How to control your company's mobile devices

Computerworld - It lurks along highways and airways. It's found in lobbies and taxis. It's difficult to track, hard to control -- and impossible to live without. It is, of course, the mobile beast: the indispensable laptop or handheld device used by sales professionals, field personnel, service technicians and traveling executives. And now more than ever, there's an urgent need to domesticate the species before it eats corporate profits alive.
According to IDC, the U.S., Western Europe and Latin America will have 31.3 million mobile workers in 2001, and almost double that number by 2004. This mobility explosion is both the cause and the effect of the growing numbers and power of mobile devices. Why? Because handheld devices, which were little more than glorified calendars just a few years ago, now have the ability to run full-scale corporate applications. In other words, countless people can't do their jobs without them.
In this environment, effectively shepherding mobile devices is essential. Yet many companies fail to plan beyond the next short-term need, purchasing a new management tool every time mobile devices prove themselves useful in a new way. Soon these companies find themselves working with a whole kit of mismatched solutions. They use one set of mobile management applications to keep mobile hardware, software and networking assets in working order. Then they use another set of tools to keep the data on mobile devices in sync with data on the LAN. What is desperately needed, however, is an integrated solution, one that combines systems management functionality and data synchronization into a unified whole.

Taming the Beast
Managing a mobile system implementation can be a complex and costly undertaking. Even in a traditional LAN environment, the cost for unmanaged PCs is nearly 30% higher than that of well-managed clients. This figure is even greater for unmanaged mobile devices running corporate applications. Most organizations need to support a variety of mobile devices, including laptops, PDAs, smart phones and BlackBerry wireless handhelds. While these small devices now run robust business software, they are only intermittently connected to the corporate LAN -- via wireless or wireline -- and usually at slow speeds. Some users are technowhizzes, but the majority can't (and for corporate efficiency's sake, shouldn't) be counted on to perform system maintenance tasks. And then there's the matter of keeping mobile data in sync with information on the LAN. Stale, inaccurate data on a mobile device can have disastrous consequences for a traveling salesperson or customer service representative.
Considering everything that's involved in managing a mobile system