California’s recent, controversial Court of Appeals decision regarding Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has put CIOs between a rock and a hard place. Compensating employees for the use of personal devices for work-related matters is certainly fair. However, funding employees’ personal calls is another matter altogether.
Filling out expense forms is a daunting task for employees and CIOs alike. Determining “who pays what” in terms of calls, data usage, etc. is a growing concern for organizations, for they must adhere to compliance, regulatory and legal ramifications. In a recent CIO.com article, Tom Kaneshige summarizes a new joint venture that may provide the answer to the BYOD blues:
AT&T has opened its Work Platform to enable split billing within EMM solutions from vendors such as MobileIron, AirWatch and Good Technology. In turn, Good Technology announced that its Good Work with Data would allow IT to separate business and personal cellular data usage on the same device, either iOS or Android, and automatically bill this data usage to the company and employee.
“It’s a step in the right direction,” says CIO Ravi Waran at Albemarle, a global manufacturer of chemical supplies, who is piloting split-billing from Good Technology. “It provides protections to both the company and the user.”
Good Technology’s split-billing solution even allows for different wireless data carriers on a single device, Waran says. For instance, a company can receive a bill from AT&T, while the employee receives a bill from another carrier. Most work-related data usage billed to the company will come from work email and attachments, as well as workflow applications.
Automatic split-billing puts an end to expense reimbursements and stipends. This means there’s no more filling out expense reimbursement forms, no more paying hidden costs associated with processing expense reimbursements, and no more dealing with tax issues connected to stipends.
Right now, Good Technology’s split-billing solution is limited to data, which won’t appease CIOs’ concerns with the California Court of Appeal ruling, because the ruling on work-related voice calls on personal devices. It is a step in the right direction, for split billing for voice calls is sure to follow in the near future.
For more information regarding split billing and AT&T’s Work Platform, read the full article on CIO.com.
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