Many of us know that a trend of „Bring your own device“ is being spread out there in many multinational companies. The term refers to permission for employees of a company to bring personally owned devices, e.g. laptops, tablets, and smart phones, to their workplace, and to use those devices to access privileged company information and applications. Is it actually possible to apply the same trend for example when it comes to accounting or payroll systems?
Viktor Mečiar, IT Manager within Accace Group, has shared with us in an interview why corporations should adapt to the latest trends:
Since 2005 I have tried to grip the idea of “all under one roof” and use it by all projects we worked on with clients, so in the end, somewhere in the future, we would be ready to use ideally only one information system or platform, throughout the whole company.
And although it was not always possible, the most of our clients were ready to share the same opinion as I did back then and tried to meet this goal at least partially. The idea of unification did not necessarily apply only to software our clients were using but also, and mainly, to hardware. Companies are using different kinds of hardware, whether rented or own, – starting from servers to end-stations or laptops – from only one producer. But it is not 2005 anymore and I think the idea “All under one roof” is not up-to-date anymore. Why? The answer is simple – the major advantages as compatibility or easy maintenance of existing hardware equipment are diminishing nowadays and the communication and maintenance of hardware equipment from different producers based on the different platforms is not problem at all.
End of the era of the unification of application
As I want to give you some examples, I will describe the equipment that I normally use, whether for work or pleasure. I use my laptop with Windows 7 quite often for streaming videos to smart TV, which runs on Linux. I also have a smart phone, with operating system iOS, which content I usually stream onto my laptop. I take it for granted that notes, which I record on one of my devices, are basically immediately available for any other devices of mine. And there is another question arising: Why do I use so many different products by various producers? Because for each type of device, whether TV, laptop or mobile phone, I prefer something else. I only use devices I personally like as perhaps most of you.
Bringing your own device
And do I think that this comfort is going to transfer from our personal lives to our corporate ones as well? Yes, for sure. You can clearly see the roots of this transformation process by the fashion wave “Bring your own device” that allows employees to use for example their own laptop in the office. Nowadays, it is not an exception if employees are using a laptop or smart phone by different producers.
Furthermore, I see this trend gradually appearing in the software parts of companies too. For example, big corporations do not insist for their subsidiaries to use the same accounting software any longer and instead give them more freedom to choose it according to their local needs and specifications. For a corporation, it is important to communicate within all parts, but even that is not a problem any longer.
And what if this trend is going far further from what we can imagine? Is it going to be possible for every accountant to choose their preferred accounting software for bookkeeping? In my vision, your accountants would be perfectly effective simply because they could not complain about the software and its pitfalls, they would choose their own personal preference. Today my vision may seem very utopian, but is it really so surreal?
TULIP Portal
In some measures, we can already say that TULIP, our portal solution for accounting and payroll processes management, grant employees to be independent from the software burden they are bearing. For example, TULIP platform allows publishing electronic payslips to employees of multinational corporations from different countries under one roof, i.e. one platform, even in the individual countries a different payroll software is used. Theoretically, your payroll accountants could choose the payroll software based on their preference and then connect everything through TULIP.
Thus, a call for new era reads: Bring your own software!
Contact:
Viktor Mečiar
IT Manager
Viktor.Meciar@accace.com
+421 2 325 53 000
