Does your mobility strategy reflect employee demands?

[gfesta]

I think we would all agree that mobility is playing increasing important role in our personal as well as our professional lives.  The growth and adoption rate of mobile phones, which is only one aspect of mobility, has been unprecedented. In 2007, CTIA pointed out that it took 90 years for landline service to reach a 100 million consumers and less than 17 years for wireless to reach 100 millions consumers. Mobile phones are now a way of life for many consumers. Consumers have already realized the personal productivity benefits, amongst other things, and are placing new demands on business to support them.

With this influx of new consumer devices, what are some of the challenges you envision? Do you see any trends in corporate liable versus personal liable? Will companies standardize on multiple devices from different manufactures?

Gerard

Unified Communications Solutions Marketing

[gmcgill]

Employee demands are totally trumped by government regulations.

We all saw Apple bow to this pressure when iPhone 2.0 came out with Exchange support, along with the ability to push corporate policy to the device. The consumate 'consumer' device was modified to meet corporate demands. Considering how few consumers run Exchange servers, this was an enormous concession.

I think employees will continue to request and demand all types of features but the company will not place itself in a tenous legal position to placate these whiners. As usual, IT will bear the brunt of this, but we are here to enforce policy, not create it. Well thought out products will slowly gain our support but only after testing and a formal acceptance procedure.

The best idea I have seen is that of dual personality devices where a personal and a business number can be configured in one device. Separate billing, no visibility into the application data of the other personality and the ability of the company to kill the business part of the device while leaving the personal part untouched. A tall order for some of the phone OS vendors.

This approach would alleviate the current problem of company owned and controlled devices and return some freedom of choice to the employee.

I suspect we will begin to see location aware applications that disable the camera in gyms or sensitive areas. With the new California ban of mobile phone use while driving, perhaps the accelerometer can be used to disable the phone except for bluetooth hands free and voice dialing.

I cannot remember the website but Nokia has a site where live streaming video can be fed from one of their phones and be viewed by the world or archived. The possibilities for mischief abound here. This is most certainly a reason for companies to disable some features - at least while on company property, and possibly while on company business.