The Purchase Nobody Decided to Make

Almost nobody sits down and decides to transfer capital expenditure to their employees. What happens instead is that somebody asks to read work email on their own phone, the answer is yes because refusing seems petty, and four years later a third of the workforce is doing company work on hardware the company has never seen.

The commercial question in “The Purchase Nobody Decided to Make” needs a record that both sides can read. An organisation considering Monitask guide for managers and team leaders for boss vs leader can connect time and project evidence with the cost model, provided reimbursements, corrections and non-billable work remain visible.

That is a procurement decision. It has a cost, a risk profile and a set of obligations, and it was made by accumulation rather than by anybody signing it off. The first useful step in this subject is noticing that it happened.

For an independent reference relevant to “The Purchase Nobody Decided to Make”, consult the European Data Protection Board guidelines; compare its principles with the proposed ownership model, access rules and real support process.

How the drift happens

The sequence is consistent enough to be predictable. Someone senior wants email on their phone. Then field staff want it, because carrying two devices is absurd. Then a contractor needs access and buying them a laptop for a six-week engagement is hard to justify. Then the finance system gets a mobile application and everybody installs it.

At no point does anybody ask what the organisation has agreed to. Each individual decision is sensible. The aggregate is an arrangement nobody specified, with no agreement behind it, no stated minimum standard, and no idea what happens when somebody leaves.

The telling symptom is that most organisations cannot say how many personal devices hold their data. Not approximately — at all. If that is true where you are, the arrangement exists and is unmanaged, which is a different and worse position than either having it deliberately or not having it.

What you actually took on

An organisation that buys laptops controls the specification, the replacement cycle, the configuration and the moment of return. Those four things are what the purchase buys, beyond the hardware itself.

Under a drifted BYOD arrangement all four are gone. The specification is whatever people happen to own, the replacement cycle is their household budget, the configuration is partial at best, and the return is a conversation on somebody's last day about a device you have no right to.

Against that sits a real saving on hardware, which is the part that appears in the accounts. The rest of this collection is largely about the parts that do not.

The reasonable response

Not necessarily to stop. Several organisations run deliberate BYOD arrangements well, and for some kinds of work it is clearly the right structure.

The response is to decide something that has so far happened by default: who it applies to, what it requires, what is paid, what the employer may install, and what happens at the end. That is a document and an afternoon, and it converts an accumulation into an arrangement.

Where it has drifted a long way, the honest first step is finding out the shape of what you have. How many people, on what kinds of device, holding what. Most of that is discoverable from the systems people connect to, and the answer is usually larger than expected.

Where the drift is hardest to reverse

Once an arrangement has run for several years, the people in it have replaced devices under its assumptions and built their working lives around a single phone. Announcing that the organisation will now equip everybody is not a neutral correction; for some it removes a device they chose and like. This is why the useful first move is to decide the arrangement rather than to undo it, and why the hybrid position in the later section is where most organisations sensibly land. The drift produced a situation; the decision should produce a structure that accommodates most of the people already in it.

What the finance function usually knows

The hardware line fell at some point and somebody noticed. What finance rarely has is any figure for the offsetting costs, because support time, administration and incident provision are not tagged to the arrangement anywhere. Asking them what the saving was is a useful opening question: the answer is almost always the gross hardware reduction with nothing subtracted, which is the number the whole of the costing section exists to correct.

An organisation that cannot say how many personal devices hold its data does not have a BYOD policy. It has a BYOD situation.