Mobile device adoption in the workplace not yet mature, says Gartner

A study by Gartner has found that although 80 percent of the workers surveyed had at least one work-issued device, desktop computers are still the most popular type.

Gartner spoke to 9,592 respondents for its Personal Technologies study between June and August this year, across the UK, US, and Australia. While use of corporate laptops in the workplace is slowly increasing, phones and tablets are even further behind. If employees do use smartphones at work, they largely rely on their personal devices.

Mikaka Kitagawa, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner, said: "The low adoption of corporate-issued mobile devices underlines the fact that large numbers of personally owned mobile devices are used in the workplace. In fact, more than half of employees who use smartphones at work rely solely on their personally owned smartphones.

"In the era of mobility, it comes as something of a surprise that corporate usage of smartphones and tablets is not as high as PCs, even when the use of personally owned devices is taken into account. While it's true that the cost of providing mobile devices can quickly escalate, proper usage of mobile devices can increase productivity, which can easily justify the extra costs.

"Usage of personally owned devices in the workplace is nothing new, but the survey results confirm that this trend has become a new workplace standard. Two-thirds of survey respondents said that they use a personally owned device or devices for work. Smartphones and phablets are the most popular personally owned devices used for work, with 39 percent of employees using them, compared with just 10 percent who are only using corporate-issued smartphones and phablets."

Read Gartner’s report here.

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