Who Should Own The Enterprise Handset?

Ah….Beautiful Las Vegas. Sin City.  Home of bad taste, surreal people and some pretty amazing restaurants.  It’s also where many IT conferences take place.  I’ve been here for the last couple of days attending the Mobile Business Conference at Interop.  There’s a cardinal rule about this city:  “What happens in Vegas…Stays in Vegas.”  Normally, I would respect that rule, but I’ll make an exception this one time to tell you about two panels that took place today.

I was part of the opening panel for the conference.  It was pretty great to see the room packed.  The session was called “Top of the List: Key Issues in Wireless and Mobile.”  While there were 4 really smart people there, somehow I slipped in to lower the collective IQ by 20%.  In any case, the panelists talked about what they thought were the key issues.  Interestingly, much of the debate and Q&A ultimately steered towards the following session, which yours truly was moderating: Individual vs. Corporate Liability of smartphones.

It was a really great panel that included:

• Michael Saitow – CIO, MS Walker
• Mark Shull – CEO, Trust Digital
• Robert Tinker – President and CEO, MobileIron
• Steven Wastie – Sr. Vice President of Marketing, iPass

Let me give you a quick summary of the discussion:

• Should a company allow and/or support individually liable devices.  The answer to this question was a unanimous YES. The smartphone has become a physical extension of an individual’s persona.  The new workforce generation is used to having their own devices and that’s what they will expect moving forward.
• Who should be in “control”?  The IT department or the employees? The answer was neither and both.  It should be a partnership between the two “sides.”  IT should be there to help the workforce maximize the use of their devices to have the best mobile experience possible to work as effectively as possible with their device.
• Should there be a difference between how companies treat IL and CL devices? No.  They should all be managed – especially the corporate data that is residing on those devices.  That’s the part that matters.
• So if IL devices are “OK”, should companies even bother reimbursing employees for their devices? It depends what the company wants to do.  It’s not the carrot that will allow you to manage the device.  Instead, companies should work to develop a mobility policy that employees actually sign off on as part of their hiring process.
• Can individually liable devices and Governance, Risk and Compliance co-exist? Absolutely.  Again, this goes back to the idea of creating a mobility policy that employees sign off on.  However, the mobility policy is not an IT issue.  It’s not a Legal issue.  It’s not a HR issue.  It’s not an issue for the Line of Business.  It’s an issue for all these constituents and as such, they should all be at the table when the mobility policy is crafted to address the real needs of GRC.

So there you have it.  I broke the rule about what happens in Vegas.  I figured this was a worthy exception to the rule.