by Brianna Crandall — November 19, 2012—The advent of new personal computing devices with more memory and greater capabilities means that the workplace computer and the home personal computer will morph into a single device, transforming the workplace yet again and underscoring the continued blurring of lines between work and personal lifestyles, according to a recent study.
The trend toward Bring Your Own Technology or “BYOT” is among the findings by CoreNet Global, a worldwide association of over 7,400 corporate real estate executives that earlier this year released Corporate Real Estate 2020, a forward-looking study of corporate workplace and real estate trends.
The implications of sharing personal and business computing in a single device are said to include physical and electronic security measures, saving corporate expenses, and varying real estate space allocations. The changes specifically affect facilities managers in such areas as space management, furniture setup, cable management and equipment procurement.
CoreNet Global’s research findings also predict that the power and speed of personal digital devices will eventually make cloud computing obsolete.
By the next decade, information technology (IT) support budgets could decrease by as much as 40 percent, according to the study, as IT provisioning of individuals becomes the responsibility of the employee.
Another expected major contributor to BYOT into the corporate workplace will be the accelerated growth of the “contingent” and contract work force—expected to comprise up to 60 percent of many organizations in terms of total overall employee headcount by the year 2020.
“Companies will just assume an employee has that device and that it can run any applications, so I don’t see why a company wouldn’t just have an app that you load onto your personal PC, or iPad, or tablet, or whatever it is. Then, you just access their world through your application,” said one corporate executive who participated in the study conducted between August 2011 and May 2012.
However, barriers to the adoption of BYOT will remain in the form of security, particularly relevant to the world financial institutions, for whom keeping too much information in the cloud becomes an unnecessary risk. Still that challenge will give rise in the short term to the development of new and high-tech forms of electronic security, including biometric security.
“BYOT is not quite wearable yet and it’s not quite biometric, however, I think that’s coming in the next several years in the very near-term future,” the same executive commented in the study.
“I have one client right now with 85,000 people globally and with 35,000 people already bringing their own technologies into the workplace,” said another study participant.
