From Corporate Luxury to Corporate Headache
In a quintessential scene in the movie Wall Street, the infamous Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) is calling his young protegee Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) from the beach out in the Hampton’s. The phone Gecko is holding is this the size of a brick. Looking back now we can laugh and poke fun at what the first “cell phones” looked like and how they were a luxury for the wealthy.
As we fast forward almost 20 years from when Gekko placed that call from his brick phone, we have seen the proliferation of wireless devices embedded into corporate culture. The increased dependence on wireless devices like the Blackberry, Palm Pilots, wireless laptops, and cell phones have given rise to the growing problem of managing employee uses of these devices. In addition keeping track of how many devices each employee has can be a sticky situation. Not surprisingly this has given rise to the need for corporations to create policies on the usage of devices and maintain inventories of wireless devices. In fact many companies are finding that without an accurate inventory, they are paying for employees cell phones long after they have left the company.