Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) lets staff use personally owned phones, tablets, and laptops for work tasks such as email, texting, and chat. While it cuts hardware costs and adds convenience, it creates a recordkeeping problem: substantive work conducted on a personal device can still be a record, yet that content lives outside organizational systems and controls.

In recordkeeping terms, the content of a communication, not the device that produced it, determines record status. A text message on a personal phone discussing an official decision must be captured, scheduled, and made available for retention, disposition, and legal demands like FOIA requests or a litigation hold. BYOD makes that capture harder, raising risks of loss, spoliation, and incomplete responses.

For example, an employee who texts an approval from a personal phone but never forwards or copies it into an official system may leave a gap in the record. Sound BYOD policy therefore requires that work-related messages be preserved in a managed recordkeeping system, regardless of where they originated.