By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. According to Gartner’s PC installed base forecast, the total number of PCs in use will reach 1.78 billion units in 2013. By 2013, the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will exceed 1.82 billion units and will be greater than the installed base for PCs thereafter.?? — Gartner Group
This shift is particularly noteworthy from a number of standpoints. By definition, mobile devices “have legs.” While laptops certainly have cause their share of headaches for their owners and groups that support them, mobile phone will be giving the headache volume knob a hard spin to the right.
Mobile phones are promoted as highly flexible multi-purpose devices that should be used for a wide variety, seemingly without controls. Downloading apps, regardless of how well-intentioned and how productive they will make the owners is not in the game plan of corporations who need to make sure a controlled environment for their assets. At the very least this will make the use of these devices less desirable.
Security and privacy, the constant bugaboos of the use of these devices will likely be solved through the variety of vendors who have worked on this problem, but the degree of intrusiveness will make the devices different from the consumer oriented happy-go-lucky devices that permeate society today.
One certainty is that policy will be developed to take a number of positions. Until some fundamental decisions are made there will be little movement on the corporate mobility front. For example, who will be responsible for provisioning mobile devices, which ones will be allowed, and who will be setting them up as per standard image? What is considered acceptable use, and what apps will be allowed / disallowed? Are the devices considered corporate assets or personal assets? What about the data that resides on the device? Will your IT Department be developing / extending corporate applications for mobile devices? What about maintenance?
Looking at the life cycle of these devices inevitably includes “being lost.” What is the protocol that needs to happen, and how does it change depending on level within the organization?
This trend has been underway for some time. Somewhere along the way we hit the accelerator on this as demand has been fueled from the bottom up. Don’t blink, because as the warning says, “objects may be closer than they appear!” – and they appear to be in our kitchen now.
