Who Should Own Your Smartphone? 129
snydeq writes "The great corporate barrier against employees using personal smartphones in business contexts has been breached, writes InfoWorld's Galen Gruman. According to a recent report from Forrester Research, half of the smartphones in use among US and Canadian businesses are not company-issued equipment. In fact, some organizations are even subsidizing employees' service plans as an easy way to avoid the procurement and management headaches of an increasingly standard piece of work equipment. Gruman discusses the pros and cons of going with a subsidized, employee-owned smartphone plan, which is part of a larger trend that sees IT loosening its grip on 'dual-use' devices, including laptops and PCs."
Another Reason to Love My Employer (Score:4, Interesting)
The rule where I work (Netflix) is simple:
1. We give you a Blackberry or an iPhone (you pick)
2. We pay for the plan
3. You use it responsibly
4. You figure out what "responsibly" means.
5. There is no Rule 5
Been there, done that (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked for a year and a half (not in the IT industry) in a position where I had to carry a company phone... and I also carried my own phone, because the company phone was strictly business. It is a hassle having to juggle two pieces of gear, especially since the job did not involve sitting at a desk.
That said, I'm all in favor of using my own phone for company business, as long as it doesn't burn through my minutes. Since my current job does involve a desk and a land line, that isn't really an issue.
Re:It can be a blurry line (Score:4, Interesting)
Granted, we're a smaller company, but we've taken the opposite approach. In the office, you either have a Mac Mini or an iMac. But when people are hired, we pay them a $3,500 signing bonus with the expectation that it is to buy a new laptop of their choice. Overwhelmingly they buy MacBook Pro's and add XP or Windows 7 with VMware/Parallels and we add $45 to the first paycheck of the month to cover data plans and "business" minutes/texts on their cell phones.
We find that they usually take much better care of the laptops when it's "their" laptop and it beats having to carry two cell phones.
Call Forwarding (Score:3, Interesting)
Current setup:
Work phone is a crappy blackberry pearl (the "keyboard" on it sucks).
Personal phone is a HTC Hero.
I simply have the blackberry forward all calls to my personal cell phone. This way if I ever leave the company, the HTC is still mine, if they need the work phone back because they are investigating something, I simply remove the call forwarding setup and give it back to them.
Only downside is if you miss a call that was forwarded to you, when you call back they get to see your personal cell phone number. This could be avoided by instead having the work phone forward to a google voice account #, and then on the personal phone, just use google voice to return calls.
Re:It can be a blurry line (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, to self reply, but I realise that the point I'm making here is rather cryptic. Your job as a sysadmin is to make sure that people can do their job in as straightforward a way possible, that means that you should be bending for your users. If your users want to use something you don't yet support, it's your job to figure out how to support it.
I appreciate that there are times where you get a higher payoff by saying "fuck that one guy with the weird kit, we'll get more by giving benefit to those 100 guys over there instead", but not ticking the IMAP box is not one of those times. By ticking the IMAP box you get to let everyone work how they want, and lose nothing.
Re:I prefer complete independence, thanks (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Depends on usage (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Depends on usage (Score:3, Interesting)
I find it much more convenient to maintain a single phone. I accept that my boss can then call me on it. If I objected to that yes I'd get a company phone, and keep my private number unlisted. But support is part of my job and I'm happy to help in a genuine emergency providing that it isn't abused. So far I've only received one unexpected call when I wasn't on support for the night in 5 years at my current job.
Re:It can be a blurry line (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, but then what does the mighty IT department do? Actually many devices support the Exchange-only servers, but enabling IMAP+SSL would probably cover all devices currently on the market (even my 2y old HTCs). And it's not a single user usually, once enable many could profit. And updates come automatically these days. So, dear admins, do the magic of checking the box and then you can get back to reading /.
Re:It can be a blurry line (Score:2, Interesting)
On the other hand, if you own your own phone, you get to decide how you use it. You are not obliged to answer it at any time of the day or night on the PHB's whim, and you are not subject to corporate restrictions on what you use the bandwidth for.
Some people find it necessary to carry their work around like a parasite on their backs, but IMO life is better when I can leave work on my desk and come back to it when I'm ready.