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Using Employee-Owned Technology in the Workplace?
digitalvengeance asks: "As of Monday, my company is initiating a 'no cell phone' policy at all of our offices, including the IT department, where I work. I consider my cellular phone a necessity both in my personal and work lives. I have a number of servers and custom applications configured to notify me by text message, in the event of a problem. I am considering refusing to take work calls or text messages on my personal cell phone, and even quitting in protest of the new policy. How have other Slashdot readers dealt with policies regarding use of employee-owned technology at work? Any suggestions as to how I can get this policy overturned without looking like someone who wants to spend my working time on my cell rather than coding?"
To follow up on the gov't and the responsible thing to do, you see bans happening more and more now because of the new picture phones - they don't want confidential information leaving, which certainly makes sense. No longer do people have 'just cell-phones', they have more and more gadgets with it now, which may jeopardize businesses.
Here is my delima. I pay my phone bill, it is my cell phone. Yet 98% of the calls I recieve are work related. We have a zero tolerance policy also for cell phones. Which I adhere to as does everyone else. When I forget to turn MY phone back on after leaving work, I get my ass chewed. Yet my company pays for none of the minutes they use. I recently had my cell phone disconnected for currency issues ( lack thereof ). I was told that I had one week in which to have it turned back on or lose my job.
I had no clue what to do in this situation either. It has gotten to the point where I could no longer afford the bill I was getting every month for a service that turned out to be work related. I have tried showing and even turning in a copy of my cell bill showing the company use, and requesting reimbursement. You know what, it never happened. Yet make one long distance call at work, and you get blasted.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
As a DBA I face the same type of thing every day. When setting up a server I ask for their tolerance of downtime and suggest solutions. If they aren't willing to 'pay' for those features then thats their call.
Also, why were the cellphones banned? Is there sensitive work done onsite? Are they afraid of the new cellphones with built in cameras? Does it interfere with some electronics? There may be a valid reason behind the ban.
As long as your ass is covered (ie, you explained the situation to managment) then whats the problem? Are alpha-numeric pagers banned as well? Why not pick up one of those? You can still get your alerts and friends can still contact you.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
Clarification from the submitter:
Though this policy was abandoned due to my concerns prior to being implemented, it still has relevance in many places. Let me answer some of the questions that have been asked.
Work was, in-fact, saying that I cannot bring in my personal cell phone. Though they don't pay me for for the phone bill itself, I do get compensated for responding to server-down pages or other problems after hours and this more than pays for the phone bill.
Why are they doing this? The stated reason is security. We've been the victim of intellectual property theft due to camera phones, but in my case: it isn't an issue. I have, in effect, clearance to any and all company documents at this location and all others.
As for forwarding my responsibilities to my supervisor, it just won't work. I report directly to the president of the company and he is not exactly a power-user. I've been with the company just over three years, and he's never even glanced at any of my coding work. He simply believes the heads of other departments when they note that their IT systems are doing well, saving money, or whatever the case is.
To save this poor guy a headache: I am not Brian Cancio. I don't own that domain and have no involvement with it whatsoever. Digitalvengeance is just a slashdot ID as my usual alias was already taken.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
not exactly correct. The cellular phones interfere with the cardiac monitoring equipment and some of the imaging equipment (although i really doubt that a cell phone is going to last long enough to mess up an MRI). However it is the frequency they work on that causes the problem. That is why pagers are so popular in the hospital setting.
Picture phones are another problem. The advent of picture phones has led to bans of cell phones in medical, children, exercise, entertainment environments. While they exist they are poorly enforced.
The other issue mentioned about governemnt and security. Well if you are in one of thos jobs that has cell phone bans, i am surprised i am even having to explain this to you. YOU CAN BE TRACKED BY YOUR CELL PHONE. (watch "the recruit" they focus in on that one a lot). If you dont understand the implications of being tracked you probably shouldnt have that classified clearance you have.
Well my 2 cents worth.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Your line of argument raises the whole nannyism question. Is the lack of a picture phone really going to impede someone bent on doing the unethical?
In the case of a physically secure environment, one where your bags have to be checked on the way in and out, any data storage device of any kind is going to have to be explained at the checkpoints. They're not going to let you have a CD-R burner at your desk, etc.
