Gartner said that while many businesses think it’s time for them to go mobile, there are obstacles to that move and many don’t know how to proceed.

But, said Darryl Carlton, a research director at the market research company, the key to success is appplications architecture and design,

“Designing your applications to meet the demands of BYOD is not the same as setting usage policies or having strategic sourcing plans that mandate a particular platform,” he said. “BYOD should be a design principle that provides you with a vendor neutral applications portfolio and a flexible future-proof architecture. If the applications exhibit technical constraints that limit choice and limit deployment, then the purchasing policy is irrelevant.”

IT departments are losing control of tools accessing corporate systems and data because of changes in the workforce and processes outside organisations’ boundaries.

“The community of users has expanded to include suppliers, customers, employees and a very broad range of stakeholders,” Carlton said. “We are no longer developing applications for deployment to an exclusive user base over which we exert standards and control.”

Partly, IT departments don’t realise that there are users that IT departments can’t control, and that means standards can’t be dictated and proprietary controls can’t be imposed.

“For CIOs to consider BYOD activities within their organization to be a temporary problem generated by a few disaffected employees would be a tragic mistake. This is a leading indicator of change for which an appropriate response is required. Reasserting control is not an appropriate response. This is a permanent and irreversible shift in the way that IT is procured and implemented to support the organisation, suppliers and customers.”