The Computer Economics annual IT Management Best Practices study finds that bring-your-own-device (BYOD) has become one of the fastest-rising practices in IT organizations today.

As shown in Figure 80 from the study, for the first time, at least half of IT organizations currently have a BYOD policy, which is up from 46% a year earlier. This represents a strong and steady increase from 2013 when only 37% of organizations had BYOD in place.

The rise of the mobile enterprise has been spurred by consumerization, and it appears that organizations have embraced their workers using devices of their own choice rather than restricting their use for security reasons. 

“Security is obviously important,” said David Wagner, vice president of research for Computer Economics, Irvine, Calif. “But good training, judicious use of virtual desktops, and mobile device management can mitigate most major risks. Employee happiness, productivity, and innovation seems to be winning out.”

The practice is one of 33 profiled in the IT Management Best Practices 2016-2017 study. The study, now in its 12th year, analyzes the practice rate, practice level, and growth trend for each practice. The practices in the study are as follows:

• IT governance practices: IT strategic planning, IT executive committee, IT project portfolio management, and IT change control board.
   
• IT financial management practices: IT personnel cost accounting, IT service cost accounting, IT chargeback, showing back of IT expenses, IT service catalog, and benchmarking IT spending.
   
• IT operational management practices:  IT policies and procedures, enterprise architecture, IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), project management office (PMO), IT asset management system, BYOD policy, post-implementation audits, user satisfaction surveying, publishing IT performance metrics, and DevOps methodology.
   
• IT security and risk management practices: Formal security policies, auditing compliance with IT security policies, data classification, security incident management, disaster recovery planning, testing of disaster recovery plan, and business continuity planning.
   
• Software development practices: System development life cycle, agile software development, peer reviews, automated testing, change management, and software metrics.

This study is designed to increase the awareness of IT leaders concerning what are best practices in IT management, provide benchmarks against which an IT organization can compare its own adoption and practice level, and justify investments to improve an organization's IT management practices.

This Research Byte is a brief overview of our report on this subject, IT Management Best Practices 2016-2017.  The full report is available at no charge for Computer Economics clients, or it may be purchased by non-clients directly from our website (click for pricing).