NEW YORK – Several big banks are making bulk purchases of Apple iPads.
Barclays said it has made a bulk order of 8,500 iPads for staff to improve customer service and boost sales. The devices are being given to front-office employees in its 1,600 branches – an average of five per branch – in one of the largest uses so far of Apple’s tablets in an enterprise. Sovereign Bank and others are following suit.
Is the reign of Bring Your Own Device – in which employees bring in their favorite mobile computing device, be it iPhone, iPad or Android, and ask IT to load it up with their work apps and files – already on the wane?
“BYOD for us for some time has not so much meant literally you take whatever you have lying around in your house and your IT department will make it work,” said Aaron Freimark, CTO at Tekserve, a consumer electronics and IT consulting business based in New York. “I don’t think it’s ever really meant that. It’s more a sexy way of describing consumerization. Specifically, it’s about control of the device you have in front of you. Who has the admin password? How much control does the IT department cede to the user?”
Many banks and other large businesses Tekserve works with are buying iPads for their employees and setting up the devices with recommended apps and personalization, so that the user’s email account, VPN access and such are already on the device the first time she uses it.
Some companies assign each user an app store login and let them install their own apps. “That has the employee feeling ownership of the device, feeling responsible for it, taking more care what they do with it, and not leaving it around,” Freimark says. This has a beneficial effect on security and productivity, he added.
One customer, Sovereign Bank, has given the iPad 2 to 140 employees in a pilot. “That’s a case where the customer wanted a locked down experience, there wasn’t a lot of user participation and control,” he said. “Certainly in a highly regulated industry, that is an important consideration.” This was of the most secure implementations that Tekserve has ever done, he noted. “You can’t even plug it into your computer at home,” Freimark said. “It is locked down, prevented from syncing anywhere else, prevented from selling apps and what is on there is what is on there.”
