Corporate-owned personally enabled devices, or “COPE”, is a reemerging trend as enterprises continue to adapt to new ways of working. Where BYOD creates IT management and support complications, as well as security risk, the advantages of COPE programs include lower costs and lower risks. The key factor is that the approach also empowers employees to use these company owned devices for personal activities including social sites, e-mail, and calls, inevitably passing savings along to the employee, as well.
If you’re thinking of rolling out a COPE program at your company, follow these 4 steps for success:
- Make sure your mobility strategy maps to your company’s vision and mission. For instance, if you’re an airline with the corporate mission of “providing a world-class experience and safe travel” make sure that your mobility program empowers your employees and customers to do just that.
- Understand your internal stakeholders. Make sure you’re considering ALL users, how they’ll use the technology, and what their needs are. To use our airline example again, make sure you’re thinking of how your COPE program will be used by the mechanics, the flight attendants, and the front-desk associates (your line of business owners).
- Remember your internal approach will set the tone externally, as well. Know your customers and their technology practices and be sure your mobility plan can live up to these expectations. Does your strategy enhance the overall customer experience? Improve customer service? Drive revenue? Whatever the answer, your COPE strategy and business objectives need to reflect all those goals.
- Make it easy to get onboard – When you partner with a managed mobility service (MMS) provider, you can plan a mass rollout, ensuring that all your devices are deployed at the same time and in the same way. This is a multi-faceted benefit. Your employees will have a standardized, similar experience when they turn on their devices, which will instill confidence in the program. They can also rely on the MMS provider to handle support, avoiding a lengthy carrier-led process often associated with BYO programs. This also alleviates the burden on IT.
Depending on your specific enterprise needs and go-live plan, MMS providers can also customize rollouts, whether project or phase-based, and can ship devices directly from the carrier to the end user, simplifying the internal process and increasing end user satisfaction.
Ultimately, the advantages of a COPE program over BYOD are that you simplify IT support requirements by limiting device assortment, ensure increased enterprise information security by monitoring and controlling certain application access and usage for data leakage and hacking, and deliver cost savings for both the enterprise and the end user, driving company-wide satisfaction, loyalty and productivity.
