Analysts estimate that by 2020, 85% of organizations shall have some sort of BYOD program. There are several arguments how embracing BYOD in an organization benefits both end users and IT in several ways starting from lowering costs to better end user satisfaction and better productivity.

With BYOD gaining traction, end users/customers expect the service desk to support wide variety of devices.

For IT/service desk staff , the challenge is to ramp up to support these wide variety of devices. However, how much can a technician learn and support? Everyday there are new devices coming to the market and making their way into organizations. IT service strategy needs to consider the adoption of BYOD devices in their organization. Each of the ITSM processes(incident, service, change, problem etc) needs to evaluated and should consider BYOD support. IT need to be clear on what they support, the kind of SLAs they are willing to provide for such devices, device life cycle etc.

BYOD brings in SYOD (Service Your Own Device) mindset for BYOD users. As per the  research, when they have an issue on their device, 60-70% of BYOD users say that they most likely troubleshoot the issue themselves and a further 14% said they would ask a colleague for help rather than going directly to the IT department.

This mindset of BYOD users to use colleagues/peer/community knowledge would benefit the IT department and may not necessarily create more challenges. IT department can create BYOD discussion forums and encourage the endusers/customers to use them.

However, BYOD users might expect a social media forum they are familiar with. Something like this -


Using social media platforms may be too open for several organizations and internal discussions/content can easily go out of their control.

Hence you need a system that can provide a peer-to-peer platform where you can provide general guidelines, you can moderate the discussions , ensure the content is relevant, appropriate and internal discussions stays within the service desk boundaries and is easy to use. Novell Service Desk provides you options to easily create such discussion forums and embrace BYOD in your organization. These forums provide a peer-to-peer (P2P) discussion platform and helps to reduce the demand on the service desk and improve user self-sufficiency. Below screen-shots show an example BYOD peer-to-peer discussion forum in Novell Service Desk.





Few Points to note here:

• • Centered around customer: Provide IT support through the customer’s preferred channels

• • Technician provides general guidelines

• • Capture and share knowledge across organization

• • Customers can help each other and can contribute to any item

• • Little difference between technician and customer; the affected Customer tries the suggested solution

• • Customers can follow the topics/items that they care about

• • Open and Transparent: all stakeholders look at items in the same context

• • All information is stored and captured within Service Desk

• • Alleviate the headache of support requests that BYOD users will generate

• • Provide irresistible experience and make the service desk the chosen point of contact for BYOD users

To summarize, BYOD is here to stay and Service Desk has a huge role to play to manage and support these devices/users