A lot happens in two years, particularly in the world of
smartphones and mobile applications, or at least it seems that way
with all the noise about upgraded networks and fancier handsets.
When we did our first survey on mobile device management two years
ago, the iPhone 3G was barely out and the BlackBerry Curve was all
the rage. Enterprise deployment of smartphones was in full swing:
56 percent of survey respondents had upplied smartphones to
up to 25 percent of their employees, 27 percent had given them to
26 percent to 50 percent of employees, 11 percent had them out to
51 percent to 75 percent, and 6 percent had equipped every employee
with smartphones. The vast majority of those devices were
BlackBerrys, and they were used mainly for e-mail and calendar
management.
Now two years later (full report to come later this summer), with
widely available 3G networks, you’d think that the devices
would be more widely used and that the applications would be richer
and more varied. You’d be dead wrong. Within the accuracy of
our survey, which is within five percentage points, the extent of
deployment and the applications in use on smartphones are
practically identical to what they were in 2008. E-mail is still
the main use by a large margin, and whereas just 30 percent used a
smartphone for job-specific applications in 2008, 31 percent now
report such use. The fraction of employees with smartphones remains
the same; they still use mostly BlackBerrys. It could be that
there’s limited call for job specific applications, and that
over the past two years those applications have grown from
rudimentary designs to more robust enterprise tools. But it seems
highly unlikely that everyone who wanted to start down the mobile
app path had done so before 2008. So why do we see such stagnation?
Device management is still a work in progress by any measure, even
though it’s clear that you see the need for it. Whereas in
2008, 52 percent of you said security was the reason to deploy
mobile device management, that’s now up to 73 percent, with
the next highest response coming in at 10 percent. And therein lies
the problem.
While the vast majority of you say that unmanaged devices are a
security risk, 61 percent of those not implementing device
management identify staffing resources as an issue, up from 46
percent in 2008; and 32 percent of you now see mobile device
management as too expensive, up from 26 percent. Simply put, for
many organizations IT budgets have been too tight over the past two
years to allow them to tackle mobile device security, and until
those issues are addressed, few shops are likely to step up their
development or deployment of jobspecific applications beyond e-mail
and the basic productivity tools that come with the BlackBerry.
This is just one of many examples that have played out in our
research recently. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that
through the depths of this recession, the lack of staff and money
to do security right has (correctly) led many organizations to
shelve projects that would otherwise be highly beneficial to the
business. As the economy improves, however, those same
organizations must understand that if the lack of security could
stop key business initiatives, then its presence should now be seen
just as much as an enabling technology. The days when the value of
security was viewed as too difficult to quantify should be behind
us.
The writer is Director of InformationWeek Analytics, a
portfolio of decision-support tools and analyst reports. You can
write to him at awittmann@techweb.com.