Ricoh Gives Some Employees More Mobile Freedom

[Anonymous]

Ricoh Gives Some Employees More Mobile Freedom

The U.S. division of Ricoh has a new policy allowing employees differing degrees of autonomy with regards to the mobile devices they use, based on their roles. The policy is part of a broader move to increase productivity and idea-sharing at all levels of the company. At the more liberal end of the spectrum, the copier maker provides its salespeople with a stipend they can use to purchase any brand of device. Administrative personnel can also choose their own devices, but have to purchase it themselves. At the most restrictive end of the spectrum, the company still assigns mobile devices to field service personnel, but even here, has plans to expand its fleet of devices to include more popular devices like iPhones and Google Android-based phones.

Rather than forcing employees to accept the company’s choice of smartphone or tablet, Ricoh is one of many organizations allowing employees to connect their own equipment to corporate email and other business applications, including software than encourages company-wide collaboration. The policy is a tacit acknowledgement that phones and tablet devices sold to consumers have become more popular with employees than devices typically sold to businesses, like BlackBerry and Windows-based phones.

“It’s a very big phenomena,” said Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney who said that the policy, also called “bring your own device,” has intensified over the past year with the growing popularity of Apple’s iPad. Dulaney said that a recent survey of 2,000 attendees at a Gartner cloud and infrastructure confab last week showed that 60% of them said worked for a company that either had or was planning to implement a bring-your-own-device policy.

But the trend also complicates matters for business IT departments who have to provide technical support for those devices, and have to ensure that company data doesn’t become compromised if it’s stored on an employee’s stolen iPhone.

Ricoh is addressing the latter issue by remotely wiping devices of all information if they’re reported stolen, said Tracey Rothenberger, Ricoh Americas chief information officer, during a visit with Digits in New York Wednesday.

While Ricoh supports all mobile devices used for work, the level of IT commitment depends on the device owner’s job description.

Ricoh’s salespeople require a mobile policy that makes it easy to connect with their team when they are on the road, access company data on Salesforce.com and other Internet-based software programs and draw up PowerPoint presentations on the fly. Because of their demands, salespeople get to choose and buy their own combination of devices. The company covers technology costs with a monthly stipend.

Ricoh applies a different mobile strategy for administrators. “We’ll support ‘bring-your-own-device,’ but we’re not going to pay for it,” he said.

For support staff, Ricoh supplies mobile devices sourced for ruggedness and in line with the type of repair work that support staffers may engage in. The company, said Rothenberger, may procure more lightweight and appealing devices. “We’ll probably sacrifice some of the ruggedness,” he said.

The company is also introducing software that employees can use to share ideas, solicit information and expertise from each other, or support online brainstorming sessions. But Rothenberger said that older employees are less likely than younger ones to take advantage of this type of software, a “cultural issue” that will be harder to overcome than any technical hurdles.

The company uses software from Salesforce.com to help manage its sales and customer support, but decided to use software from Jive for its online collaboration. Rothenberger said the Jive application is farther along than Salesforce.com’sChatter collaboration software and “we want to set the culture [of increased collaboration] now.

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December 20, 2011 at 7:42 AM