Were you one of those IT pros who reacted to the Sidekick data fiasco with a knowing tsk-tsk, and thought, "What were those people thinking? Believing that cloud computing mumbo-jumbo, and trusting their contacts and calendars to Microsoft and T-Mobile! Well, those dopes sure learned a lesson."
Unfortunately, your own IT group may be learning a lesson as well. While many companies imagine that personal and business mobile phone use is always kept separate, the reality is there is a lot of mixed use, and situations where personal devices become de facto work phones. Not every company issues BlackBerries to their staff, and even among those who do, usage is often rationed, with salespeople, senior managers, and IT workers getting priority.
What about everyone else? Consider "Joe" in accounting. He's chained to a desk all day, and a few years back operations decided Joe didn't really "need" one for work. Even if you offered a BlackBerry to Joe today, he'd decline. He doesn't like the way BlackBerries look, and besides, he already has a smartphone that he likes, and a phone number that he's used since he was in college. In fact, Joe likes this phone so much that he even put the number on his business card and email signature, and now has the contact information for about 60 colleagues, partners, and customers stored on the device. Well, he thinks it's stored on the device, and maybe somewhere else as well -- Joe's not too sure where, but he remembers the brochure that the carrier gave him said something about the contacts being safe on their servers. So everything's cool, right?
Well, guess what? It turns out that Joe was one of the one million Sidekick users affected by the problems at T-Mobile/Microsoft, and now the data is probably gone forever. And while operations and IT support may shrug and say "too bad, but that's his problem," the reality is it becomes his organization's problem. At the very least, the loss translates to lost productivity and some missed connections as Joe rebuilds the contact list and calendar entries. Worse-case scenarios include lost business, or many hundreds of hours of lost productivity at those large organizations which have many unofficial Sidekicks in employees' pockets. If these companies suddenly decide to force people like Joe to give up their personal phones for work purposes, there will be additional cost and time considerations, not to mention backlash as people are forced to give up their Sidekicks, Nokias, and iPhones when they're connecting with colleagues and clients.
But these costs and headaches may be viewed as a small price to pay the next time a carrier cloud aimed at consumers goes down or experiences a security breach. While employees may be frustrated at losing access to their personal contacts, business can continue as usual as long as they have followed the new policies and IT departments have backed up and secured the data.
So maybe the real lesson of the Sidekick outage is it's time to stop pretending that consumer devices have no effect on business communications. They do. Another lesson: It's time to proactively address these problems through a combination of policy changes, user education, and issuing company-owned smartphones to people who previously were deemed as not needing them -- or helping owners of popular consumer devices properly secure and back up the data on them. It may be costly and time-consuming, but it could represent a big savings in the long run.
Sources and Research: Pew Internet and American Life Project, Wall Street Journal, Compete report, Moconews.net, bits.nytimes.com, advice.cio.com, networkworld.com
Image: Noize Photography/flickr (creative commons license/commercial use)
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