Your IT staff may be grumbling about BYOD, but there’s a whole lot for Finance to love about the Bring Your Own Device trend. How often does a tech trend wind up controlling costs and making employees happier and more productive? Almost never, exactly. And there’s one other reason Finance should be embracing this fast-moving trend:Your staffers are likely already using their personal devices to access and manage company data.

What’s wrong with that? Without a BYOD process in place, they’re doing it without the safety and controls IT should be putting on rogue devices.

A recent Harris Interactive poll for security firm ESET found that more than 80% of employed adults use their own devices for work. And according to a 2011 Forrester survey of 361 North American IT decision-makers commissioned by security firm IronKey, 79% believe the “increasing diversity of our end-user devices” will have a significant-to-moderate impact on IT-services spending, and 60% say they’ve already seen savings in that area.

How do they get these savings? Mostly by giving staff options and limits. For example, staff get a tech “allowance” to purchase the device of their choosing. The company also sets a limit for how much it’ll pay per month for a service contract.

Anything above or beyond that allowance is on the employee.

It’s amazing how much people will spend out of their own pocket to control the choice of device.

Of course, IT will likely outline all the complexities of supporting a variety of consumer devices. Don’t be intimidated by their grumblings.

Most organizations find that user-chosen devices need less support and are cared for much better than units provided by the organization.

For a more in-depth look at how CFOs are approaching BYOD, visit here.