Who's in Charge of "Mobility?"

I conducted the full-day tutorial on "BYOD - Why and How IT Should Embrace Mobility" at Interop New York this week, and once again got to ask one of my favorite audience questions: "Do any of you have the word "mobile" or "mobility" in your job title?" Of the 40 or so IT professionals in the audience, only two raised their hands. Given all of the attention being paid to mobility and the focus on capitalizing on this important capability, you would think that organizations would want to be out in front on it, but maybe that's not the case.

With regard to B2E (Business-to-Employee) from what I've seen, the lack of a Mobility Manager largely has to do with how mobile technologies made their way into the enterprise. The first mobile technology to appear was the cell phone back in the early 1980s. You'll likely recall that those early models were crazy expensive (my first plan charged $0.53 per minute and a premium for long distance) and the phones themselves were "portable" only in the fact that you could install them in a car.

"Bag phones" were the first stab at a portable product, and the first true "mobile" phone was the Motorola DynaTAC line made famous by Michael Douglas' Gordon Geckko character in the movie Wall Street. While the responsibility for acquiring cell phones was sometimes assigned to the telecom or IT departments, more often than not, it was given over to the purchasing department. The logic for that was that cell phones really didn't have much to do with PBXs or anything else in telecom. They were expensive items that involved unique contracts, just the sort of thing Purchasing managers knew how to deal with. Over time, cell phones evolved into smartphones, primarily BlackBerrys, and IT became involved in setting up the email interface and managing the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), but the primary management authority typically remained with Purchasing. The second major mobile innovation was the wireless LAN that appeared in the late-1990s. Since "LANs" were the purview of IT Infrastructure, someone in that group was sent off to the WLAN school, and was given the responsibility to implement and maintain the Wi-Fi network. Only us wireless folk remember that the original name for the Wi-Fi Alliance was the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance or "WECA."

The third and most business significant development was the development of mobile apps, which began in earnest after the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. In actuality, there were apps for the BlackBerry platform, but the geniuses charged with managing the BES locked down the BlackBerrys to the barest minimum of capabilities - essentially email and PIM ("Personal Information Management").

Few enterprise organizations had any expertise in mobile app development, but the Marketing folks understood immediately that this was something they had to get in front of and quick. In response, a new marketing group was spun up with a big budget and a name like "Digital Channels." Those folks ran off to find a development firm to build an app they could get in their customers' hands and join the mobile revolution.

So in the end, IT had control of Wi-Fi, some involvement in smartphone security, but the biggest (and most important and best funded) mobile initiative was somewhere else.

As is typically the case in large organizations, none of these different groups had much to do with one another, so the mobility initiatives continued on three separate and independent fronts. The development that now puts pressure on this lopsided structure was the introduction of bring your own device (BYOD) programs.

As soon as the iPhone was introduced, business people fell in love with it. With the other option being a totally locked down BlackBerry, they started bringing their BlackBerrys back to IT with the request that they get their email and network access on the shiny new iPhone. As the first people making those requests were the C-Level execs, something had to give.

The purchasing folks had no qualms about buying iPhones, but alarms went off within security and compliance as those early models lacked such basic enterprise capabilities as on device encryption, VPN capability, or Exchange Active Sync support. As time went on and Apple and Google began to add those enterprise-necessary capabilities, the mobile device management business was born to provide BES-like security and management capabilities for this new population of smartphones, but it is still anyone's guess as to who should be in charge of it.

The problem is that the management structure for mobility is being defined by the technology. There is no doubt that in the near term, Marketing will retain control of the B2C side of mobility. However, there's no reason that responsibility for B2E mobility should remain split. The problem on the B2E side may be worse than it appears in that no one in IT is taking the lead on mobility. That might help to explain why the B2C initiatives continue to outpace what we're seeing on the B2E front.

What I have seen in working with clients on developing mobility policies and security plans for B2E BYOD initiatives is that the responsibility for the development is handed over to an ad hoc committee. Generally the chairperson of the committee is from IT. If they have any sense will pull in representatives from security, legal, HR, labor relations and line of business managers who rely heavily on mobility. Unfortunately, once the policy is finalized, everyone involved, including the IT chairperson, goes back to their day jobs.

A field that moves as rapidly and unpredictably as mobile should have someone charged with monitoring developments on an ongoing basis. Further, at some point those B2C apps will need to enable communications with internal employees as well as with the company's web site, and that will entail interconnecting the mobile app and the UC system. So at some point, B2C and B2E may eventually converge. The question is will that convergence occur under the IT or the contact center organization.

All of this presents a challenge to the channel. It's hard to sell something if you can't even identify who the buyer is, and that is the situation we face with enterprise mobility today. What is clear is that enterprises are going to be pushing mobility initiatives, and if IT doesn't provide the needed support and direction, this is one more area that will move from IT to line of business control.