More than half of enterprise respondents said they have a Bring-Your-Own-Device policy in place for employees, but many are still grappling with issues surrounding program oversight and expense reimbursement, a new report from Syntonic found.
According to the report, 59 percent of enterprises said they have a formal BYOD policy, but executives within those businesses are conflicted over who should oversee the programs. Syntonic said 79 percent of CEOs surveyed said they should be the ones in charge, while 73 percent of IT departments and CIOs and 51 percent of Finance departments and CFOs said IT should lead the BYOD charge.
Syntonic found enterprises are also struggling with new BYOD reimbursement laws, such as those in California and Massachusetts. In a rush to implement policies to comply with the law, Syntonic found many enterprises are “drastically” overspending.
Syntonic found 47 percent of companies reimburse for BYOD usage via a fixed monthly stipend and 29 percent ask employees to manually calculate reimbursement amounts on an expense form. The result is an average reimbursement amount of $71.40 per employee per month, the study found. Approximately one third of companies said finding an easy way to calculate reimbursement expenses was their primary reimbursement challenge, while 26 percent said they know they are overpaying employees with their current reimbursement method.
Only 41 percent of enterprises said they weren’t familiar with split-billing solutions, which automatically split business and personal usage to more accurately calculate reimbursement amounts. Syntonic offers one such solution.
Syntonic said BYOD reimbursement overspend totaled $2.6 billion annually.
“BYOD is quickly becoming an established policy in the enterprise with nearly 81 percent of companies in the United States supporting BYOD today or planning to within the next 12 months, as identified by our survey,” Syntonic CEO Gary Greenbaum said. “However, the results also indicate that business leaders are struggling to keep up with both the technical and corporate implications of BYOD. We were surprised by how much is being overpaid in reimbursement costs due to a sheer lack of awareness and pressure to comply with labor laws. It’s also clear from the survey that businesses are highly dependent on mobile data but remarkably lack understanding about how mobile data is being used within the enterprise.”
The study, which surveyed 409 U.S. CEOs, CIOs and CFOs working for companies with more than 100 employees in the summer of 2016, found more than a third of companies said at least half of their employees were using personal devices for work-related purposes. Nearly 70 percent of respondents said employees spend at least four hours per week on their smartphone for work-related purposes, with 20 percent using them for at least eight hours per week. Additionally, 87 percent of companies said they are dependent to some extent on their employees’ ability to access mobile business apps from their person device.