Moves afoot to break the impasse of who buys and manages what
The state of mobility in the enterprise is officially at a crossroads. Businesses are torn as to whether they should wash their hands of procuring mobile devices and wireless services for employees to save money or to cling to centralized control to maximize productivity and ensure enterprise security.
Some businesses have already decided to push mobile device and usage costs off to employees in an effort to save cash and to avoid corporate liability if users do something dangerous like text and drive and injure somebody. And it’s also true that users don’t particularly like having to choose only from the limited devices that corporate IT decides it will support if it’s paying the tab. So why not let users just go buy whatever the heck they want?
Well, this fragmentation makes it tough to execute a corporate-wide mobility strategy for a maximum return. It’s also difficult, to say the least, for IT to successfully secure devices, the data they store, and the corporate network they access when the company isn’t in charge.
What about a structured compromise between the two? The last newsletter mentioned that AT&T is making noise about helping users understand their usage patterns to curb bandwidth-hogging behavior when that behavior is out of ignorance. Similarly, some mobility management companies such as newcomer MobileIron are trying to establish a cooperative relationship between users and IT by arming users with the tools they need to see real-time information about their usage.
My colleague Craig Mathias believes that the days of enterprises being in charge are ending, though he acknowledges that security must remain top of mind. In that spirit, my biggest question is whether employees who procure their own devices will look favorably upon corporate IT installing a software agent on their property for management and security. The answer could make or break the emerging model of cooperative mobility between user and enterprise.
