By Tom Kaneshige | www.cio.com
You lost your smartphone, which you also used for work. Think that’s bad news? It gets worse. You wait a few days to tell IT. These days that can get you fired. So now you’re thinking, “I really wish I read that BYOD policy.” Five years after BYOD first caught fire, IT is still trying to figure out how to handle it.
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Imagine you’re working for a big financial services company and you stupidly left your BYOD smartphone on the seat in a commuter train, yet you’re not really sure where you’ve misplaced it. So you search high and low, in your home and car, at restaurants and coffee shops.
In the back of your mind, you know that the company requires you to contact those robotic IT folks within 24 hours of losing your phone so that they can remotely wipe it, but you don’t want that to happen. They’ll delete precious notes that you need for a client, maybe even personal photos that you forgot to back up. Besides, you haven’t searched everywhere yet.
You miss the 24-hour window, and the company promptly fires you.
Fiction? Hardly.
“I was at a CIO roundtable last year where a bunch of CIOs talked about the challenges of moving to BYOD and how they’re establishing policies, and a few said that their policies state very clearly, if you lose your device and don’t report it within 24 hours, you lose your job,” says Bill Versen, director of mobility solutions at Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “A financial services company said they lost three people because of that policy.”
