"You're giving them or possibly loaning them the device, but it becomes their device for that period," Freimark .

Some VMware employees were taken aback by the BYOD mandate. "The response was, how can you do this to me?" Egan recalls. "You had people really happy and really sad. I initially got a bunch of flak from employees because, up to that point, the company kind of paid for everything."

Social Enterprise Network Eases Adoption

Employees with company-owned phones could simply take ownership of the phone itself and then call up the wireless carrier to change over liability. But that's not as easy as it sounds. The employee has to establish an account with the carrier and sign transfer of liability forms. It takes about three phone calls to do this. Carriers, says Egan, don't have the greatest customer service.

The transition to BYOD is labor intensive, agrees Brandon Hampton, a founding director of Mobi Wireless Management, a software and services provider advising Fortune 100 companies on wireless strategies. "We average about 20 to 25 minutes per user to convert from a corporate-liable to an individual-liable line--and we're good at it," he .