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IT and wireless still separated

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CIOL Bureau
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In the

halls of the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco during the CTIA Wireless

I.T. and Entertainment conference, it's easy to imagine that all businesspeople

are always connected over fast networks using attractive and powerful devices.

So why are only 6% of businesses surveyed by McKinsey & Co. working on plans

to roll out phones and other wireless devices by 2008?



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A panel

of wireless industry executives and IT decision-makers put that question to the

test during a panel discussion at the conference on the current state of

wireless mobility within large companies. Among the answers? The lack of a

coherent IT strategy in the first place, concerns about security, and a poor

understanding of the benefits of wireless technology, according to the

panelists.



Like

the early days of the PC industry, workers are "sneaking" personal

wireless devices into corporations and using them for work purposes, said Said

Mohammadioun, CTO of Intellisync. IT managers "need to wrest control of

this and make it an enterprise project. The role of is not to

convince people to use a technology, it's to control it, plan it, and make sure

the corporate assets are not compromised," he said.



However,

many businesses lack a standard way of dealing with mobile devices, said Reed

Hundt, an advisor to McKinsey & Co., a consulting firm. McKinsey's recent

study also showed that around 50% to 70% of U.S. businesses simply reimburse

employees for costs incurred using their personal communications devices rather

than rolling out that service themselves, Hundt said.



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CIOs or

other high-ranking IT officials can get bogged down when trying to emphasize the

benefits of wireless connectivity as opposed to wired connectivity, said Scott

Teissler, CIO and CTO at Turner Broadcasting System in Atlanta. The decision

really shouldn't be about the devices or the network, but the application, he

said.



"Once

you establish an application is key to the company, whether that application

needs to be wireless or wired is not much of a decision," Teissler said.

The CIO can then focus selling the competitive advantages of having that key

application extended to new areas, rather than trying to sell a CFO on the

productivity benefits of flashy devices, he said.



Turner

Broadcasting recently rolled out satellite phones to correspondents and

producers at CNN. While this involved considerable expense, it allowed CNN

correspondents to quickly respond and file reports -- often ahead of the

competition -- in the aftermath of the tsunami that hit parts of Asia last

December, Teissler said.



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Security

concerns are often cited in opposition to wireless strategies, but those

concerns are largely overblown at this point, Intellisync's Mohammadioun said.

"It's very easy to argue that wireless security is easier than wireline

security in your companies," he said.



There

are still inherent security problems in working over the Internet, but vendors

have done a better job figuring out how to protect corporate data in transit

from one device to another, said Jim Straight, vice president of wireless data

products and business development with Verizon Wireless. Corporations must use

technologies like virtual private networks and basic encryption standards if

they are going to deploy wireless devices to their workers, but that has been an

IT best practice for quite some time, he said.



For some companies, recognizing that their customers need products for

wireless devices makes it easier to bring those capabilities inside the IT

department, said Joe Ferra, chief wireless officer at Fidelity Investments. As

early as 1998, Fidelity began working on applications for letting customers buy

and sell mutual funds with mobile devices, he said. This gave the Boston company

insight into how best to roll out wireless devices and in-house applications to

its own employees.






Several panelists cited Research In Motion's BlackBerry device as one of the few
products being deployed in any kind of volume that offers corporate workers

ubiquitous access to e-mail, applications, and voice. But the specific device or

network does not matter nearly as much as making the wireless experience easy to

use and easy to manage, Mohammadioun said.

 



Source: IDG

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