This article is an excerpt from 5 Actions to take for an Airtight Mobile Use Strategy in Government, a three-part series.

Taking five key actions to form your mobile use strategy will help ensure that your HR, legal, IT, risk management, and records teams coordinate and prepare to mitigate text message risks.

To set up a comprehensive archiving solution for the retention and oversight of text messages, you’ll need to define or refine your organization’s overall mobile use strategy. Step 1 uncovers the options your organization should consider when building your strategy.

Step 1: Device Ownership 

Who will own and operate devices used for text communications?
To begin, address how your organization will provide mobile devices to be used for business text messaging. This is important, because your device ownership and billing model will have a significant impact on how your organization implements its mobile and text messaging archiving and monitoring plan.

The major categories of device ownership are:

• Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
• Choose Your Own Device (CYOD)
• Corporate-Owned Personally Enabled (COPE)

Or, roll out a combination of these scenarios. Each approach to device ownership has advantages and drawbacks; However, there’s no perfect solution that suits every organization.

BYOD: Also known as Bring Your Own Technology or Bring Your Own Phone, this is the policy of permitting employees to bring personally owned phones to the workplace, and use them to access privileged company information and applications.

• Advantage: Quick to deploy
• Disadvantage: More work to enforce compliance requirements

CYOD: Organizations provide a predetermined, limited menu of devices that employees can choose from for business use.

• Advantage: IT support for employees is streamlined with fewer types of devices to manage
• Disadvantage: Procurement process can be complicated compared to BYOD or COPE

COPE: Organizations provide a device to an employee at the organization’s expense.

• Advantage: Exerts the most control and supervision over mobility and text communications
• Disadvantage: Employees may feel they have less freedom, which could hinder productivity

Look for next steps  in part two of our series. Coming soon: 5 Actions to take for an Airtight Mobile Use Strategy in Government
Here is a quick preview of Steps 2-5:

• Update your communications policy to account for business text messaging
• Determine which mobile carriers and plans your organization will use
• Determine if your organization needs to use a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution

 
 Register here for our free webinar, Setting up a Text Message and Social Media Archiving Solution, on Thursday, March 16, at 10AM PDT