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For the social networking giant Facebook, mobile phones represent both an opportunity and significant risk to the company's business. The ...
Guest post written by Bob Tinker
Bob Tinker is CEO of MobileIron, a provider of mobile device management software.
Bob Tinker: Unplugged.
The technology industry will look back at 2011 and realize it was the year that Mobile IT was born. It was the year the IT industry figured out mobile and the year the mobile industry figured out IT. Business is moving past the PC onto mobile devices and its impact on IT will be as far reaching and as impactful as the shift from mainframe to PC. Visionary CIO’s are forming Mobile IT teams and Mobile IT vendors and services companies, purpose-built to address enterprise mobility, are springing up to service them.
The emergence of a new industry and profession is not new. It happens at moments of technology transition and we’ve seen this kind of disruption before. The rise of the Internet at work created the networking and security industry. The rise of e-commerce linked the business and Internet teams and gave rise to the e-commerce team. The rise of virtualization changed the data center profession from a big iron hardware profession to nimble software driven teams. Now it’s mobile’s turn to change IT.
Mobility in the workplace often gets wrapped up in the term “consumerization of IT” but that only begins to describe the sweeping changes that mobile is driving in business. Users expect same level of mobility in their workplace that they have in their consumer world – and it’s incumbent upon the CIO to deliver. Mobile no longer lends itself to a one-size-fits-all approach. Once upon a time, you joined a company and were handed a laptop and a BlackBerry. Now, the thinking is: “I have hired the best and the brightest and I want to give users the tools they prefer so they can be most productive.” And these tools, iPhones, iPads, Android devices and mobile apps, are coming straight out of the consumer world. This never, ever happened in the era of workstations and PCs.
Mobile devices and applications will replace PC’s as the primary business tool. Blindly applying the IT template of the PC era will fail. Why? Because mobile is profoundly different.
Mobile IT is interdisciplinary.
Mobile is turning traditional IT and computing on its head. In the old world, management evolved in a silo with vendors like CA and Tivoli. Security and networking became a separate group working with vendors like Cisco, Symantec and McAfee. Apps were big, client-server or browser-based projects from Microsoft, SAP, PeopleSoft and an army of ISV’s. Mobile turns this on its head. Now the entire IT infrastructure and apps community comes together on one small device. Apple’s App Store is an example of a great interdisciplinary experience. It is management, security and app delivery all rolled into one. And it’s easy to use. Similarly, Mobile IT has to bring together networking, messaging, security, apps and management. You are either going to need exceptional cross-team cooperation – or, like most of our customers, you need to form a new mobile-focused team that draws members from each IT discipline.
Mobile IT is fast.
No other enterprise technology changes as fast as mobile. With laptops, IT had one operating system that revved at leisurely enterprise speed every 3 to 5 years. With mobile, IT must face multiple operating systems revving at consumer speed every 3 to 6 months. New handsets and tablets show up every few weeks. In the last few months, we’ve seen new Windows 7 devices from Nokia, the Kindle Fire, iPhone 4S, and new software releases of Android Ice Cream Sandwich and iOS 5. RIM issued the PlayBook. Then recalled it. Then issued it again. HP launched the Touchpad, and then killed it. The pace of innovation and change in mobile is breathtaking. IT is expected to keep up.