Smartphone liability – Get a handle on strategy for mobile workforce

Friday, May 28th, 2010 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

In previous posts, I talked about the issues of mobile device liability (corporate liability vs. individual liability) and defined liability, in all its permutations.

There are too many variables in the equation to go about randomly managing your policy for smartphone use, ownership, and control. At the core, you need to define your strategy upfront. What are the business goals you want to accomplish? How do you balance the needs of BOTH the employee AND the company? Since every function and level of a company—not just sales and marketing Road Warriors (or “mobile maniacs” as I defined last week) —is affected by this plan, the strategy must be well thought out.

Segmentation of user types is generally the first step of the strategy. Forrester analyst Ted Schadler recommends dividing your information workers into several groups based on how their mobile enablement benefits the company:

• Those who use the most sensitive data get company-paid, company-managed smartphones
• Those who work extensively away from their desks receive subsidies for most or all of their personal smartphone charges
• Those who work away from their desks occasionally receive a partial subsidy for their personal smartphone use
• Those who rarely work away from their desks receive no subsidy, and you may consider locking their smartphones out of your systems altogether.

I ran a short little, non-scientific poll a few weeks ago, and half the responders said that their work phone was company-provided (with limited choices) and most said that the bill went straight to the company.

So who should own the smartphone? There is no perfect answer. Sometimes it’s the employee, sometimes the employer. Times have changed and employee expectations are different. The workforce today is demanding to choose their own devices. The locked down, two-year old corporate device just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Planning for this dynamic is the new reality. Forrester’s Schadler says, “The secret to smartphone management is treating employees like grown-ups and using a ‘trust and verify’ model for policy control. You have to stop treating it as an IT policing issue, and instead treat it as a business risk management question.”

More and more companies are already starting to make this shift in their thinking. A balance needs to be found between issuing smartphones as an IT-controlled management tool, to letting a certain subset of employees own the responsibility for their own devices. That balance point will vary for every company. One thing is certain—the IL/CL debate will rage on for a quite a while to come.

Go to the complete 3-part article >>

Tags: mobile device, mobility management, smartphone