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General Information
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July 3, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 18
Page(s) 38 in print issue
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Mobile Device Management
Take Charge Of Monitoring, Updates & Security
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Jump to first occurrence of: [WEISMAN]
| Key Points
• Make sure you have a clear understanding of all of the mobile devices that are part of your SME’s network.
• A tool that can monitor your employees’ mobile device activities in real time can help prevent being surprised by roaming, overages, or other unforeseen costs that your carrier plan does not cover.
• You will need to figure out a policy that protects your enterprise while not encroaching unreasonably on your employees’ privacy. The divide between work and personal becomes especially blurred in the mobile device space. | In the past couple of years, smart mobile devices have improved the productivity of many organizations. From push email to complex applications, today’s smartphones let users chuck their notebooks for all but the most data-intensive tasks. Many of today’s handheld devices pack more processing power than high-end notebooks did at the start of the decade.
But mobile devices can give the most seasoned IT professional something to worry about. If you’re lucky, you’re running an all-Windows Mobile or Research In Motion shop (and if you’re really lucky, none of your senior executives are insisting on having an iPhone). But even if you only have to manage a single platform, you still have to manage the ways in which your employees use these devices, how you go about updating devices, how you monitor phone usage, and how to keep these devices and the data housed in them secure, among many other issues.
You may have an advanced MDM (mobile device management) solution in place or at least tools that would make up such a solution. Perhaps you don’t. Regardless, MDM, as with any other IT initiative, cannot be solved just by having the right technologies. The strategies you put in place will determine your success in managing your mobile devices across your network—and if you’re especially adept, it may mean an iPhone for yourself in the future. Here are a few things to keep in mind when mapping out your plan of action.
 Get A Clear Picture
The first thing you want to do when mapping out an MDM strategy is to get a clear picture of your mobile device landscape. Such a picture would include the number and types of mobile devices you have, the hardware health of these devices, and the software installed on each device, explains Mark Gentile, CEO of Windows Mobile MDM solutions provider Odyssey Software (www.odysseysoftware.com).
“Even if a company purchased and deployed 1,000 devices with the exact same cookie-cutter image, applications get installed either by IT or by the user installing games or recipe keepers if the device is also used for personal use,” says Gentile. “Drift is normal, but when you’re talking about corporate settings and policies, that’s drift you want to avoid.”
Once you have a clear picture of each device on your network, you can manage the devices more granularly. If your mobile CRM application vendor comes out with a new version of its software, it makes sense to update the devices of just your sales staff, says Gentile. Similarly, you probably want to remotely perform updates on mobile devices at night, rather than during the middle of business hours—and midnight in Santa Clara, Calif., is 9 a.m. in Frankfurt, Gentile notes.
A Good Phone Plan
Your mobile device assets aren’t just the physical devices on your network or your middleware server. The phone plan and the phone numbers that go with your devices are assets, too, and must be proactively managed if you truly want to maximize your cost savings, says Custie Crampton, vice president of MDM technology at telecommunications lifecycle solutions provider Tangoe (www.tangoe.com).
For example, a great domestic mobile phone plan does not prevent being accountable for roaming costs when one of your employees travels overseas, goes over his monthly SMS limits, or simply uses more voice minutes than what is allotted to her. A tool that alerts you to these types of activities as they are happening will let you act on these situations and reduce costs before they get out of hand, Crampton says.
Meanwhile, you need to determine how to bill or reimburse your employees for calls and messages made on their devices, says Gerry Purdy, vice president and chief analyst at research firm Frost & Sullivan. “If you impose a policy to only reimburse for business use, how are you going to discriminate between which calls were which? Some are both,” Purdy says. “And if you’re going to prorate the 18 cents on the [personal] call, then you’ve created so much overhead that you’re wasting people’s productivity,” he says.
Balancing Personal & Organizational Needs
Mobile device management’s biggest issue may be figuring out the balance between personal and organizational needs. For example, you may have instituted a policy that precludes employees from storing music on their mobile devices. However, some of your employees might want to listen to music or an audio book on the way home from work, while others get their best work done while listening to music. “These new wireless handsets are lifestyle [devices], and they go in and out of the different things you do in your life [because they’re] what you carry around all day,” says Purdy.
Of course, you need to protect your devices and the company data that lives on them. So for example, you might prohibit users from downloading applications that leave these devices vulnerable to hacking. However, wider flexibility and more variances of control of mobile devices will be necessary going forward, says Purdy. “In other words, ‘We’ll manage this part of the device but not that part.’”
For Purdy’s part, the challenge of negotiating between business requirements and personal preferences is creating a new era of policy development. “There’s very little case log because we’ve not had these things long enough where people could challenge them in court,” Purdy says. “You have the issue of people feeling they have the right to some privacy and not be invaded by the enterprise unfairly.” 
by Robyn Weisman
View the chart that accompanies this article.
(NOTE: These pages are PDF (Portable Document Format) files. You will need Adobe Acrobat to view these pages. Download Adobe Acrobat Reader)
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