A moving platform
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Supporting business applications on smartphones requires centralised control
Why the increasing use of smartphones to support business applications calls for strategic thinking
First, it was the PC. Then, 20 years later, the BlackBerry. Today, it is the smartphone that is gradually making its way into the enterprise without the IT department’s consent.
The unsanctioned diffusion of consumer hardware into business infrastructure is nothing new, but each wave brings with it peculiar challenges and opportunities.
With their touch screen interfaces, high technical specifications and versatile operating systems, Apple’s iPhone and its ilk give employees access not only to information but also, potentially, to mobile business applications. This has many possible uses but it also creates a new, unfamiliar facet of the IT infrastructure to be procured, secured and managed.
Happily, many of the lessons learned during the evolution of business IT can, with a touch of extra knowledge, be ported across to smart mobile platforms.
But experts warn that such is the scope of these platforms, and so crucial to business operations might they prove in future, that IT departments must develop a centralised and strategic approach today. Otherwise, unchecked proliferation of devices, networks and applications will spawn a whole new generation of IT management headaches.
From on high
The ‘consumerisation’ of business IT is a much-discussed phenomenon. To hear some pundits, it would seem that employees are shipping in entire catalogues of high street electronics into the workplace, and demanding that their IT departments connect them all up and support them.
In the case of smartphones, at least, the story is in fact a little subtler. Most large organisations quite wisely have policies in place that prevent employees using unknown devices for work purposes.
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“There’s a certain degree of pressure on companies to support smartphones,” explains Pauline Trotter, an enterprise communications analyst for Ovum, “but we see a lot of them, particularly larger organisations, resisting that pressure as much as they can.”
“However,” she adds, “they might be making exceptions for the board of directors, or for senior management.”
According to Jack Gold, a US enterprise mobility analyst, smartphones typically find their way into the business from the top. “In most conversations I hear about iPhones, it’s not about low-level people,” he says, “it’s about the executives who got one for their birthday and tell their CIO: ‘I like this thing, make it work.’”
When the CEO starts using their smartphone for work purposes, Gold explains, a familiar chain reaction soon follows. “Once you make it happen for the CEO, the people who report to them want it, and then the people who report to them want it, and so on and so on,” he says. “That’s the way BlackBerrys got into the organisation and PCs before that.”
In time, executives start having ideas about how the organisation as a whole might benefit from smartphone applications. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist at the C level to start thinking: ‘I want all my guys to have access to business intelligence dashboards on their iPhones,’” explains mobile enterprise consultant Kevin Benedict.
And so, even when corporate policy expressly forbids them, executive influence can force IT organisations to develop a strategy for supporting smartphones and the applications that run on them.
Architecture counsel
According to Ben Trewhella, chief technology officer of mobile applications development agency Mubaloo, the kinds of application that his clients want for internal use (rather than for marketing purposes) are usually quite simple.
“To date, clients have typically wanted systems at the simplest level,” he explains. “Light-touch stuff, like an application that allows the CEO to do a rallying cry to all his employees through an RSS feed.”
But as businesses wake up to the possibilities, he explains, their demands are becoming more sophisticated. “Now they are moving towards apps that let you do things like enter your expenses, things that you can do while you’re at a bus stop,” he says.
Continued...
