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?"

Comments

Government and Hospitals

[rwiedower]

Actually, both my friends who work in the government and my father who works in a hospital have this requirement. One has to do with security, the other with interference of pacemakers and electronic equipment. Sometimes a cell-phone ban (though I'm not in favor of it) actually is the responsible thing to do.

Re:Government and Hospitals

[gregmac]

It's only older (5-10+ years old) medical equipment that *may* be affected, and usually only if the cell phone is placed in very close proximity (2-4 inches away) from said device. This is also very similar to the ban on cell phones at gas stations. Most have signs up showing a red X through a cell phone. In reality, there are no documented cases of a cell phone causing any kind of accident whatsoever at a gas station. What is far more common is static discharge, which happens when you are statically charged (ie, from sliding across the seat) and touch metal near the tank opening, while filling it, and cause a spark. Even this is extremely rare, and is only a problem when the person freaks out and pulls the gas nozzle out, causing flaming gas to shoot everywhere. In fact, it takes very specific conditions for gas to even ignite from a spark (just the right percentage of vapour, temperature, etc). There was a geat episode of MythBusters where they tried the cell phone myth. They created a sealed chamber and had the gas under the exact correct conditions, and couldn't get it to do anything - with a cell phone, or with a device they rigged up to simulate static from sliding across the seat. (They did show some neat fire dept. video of the static discharge igniting the gas, so it is possible). IIRC, the only way they even ended up blowing up the chamber was by using a giant telsa coil or something that caused a really big spark. Apparently that whole situation was also caused by some study that was summarized somewhere else, with the statements about how rare and unlikely it is removed. But pratically every gas station bans cell phones. I certainly didn't blow up the other day when someone called me while I was filling my tank. Hell, I even had a conversation with them.

How about a PDA?

[FubarPA]

Are those banned? If not, and you're lucky enough to have wireless access via your PDA, redirect all of your text alerts to an email address accessable via your PDA.

This assumes you're in an environment with wireless, and you have a wireless-enabled PDA. Or, like another poster mentioned, see if they'll allow an alpha pager and go from there.

I was FIRED when I stopped using my own tech.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to run my own webserver at home on a mac. I did Mac phone tech support, and over time quite a few of the sites & hints I did for customers ended up on my server.

When I needed to sell the mac to cover school fees and told my work they should really host the stuff themselves, I was told under no circumstances should I remove work material from where it was used. Hell I was happy to give them the domain too, it was just a small vanity one that had no other use to me.

So in the end I had to sell the Mac, the site went down, and I lost my job. Sucks

Get a Nextel handset.

[Wireless Joe]

And then argue that it's not a cellular phone, but a two-way radio. You'd be tecnically correct.*

*And that's the best kind of correct.

Why not get them to sport a pager?

[zakezuke]

I have a number of servers and custom applications configured to notify me by text message, in the event of a problem.

If I were you... I woudl think it would be in your best interest to get them to sport for either an alphanumeric pager, or a two way pager.

Just a oneway alpha/numeric pager should work as well as your current mobile setup, may not even require changes to your script.

Two way pager may be able to be attached to a serial port... provided you use TTL levels, and just accept error messages regardless of whether you have a network connection or not.

It seems to me that you are doing your job and using your equipment to do it. If they won't allow you to bring in your own equipment it's only common sence for them to buy it.

Otherwise, you can invest in a handheld internet terminal, which while can be used as a mobile phone, are more likely to inspire sympathy as being a IT required device. Unless they plan to ban handheld palm like devices.

Laptops

[LostCluster]

One of my former employers had to implement a ban on personal devices unless otherwise approved because the salespeople were all bringing in personal laptops and wanting to use them despite the fact that they had perfectly good computers on their desks. This was getting to the point that they were starting to trip the circuit breaker and taking the entire room's power down.

The reason they wanted to use their own laptops became a bit of a turf war. See, these were mostly new sales reps who had worked for other companies before joining ours. They wanted to keep their sales contact list on their own laptop so they could bring it from employer to employer. The company wanted them to store their sales leads only on the company server because even though sales reps could only see their own accounts, when a rep leaves it becomes very easy to split their leads list among other reps and also limits the outgoing rep's ability to contact their existing accounts under a new employer.

The IT department's offer was to convert any contact database into our system. We never did get any reps who took us up on that, but some left in protest of being unable to keep their laptops up-to-date.

Re:Bringing in my own Laptop

[neurocutie]

Actually, on the contrary, here at our medical school/university, they have begun to DISALLOW the usage of personal laptops and desktops on our campus network. The theory is that if the university doesn't own the equipment 1) if there is any kind of security breach, data lossage, break-in, virus-spread that causes significant damages (read *legal* damages), it will get very messy if someone's personal equipment is involved, 2) then the university will have a much more difficult time mandating that a personal laptop run specific virus scanners, security software, OS's at certain patch levels etc. The situation is more critical here because of the medical school and associated hospital and the national HIPAA rules, all of which contribute to potentially large legal liabilities, either for HIPAA infractions, or if someone sues, etc.

It is a pain, indeed, but there *are* some valid reasons for controlling what equipment is brought on campus. It does create problems, e.g. a visiting professor brings his own laptop, or a company wants to provide on loan some equipment, or you are doing a joint research project with another institution and they send you some equipment to use, etc...

