engineers. All the stakeholders would collaborate to discuss their concerns and suggestions towards a more effective strategy. At this stage, we will decide specifics of the long-term policy, technical implementation preferences and two partner vendors for BYOD.

For short-term, we shall implement BYOD for 5000 employees. To ensure scalability for the future, the technical implementation should be decided with an eye on the long-term organization-wide implementation.

Technical and security requirements stage

After gathering all perspectives across the organization, we will determine the finer details of the plan. A thorough review of the technical infrastructure will be followed by the process to determine the required changes to our network-new hardware requirement, server configurations, bandwidth augmentation and so on. To ensure secure communications to mobile devices, we would host virtualized desktops for all enterprise and client work. An employee would be able to remotely login using a secure VPN channel and access enterprise applications and data using virtual instances. Fine-grained security controls can be applied to virtual desktops that disable insecure communication, clipboard, shared folder-features between virtual instances and host machines.

Pilot stage

Owing to the large size of our organization, I propose that we implement BYOD in phases. The pilot stage shall be implemented for one year and include teams of up to 20 employees. We would include 5000 employees across our five major locations in India. I recommend that we include a decided mix of high-mobility consulting teams as well as maintenance project teams. This will help us better interpret the relative benefits of the scheme to different types of teams.

Procurement, installation and use

Employees under the policy would choose a mobile device model from one of the two vendors. They would get the virtual desktop applications and related software installed from their Infosys local IT center. Each employee would go through a one-week training in the virtual desktop environment. The training would cover usage, security and policy aspects of BYOD. All enterprise activity on the VPN channel would be logged and audited.

Enterprise-wide implementation

The results from the pilot stage would be used to fine-tune the technical and policy aspects of BYOD. A company wide-policy shall be defined. More number of vendors can be brought in to increase choice for the employees.

Table : Workstation cost estimates

Cost and usefulness

Though, it may not be currently possible to determine the cost savings from BYOD for the entire organization, I am introducing rough estimates for my security team of size 10.

Table 1 lists approximate costs for procuring and maintaining workstations for a small team. We need to renew our inventory after every three years. As per my estimates, our maintenance costs are 10% of procurement costs. A BYOD scheme shall eliminate the procurement costs altogether which are an enormous amount, given the large number of workstations we maintain. The maintenance costs would still apply. There will be initial expenditure on preparing the infrastructure, training employees and maintaining the system. I do not perceive the costs to be substantial compared to our infrastructure maintenance costs.

Next Steps

There are aspects that may need consideration — software vendor support and employee feedback. I am positive about the benefits offered by BYOD in fulfilling our customer satisfaction and cost optimization goals. We may schedule a meeting to discuss the finer details of my proposal. If required, I shall be excited to apply myself in cost-benefit and risk analysis of the implementation.

Thanks for taking the time to review my proposal. I am available at (412)304-5129 or [email protected] to assist you with any questions or concerns that you might have.

Enclosures: BYOD_survey_charts