Prisoner of Your Own Devices?
 It’s fashionable in ICT circles to talk about the various screens that have become the click and touch of our lives – TV, Computer, and PDA/Mobile (not counting Silver Screen, the biggest of them all).
Initially, the debate rested on which screens would dominate and which would merge or fade (remember PC-TV and TV-PC?). But thankfully, it’s settled that they will all play their respective roles.
For the CIO community, however, the discussion has barely begun. As information access becomes more and more complex and a slew of PC, handheld and mobile devices continue their beauty parade before the buyers, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make a choice.
Consider that more than 1 billion cell phones are sold worldwide each year. According to Gartner, 50% of mobiles will be smart phones by the year 2011. Now, how many will actually run business applications is still an open question.
While a few conservative companies insist that the majority of their employees remain tethered to their desk, the forward-thinking ones allow their folks to access their applications on the go. Their reasoning: field sales and service execs can be more responsive and productive if armed with tools to access inventory, customer and other business data they can read and manipulate anytime, anywhere.
Not that the promise of mobility is without the headaches of security and management. According to a Forrester report titled Redefining Enterprise Mobile Devices, “The growing numbers of employees who are not waiting for IT, instead going mobile themselves, are introducing major support, management, and security pains to the corporate environment.” It goes on to say that to prevent the trickle of incoming devices from becoming a flood, “IT operations must define a standard list of approved mobile devices from which employees are permitted to choose.”
In spite of the apparent harshness of its pronouncement, the report does have a point. IT heads will indeed find it a pain to walk the tightrope between user preferences, mobility imperatives, and departmental budget allocations. And once they do narrow down their choices to keep the maximum number of users just about happy, the growing user demands for enhanced infrastructure support will only keep their own smart phones beeping, often at odd times.
How would you like to take the call on mobile devices?
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