Re:Obey the establishment, you insensitive clod!

[pinkfalcon]

An example of this taken to extreme

Oakland Harbour started to have an unusual high rate of accidents (thnakfully no one hurt, but big cargo boxes dropped from cranes tend to have financial implications). Management decides to implement the policy that if any accident happens while in violation of the safety rules, then the disciplinary action could include days off without pay or even termination.

The dockworkers union decides to follow the safety rules strictly. All breaks were taken on the hour, no one worked any overtime, forklifts were not driven over 5mph, you get the idea.

cargo gets backed up - ships are waiting out in the bay cause the cargo can't be unloaded at the same speed it was before, everyone getting angry etc (but no more accidents).

Management locks out dockworkers union - the press calls it a strike, cargo is left rotting on ships, farmers can't send their crops to their customers, etc

finally Pres Bush calls in the Taft act and breaks the lockout but without resolution 5 weeks before xmas so walmart (and others) can get their chinese made junk on the shelves in time (I'm over-dramatizing, but you get the idea).

policy about accidents while in violation of safety code is still in place to this day.

pagers aren't outdated

[Stone316]

Unfortunately cell phones still aren't as reliable as pagers.. There are many buildings I can't get a signal in and if I go into a basement of a building (where my Taekwon-Do school is for example)I can forget about getting a signal.

They might not be cost effective but I feel much more comfortable having my critical alerts going to it.

Re:First step

[jon3k]

Really? You *know* this? Since 1996, I've never met one of these. But then, I don't work in some shit hole with a server attached to a DSL line either.

Apparently he's never worked in a corporate environment. I don't know about him, but if I'm getting a cup of coffee, and I lose a server, the anti-virus server kicks off an alert, or maybe a VPN connection to a remote site drops, I need to know *THEN* - not 5 minutes later when I get back to my desk.

Re:First step

[Dasein]

You know, on another post folks are all over me because I mentioned that being reachable all the time is energy draining.

I happen to agree with you. I think we all ought to seriously consider the costs and benifits of cell phones. I went without for a while and found it liberating. For me, I like having one but having it be known that I usually don't have it on or with me.

Funny, though. My wife and our kid's school always seem to be able to get through ;-)

Re:First step

[greenhide]

Well, I remember when Hurricane Whats-its-face swept through last fall. We lost power in the area of our office building for 1-2 days. We had battery backup, but only enough for 30 minutes or so.

I was feeling a lot of inadequacy around the fact that our servers couldn't be up during that whole time (We stayed with the servers during the work day [in mostly darkness] and then checked back every hour or so). And then I thought:

Okay, so people expect our clients' websites to be "open" 24 hours a day (unlike the company itself), and so now all of a sudden we're suppose to be up for hurricanes?!?

That made me feel better.

Of course, none of our servers run what I would call "mission critical" systems. If you're a financial company, or a health care company it might be another story. Of course, the hospital just down the road had to run on extreme emergency power (practically everything but life support turned off) because although it has a generator, and a second backup generator, they had been both placed at the exact same spot, and a tree hit them both (That also made me a feel a little less bad about our servers being down).

Some people do get paid quite a lot to keep servers up. I don't, and I still will go to the server room at off hours if the servers go down. It's called caring about your customers.

On the other hand, 99.9999% uptime isn't something that every hosting company can or should guarantee.

And remember:
If you guarantee 99% uptime, that means your servers can be down for 3 full days each year!

Change a bad policy by Following it

[ddavis539]

Company policy makers are great at coming up with silly policies that are not carefully thought out. (Which is why we can all laugh at Dilbert)

Several years ago I worked for a micro-manager. He required all developers to receive permission from him before any changes could be made to a reporting system. Even if you wanted to correct a spelling error on a report you were required to fill out a request for change form and meet personally with the director for approval.

As soon as this policy was implemented, the efficiency in the department dropped to almost nothing. We all joked that it took longer to fill out the paperwork than it took to actually do the work in the first place.

Things reaced a head during a business trip to Asia. I was working with some consultants who were giving me information on how to format tax reports required for that country. Before we could open up for business, the reports needed to be modified and printed out for approval by various government agencies. Because of the time zone difference, the change management policy really got in the way; yet the director insisted that he still wanted to approve every single change by phone each day.

Since he didn't specify a time to call, I would wait until the end of each work day in Asia and call him before leaving for the day (at 2:00 A.M. his time). Sometimes I would "remember" something I had forgotten to ask permission for and have to call him a second or third time. After about 3 days, I was given blanket permission to make any needed changes to the report for the balance of the trip.

Soon after that, the policy was modified extensively, to allow us to do our jobs. Major releases and new projects were managed by committee, but minor changes were allowed to go through as long as they passed the QC process.

Re:No alcohol X hours before shift starts

[WCMI92]

"BTW: I do know which end of the IDE cable goes into the motherboard but we tend to use SCSI these days on any machine that I'm likely to touch so I'll probably forget eventually ;)"

I work in West Virginia... Cost is everything. IDE RAID, and Serial ATA are all the rage.

Better do a refresher on IDE.

PS: my PC (AMD Athlon 64 3200) has a WD Raptor 10K SATA hard drive, as fast as anything but a 15K SCSI drive...

SATA/IDE is the future, for cost, if any other reason. Performance is becoming less and less a reason to go SCSI.