ChannelWorld

Do ‘Business Cell Phones’ Really Exist

Mike Elgan writes about technology and global tech culture

According to JD Power, the Apple iPhone ranked number one in customer satisfaction for ‘smartphones in business,’ beating out LG and BlackBerry. But wait, everybody knows the iPhone is a consumer device, and not ready for business. It’s insecure! It has no keyboard! It has no back-end support! How can this be? The JD Power results should force us to recognize a new reality: There’s no such thing as a business phone anymore. In every workplace, each equipment exists somewhere on a scale, with a device that ‘benefits only company’ at one extreme and ‘benefits only employee’ at the other.

Company servers, PCs, and landline phones are clearly business equipment, as they’re selected, provisioned, installed, and serviced by the company or service contractor for business purposes only. The user has no claims on these devices.

Eyeglasses, clothing, jewelry, wristwatches, heart pace-makers, hearing aids, wallets and other personal devices are the personal property of each employee. The company has no rights over or claims to any of them.
Where does a cell phone fit? In ancient times (the 1980s and 1990s), cell phones were rare and expensive. If a company wanted executives or sales people to have cell phones, they had to be provisioned. As phones gained more capabilities and began resembling PCs, IT departments treated them as such. Like PCs, phones were (and still are) purchases based on company criteria, and for company purposes of security, data and application access and serviceability.

The industry has responded with all kinds of back-end solutions to facilitate corporate objectives. Companies like Palm, RIM, and Microsoft and many others have developed phones, server software, and other products designed to support the notion that a phone is a business tool to be provisioned and supported like a PC.
While all this activity was going on inside IT departments and in the industry, powerful changes were simultaneously taking place in the culture at large: Cell phones have become part of us. They have become profoundly personal.

Phones like the iPhone are strengthening the phenomenon. The user-friendly interface and amazing App Store create enormously powerful emotional bonds between human and gadget. They also radically accelerate the speed with which cell phones themselves evolve new capabilities.

The point is that people view cell phones in the same category as their clothing or other personal items, not as company equipment that their employer’s IT department allows or doesn’t allow.

As a result of this new reality, IT departments would be well advised to abandon antiquated notions about what a cell phone is, who owns it, who chooses it and how it will be used by employees while they’re sitting at their desks.

It’s time to stop fighting against the cultural tidal wave of cell phone obsession, against the hockey-stick growth curve in cell phone capabilities and against the growing complexity of security, data, devices and the Internet.
Let’s all understand that cell phones are part of the employee’s body -- inseparable and on the other side of the company-employee boundary. They have powerful capabilities now, and unpredictable capabilities in the future. They will evolve faster than your IT infrastructure.

Sure, vertical-use gadgets with cell phone capabilities are necessary and valuable. And some companies will still have very good reasons to do things the old fashioned way, provisioning phones and supporting them under a client-server model.

But for most companies, and nearly all employees, there is simply no such thing as a business cell phone.