The ultimate fear in such an enviroment is data leaving by airwave. Bluetooth is a mighty scary thing for administrators in such an environment, in that a bluetooth wireless mouse's access point could talk to a bluetooth cell phone, and then that cell phone can make a connection to the untrusted world. That'd could even worse than somebody taking a picture of their display with classifed info up.
When secure environments are being discussed, nobody's ever considered fully trusted.
During the first week, I raised the issue with HR that in the event something failed, how would I be reached if I wasn't near my home phone? Mind you, I owned a cell phone, but did not carry it at work. They promptly said "you have a cell phone, right?"
I explained that the cell phone was my wife's (true, inasmuch as the account was in her name) and that I did not carry a personal cell phone. Once they got over the shock of this, and I had convinced them that it is a very bad thing to find out in the morning that a critical service was down all night, they sprang for a cell phone.
You need to first make a case as to why a cell phone, any cell phone, is critical to the success of the business. Don't try to make a case based on how it is a time saver for you, or saves you hassle, or anything based on you. You don't matter in the grand scheme of things; you're just a cog in the giant gears of the corporate machine. But show them that those gears may cease to turn should you not be quickly told of a server crash, and they will realize the importance of a cell phone.
I would guess that this policy was implemented because people were using their personal cell phones for their own personal calls on company time.
I would guess the policy exists because of the possible security threat. Notice that a LOT of the newer cell phone models have cameras on them? Think about how this enables corporate espionage or sabotage. How easy would it be for someone with a cell phone/camera to surreptitiously take a picture of a sensitive document and send it to the company's competitor?
This is one of the many reasons the three-letter government agency headquartered in Langley, Virginia, does not allow cell phones inside the building. (BTW, said building is named the George Bush Center for Intelligence. Makes me crack up every time I see street signs for it.)
The existing situation was that safety rules had been established. Either from the start, or over the course of time, the workers started to bend the rules. Why? In order to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. They figured out that, *normally at least* a forklift could safely travel at ten mph instead of 5. They'd been willing to forego breaks to get the job done mroe quickly, so things wouldn't stack up.
The management says you're responsible for damage done if you aren't following the safety rules. The union says no problem, we'll follow the rules. However, following the rules strictly meant that it would take more people, possibly more equipment to do the same job. A forklift traveling at 5 mph can wind up moving as little as half the cargo as one traveling at 10 mph. Taking a break everyone had ignored before means fifteen minutes less work time per person per day; at the very least, it means that a job that could be done in ten minutes might now take 25, because the break's scheduled to come in the middle, and not taking the break at the scheduled time is breaking the safety rules.
The goal of the union wasn't necessarily to say, "Hey, we shouldn't be responsible for our actions." It was at least in part to say, "We haven't followed the rules strictly to benefit you; you want the speed and cost benefits of breaking the rules, you accept responsibility for when those rules break the equipment."
Under the same circumstances, I would be inclined to do the same thing; it was a simple CYA maneuver.
Note: This all assumes the situation was as stated in the original post - I have no actual knowledge of the incident, other than some vague recollection that there was an incident holding up shipping on the left coast before Christmas a few years back.
R David Francis
You've got to be kidding me. Did you read that post at all?
Management wanted it both ways - they wanted the union workers to ignore the rules so that they could get the job done faster, and they wanted to blame the union workers when something went wrong.
The union said "ok, fine. we'll just follow the rules then."
As it usually does when insanely restrictive safety rules are implemented and followed, work slowed to a crawl.
Actually, there are ways to find out the position of a cell phone with a fairly small margin of error - tens or hundreds of meters, depending on the density of cell towers. Location-based services depend on it, as do emergency services.
Also, one way of getting the cell phone to communicate without the user doing anything or even noticing it is using service SMS. These are routinely being used to transmit maintenance info to the cell phone. The German police has tracked people this way, and have gotten intro trouble for doing so because they should only be allowed to track the signal if the cell phone if the user sends text messages or calls someone.
I am not a cell phone engineer, though, this is really bits and pieces I picked up reading the usual tech outlets.
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