Answering the Drumbeat - How CIOs can say YES to the iPhone

Answering the Drumbeat – How CIOs can say YES to the iPhone

by Dan Dearing on 29/04/09 at 10:00 pm

Dan Dearing is the Vice President of Marketing & Product Management for Trust Digital and contributing editor for iPhoneCTO.

Millions of users have voted for the iPhone with their wallets and are using the device for both work and play, often without the knowledge of their employers. Case in point; I recently had lunch with an acquaintance who handles sales for a consulting firm. She told me that while her company provides employees with BlackBerries, it does not support the iPhone. She then proceeded to answer a call with her iPhone. “Shhh, IT doesn’t know about this, but I redirect my work emails to my iPhone. They would kill me if they found out” she said. This example illustrates a point made in a recent posting on iPhoneCTO. CIOs continue to say “No iPhone for you, we’ll give you a BlackBerry instead.” But, this “one size fits all” strategy is not working since today’s users are savvy enough to work around it, and if they’re not, then YouTube provides plenty of instruction. CIOs therefore should say yes to device choice and let the user decide.

The debate about whether or not iPhone is enterprise-ready typically revolves around the attributes of the device like its keyboard, but what really stands in the way of its adoption is the perceived lack of IT tools to manage the iPhone. BlackBerry, for example, provides CIOs with an end-to-end system that makes it easy to activate, support and maintain thousands of devices. Meanwhile, Apple has built a consumer device that is easy to hook into the enterprise but has only primitive tools to configure the device. As I pointed out in my last posting the Apple tools do not scale and cannot support a large deployment. There are, however, solutions available for IT to support large deployments of the iPhone.

Enterprise mobility management (EMM) platforms for the iPhone provide the CIO with centralized device management, security enforcement and easy device activation, making the iPhone as easy to deploy and maintain as the BlackBerry. EMM platforms benefit both IT and the user. For example:

- EMM platforms allow IT to leverage the native email sync capabilities of the iPhone providing a more reliable way for users to get their email.

- Large-scale deployments of the iPhone are made possible by associating device configurations with directory service groups and by providing a user portal to auto-configure the iPhone over the air.

- Compliance reporting and enforcement ensures that iPhone are used per the policies established by IT.

With a cost effective solution that encompasses all the features above, CIOs can feel empowered to embrace device choice. And instead of a drumbeat for change, CIOs may hear hands clapping from the cubicles everywhere.