Support PDAs, But With CautionSupport PDAs, But With Caution

What a difference a year makes. In early 2005, EMC Corp.'s IT department supported about 200 BlackBerrys in a company of 23,000 employees. It now supports some 5,000 of the popular handheld wireless devices--a number that continues to grow daily.

The data-storage company's effort to empower its workers with mobile-communication technology illustrates one of the most compelling trends found in GCR Custom Research's IT Watch enterprise-spending survey, conducted in November: a projected 8.1% jump in spending on mobile and wireless devices for 2006. Our analysis finds that while these products and services present new opportunities, they also must be evaluated in the context of overall costs and alignment with business goals. CIOs need to watch the creeping threat posed by a spike in spending on mobile services, especially in a climate where overall IT spending is softening.

Total IT spending on staffing, products, and services was expected to grow 7.2% in 2005 compared with 2004, according to the survey. This year total growth in spending is predicted to slow to 4.5% among companies of all sizes. The softening in IT spending is consistent with an expected slowdown in the growth of U.S. gross domestic product, which is expected to fall from about 3.5% in 2005 to roughly 2.5% this year.

Careful Approach
With spending concerns in mind, EMC's PDA adoption plan was carefully managed. "Investments in mobility must be made cautiously and judiciously," says Terry Dymek, EMC's senior director of global technology. "Costs can very easily spin out of control."

EMC had a rollout plan before letting the hardware proliferate. It did a cost analysis and early on instituted policies governing the choice of service providers and hardware, applied familiar total-cost-of-ownership rules, and decided to support only one device: Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry.

EMC saw little benefit to standardizing on a single service provider, however. Employees are best served if they can pick and choose carriers; that way, they retain their existing cell-phone numbers. "We negotiated with each of the major carriers so that employees would have their choice," Dymek says, noting that the company didn't want to burden its IT department with wireless-service support. "If we contract with a single carrier and [the carrier] has a problem, then that becomes our headache."

Demand Outpaces Security
Additionally, the GCR survey shows business demand for mobility is outpacing demand for security, though the two are complementary and interrelated. Busi- ness spending on security hardware and services in the United States is expected to grow 6.8% this year, compared with the 8.1% jump in spending on mobility hardware and services.

Most IT professionals are trying to juggle increasing mobility needs with security and other IT-spending priorities. "Security is a huge consideration when we're looking at any kind of mobility," Dymek says. Field-service engineers at EMC were the first to receive custom applications for their BlackBerrys. Since the reps need to get case and service information in the field, they also must have secure connections to the company's data center.

Laurette Bradley, senior VP of IT at Verizon Communications Inc., also treats security and mobility as dual priorities. Verizon's investments in mobility extend past its field workers to support the always-on needs of knowledge workers.

While Verizon works on integrating recently acquired MCI, the company also is in the midst of a major fiber-to-the-premises deployment--one requiring entirely new systems to handle billing of not only voice and data, but also television services. At present, these initiatives are much higher priorities for Verizon than mobile spending.

Empowering Workers
The impact of empowering the mobile knowledge worker also is highly evident at Citigroup. "Being able to extend E-mail to executives who aren't at their desks is a real productivity win for us," says Steve Ellis, head of global operations at Citigroup's technology-infrastructure group.

It became clear to Citigroup's IT team that BlackBerrys weren't just an executive toy. For one thing, the devices went way beyond PDAs in providing instant voice and data communications, in addition to offering views of attachments in familiar file formats. And the devices proved more mobile than notebook computers. "For an executive, a notebook isn't that portable," Ellis says. "The BlackBerry is a truly portable device."

Citigroup's deployment of mobile technology has been somewhat less linear than that of EMC, which had the luxury of initially constraining the adoption of wireless handheld devices while it established rigorous policies. Like most financial-services organizations, Citigroup takes a decentralized approach to early adoption of IT--especially technologies that blur the business-consumer spectrum. Preliminary BlackBerry trials at Citigroup in New York and London rapidly morphed into a full-blown deployment. While EMC standardized on one platform, Citigroup isn't as firm. "We'll support executives who have PDAs, but we don't promote" the devices, Ellis says.

In the context of overall IT spending, GCR expects the growth in mobile and cellular services to drive overall telecommunications services spending for the year. Traditional needs such as staffing, IT services, and software remain key spending priorities as well, with hardware taking a backseat in terms of growth.

Jeremey Donovan tracks mobile technologies for GCR Research's IT Watch, which monitors business IT spending. This article originally appeared in Optimize magazine, an information sister publication.