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?
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
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.
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.
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
NEWS SERVICE.