Roger looks at the growing trend of companies allowing employees to use personal mobile devices at work:

“As people pack increasingly sophisticated smartphones in their personal life, they’re clamoring to use those gadgets in the workplace as well. And many of their bosses are loosening up. They’re ditching the traditional BlackBerry-or-nothing policy and allowing a wider range of mobile devices, including tablets such as the iPad.

This arrangement can bring benefits for both sides. Businesses don’t have to buy as many phones for employees. Employees, meanwhile, don’t have to carry two devices around, and people who didn’t get a company phone before can have one now.

But there are a lot of potential pitfalls, too. “

Various strategies are proposed for making it work:
– A screen-on password is essential.
– A remote wipe of the device if it’s lost or stolen, or the employee leaves the company.
– Carving out a part of the device for corporate data.
– Keeping things simple, in terms of application access.
– Cost-sharing approaches.

My Comments
1. The complexity of making this work, across a multitude of devices, signals a big opportunity for vendor(s) that can make it coherent / simple for organizations.

2. This problem isn’t going away. The option is to carry two phones, but this is increasingly unattractive, even if the respective devices are leading edge.