“You shouldn’t reject things that make employees more productive, and if those things happen to be consumer technologies, so be it,” said Ted Schadler, an analyst with Forrester Research.
[..]
Letting workers bring their iPhones and iPads to work can also save companies money. In some cases, employees pay for equipment themselves and seek tech help from store staff rather than their company’s I.T. department. “You can basically outsource your I.T. department to Apple,” said Ben Reitzes, an analyst with Barclays Capital.You can trade in your iPhone to Buyback Boss and get paid out via PayPal or check.
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A survey of more than 1,700 information workers earlier this year by Forrester showed how much of the equipment-buying decision rests with employees. Nearly half of the respondents said that they bought their work smartphone while 41 percent said their employer paid; 9 percent said the cost was shared between the two.
I blogged at length about this back in April. BYOD for mobile devices is a hot topic that is simply not going away. Your company should be already addressing this or facing more and more rogue smartphone users. It simply is not acceptable to hand over a slightly used or outdated BlackBerry or even any other smartphone to a new employee or top VIP and expect them to be happy about it. I can guarantee you that this will not be their first mobile phone ever and probably not even their first smartphone, they already know what they like and forcing their hand might just cost you a new hire or even worse push that user to call forward to his own device and even worse, illegally hook up his email by coercing the Exchange guy into enabling certain policies.
Securing your corporate data and protecting your network and devices doesn’t mean rolling out ONE locked down device anymore. First of all you need to give your employees some credit and make them responsible for their actions. Not to mention that there some very powerful mobile device management tools out there. If you haven’t looked into these yet, I can almost guarantee that you have a top level director that is probably a little annoyed. And we all know that no company can afford that right now.
via Workers’ Own Cellphones and iPads Find a Role at the Office – NYTimes.com.
