What started with employee requests to use their smartphones in lieu of corporate provided handsets has gained formal market status under the moniker ‘Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)’.  Somewhere along the way the idea of providing choice to bring a device into the corporate centralized model has been replaced by the notion to banish that device along with its financial and support responsibilities to the user.  The idea that ‘he who chooses, owns’ has led some companies to relinquish control and security of an increasingly critical company asset, mobility devices.

BYOD is a rapidly trending Google search term.  Second only to the acronym ‘BYOD’, the most popular related Google search is ‘BYOD Phone Plans.’  Why would someone be looking for a specific plan for their BYOD device?  Is this just a roundabout way to ask if there are capabilities to separate out personal versus business expense for a BYOD provided employee phone?

With sophisticated Mobility Managed Services (MMS) solutions like MobilSense’s MobilSentry, the capability exists to easily parse and collect reimbursement in an automated way from mobile devices for employee-incurred expenses.  This is the notion behind Centralized BYOD.  Examples of this might be an employee’s financial contribution toward the purchase of the handset or participation in a portion of the ongoing monthly costs.  It could include collecting reimbursement for toll charges, international travel when not business or download subscriptions, which are generally not business charges.

Centralized BYOD provides something the personal version of BYOD can never provide, namely, oversight, control (of at least the business portion of usage) and significantly lower overall cost to both the user and the company.  When you are considering your own company’s approach to BYOD, please do not overlook what could be the most powerful and effective instance of BYOD, Centralized BYOD using an MMS solution to provide the optimization and control.

Thanks to Jake O’Donnell’s (@JakeODonnell_TT) article published 10 July 2014 in Search Consumerization, we see that BYOD adoption is not at the pace the media hype would suggest.  As outlined in the article, there are a number of reasons, but the fact remains the trending nature of BYOD and the recent research are not aligning.  We believe the more practical and reasonable approach to meet the real needs of balancing personal choice with business need is to retain central management and not in enterprises abdicating responsibility for the support of wireless devices.  The better answer lies in tailoring the support and segmentation of the personal responsibility as Corporate liable devices.  Why would the business need be the subordinate partner in the BYOD business versus personal duet?  For more details on the MobilSense Solution, visit our website at www.mobilsense.com.

Check out Jake O’Donnell’s article at http://bit.ly/1w6hIPt.

Some Companies Take BYOD Personal, How About Yours? 

Since the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) dilemma first appeared on the scene, there has been no shortage of opinions on how to address the situation.  Managing mobile devices is simply not a core competency in all companies.  For some, BYOD delivered the excuse they were seeking to dodge corporate liable mobile management responsibilities.   As a result of viewing mobile devices as intrinsically personal in nature, companies both large and small, have pushed mobile device responsibility to employees while providing a fixed monthly business reimbursement.  The correlation between bringing your own personal device and personal liability seemed for some an easy connection to make.

The ‘reward’ for turning a device used the majority of time for business purposes to an employee for management and financial liability has become a fixed monthly stipend.  From the very beginning of mobile devices in corporate environments there has been a reasonable tolerance for some amount of personal usage.  So the question becomes how is your organization viewing mobile devices, business or personal?

A Warning Note on BYOD

What has changed and why is BYOD becoming the point of justification to burden employees with expense and time commitments usually the responsibility of their employer?  There are three contributing factors, 1) the high cost and growing percentage of smartphones and tablets which continue to drive up cost, 2) presumptions that personal liability can reduce mobility expenses, and 3) the challenge of maintaining effective internal mobile management competencies.  For companies with a history of utilizing a corporate liable strategy they are taking a risk on a potential solution that has delivered marginal results and may run counter to a company’s culture and security standards.