Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

A tidbit from the previously mentioned seminar on BlackBerry, here’s a list of requirements from companies regarding IT. I don’t know if this is RIM data or somebody else's. As always I have to comment on them too. The last one might be especially interesting.

Complete end-to-end security

Feeling safe that no operator or even IT department is eavesdropping on your communication is crucial, even if what you communicate is nothing to be ashamed about (I’m not talking piracy and … other things here, but confidential information). You should feel as safe when out and about as when at the office accessing services and information locally. Of course that also means if somebody steals your laptop or phone, they shouldn’t be able to get to your data or be able to pretend they are you towards the services.

Scale and reliability

This is a given: What you invest in now you should be able to stay with for years, even if the amount of users grows considerably. Also, you don’t want down-time nor cause a lot of labor cost and wasted time for your staff.

Low TCO

That’s a golden oldie, as everyone has said it, but I wonder how well it can be quantified. What about all the PDAs (with or without mobile radio) that were handed out a couple of years ago. Were they ever recouped? It’s anyway a given and needs to be considered whenever buying those tens of thousands of consulting hours for customizing a system that really should fit your needs from the get-go, at least through configuration.

Manageability and integration with critical systems

Being able to manage user devices and services centrally and ideally automatically is key to low overhead for IT. Also, e.g. mobile access to a corporate service needs to be well integrated, so that data is directly exchanged with the same database used internally. Otherwise you run the risk of data irrelevance, latency and/or even corruption.

Architecture for mobilizing all key systems

I guess this is a very interesting one for this blog’s audience (if there’s any). Mobilizing is not just about mobile phones of course, but generally being able to access the corporate services untethered from the office, be it via a laptop PC, or an information-centric or voice-centric mobile phone. Phones have advantages, as I’ve described a couple of times, like always-on, always-with-you, always-on-line, with integrated functionality like camera, GPS etc. Especially information-centric ones of course, but also standard voice-centric phones will do for many cases, and in the latter case you don’t have to make a truck upgrade of all users’ phones. Field staff often still collect data off-line and sync back at the office. Being on-line all the time means data is transferred when it’s needed, rather than too late.

Posted by Anders Borg 09:59 | Permalink