Wireless Strategy: To BYOD or not to BYOD?

Wireless Strategy

Mobility isn’t just revolutionizing business. It’s also revolutionizing personal communications. In fact, employees are often much more aggressive about adopting the latest mobile innovations—including the latest smartphones, tablets and “phablets”—than the companies they work for.

One result of this has been a move towards the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) model for mobile enablement. Under this model, employees are permitted to use the personal devices they already own for work-related purposes. In theory, this saves companies the capital cost of mobile device— while eliminating the need for employees to carry two devices all day. There is also some evidence that employees are more productive when they work on a single device of their own choosing.

• Unexpected costs. Many companies found that much of the savings they expected to get from BYOD have been consumed by added management and support costs. Also, individual employees often wind up paying much more for minutes and data individually than their companies would under a consolidated plan.

• Complexity and confusion. In some cases, it can be difficult to come up with a fair stipend for employees to compensate them for business use of their personal device. What exactly constitutes “business use?” What happens when employees roam or use apps that consume an unexpectedly large amount of their personal data plan? What if the employee uses multiple devices? These questions and others have created conflicts, complexity and confusion for many BYOD programs.

• Policies vs. realities. Companies implementing BYOD have to create clear policies that address the responsibilities of employees participating in the program, such as keeping their devices password-protected and immediately reporting the loss or theft of those devices. Unfortunately, these policies don’t often work in the real world—especially when it comes to blacklisted apps and remote data wipe.

Some companies have responded to these issues by implementing modified BYOD—where the employee owns the device, but the company manages the wireless plan. Others have adopted a COPE (corporate owned, personally enabled) model that provides users with many of the benefits of BYOD even though the company both owns the device and manages the carrier plan.

OneCall can help you navigate these alternatives and choose the strategy that best fits your company’s usage patterns and culture. With our extensive experience managing wireless costs in a full range of traditional, BYOD and COPE environments, we can help you avoid learning some very hard lessons yourself. We can also help you transition to whatever model best suits your needs, so that transition doesn’t disrupt your business or create problems for your valued employees.