Little points of failure

It’s been quite a while since I’ve been up at 2:30 a.m. troubleshooting a worrisome technology problem. For the most part, our key systems at InfoWorld are humming, our IT team has operations under control, and it’s extremely rare that an IT failure has me crawling into the entrails of IT systems at such an odd hour. In the past, I’ve tangled with complex CRM projects and delivered the goods. With steely determination, I’ve stared down the barrel of enterprise content management projects that have literally made grown men weep. Years after leaving a company, I have responded coolly to panicked calls from former colleagues, quoting seemingly long-forgotten command-line incantations like poetry to help them out of a jam. Tonight, though, I’m tangling with a system so critical that it’s practically an extension of myself. The problem is decidedly unglamorous -- my handheld (a Treo 650) is endlessly rebooting, and I’m off the communications grid. No phone and no PDA means no productivity.

In the past, my PDA was separate from my phone, and if my PDA became unstable, it wasn’t a big deal. Now that my cell phone and PDA are one device, which I love, I’ve got a single point of failure that not only keeps me from knowing key phone numbers and critical appointments but prevents me from making a call even if I know a number from memory.

My experience getting my phone back up and running surfaces an increasing tension in enterprise IT: Mobile devices are growing increasingly full-featured and mission-critical for end-users, but many IT departments have no strategy for supporting them. I suspect that if your IT operation is at all like ours at InfoWorld, support for handheld devices still falls mostly on the end-user, which was certainly true in my case. To get my Treo 650 running again, I had to rely on years of experience with Palm OS and a healthy dose of the ingrained IT logic I’ve picked up solving all kinds of IT problems day in and day out for years. Not everyone is a CTO, though, and although every salesperson and CEO wants a Treo or a BlackBerry, very few enjoy drilling into technical minutiae at late hours just so they can make phone calls the next day.

On the near horizon, the continued mass adoption of phone PDAs such as the Treo and BlackBerry combined with the real beginnings of 3G network rollout suggests that, for certain mobile functions, handhelds really will provide rich application capabilities in a high-bandwidth environment, supplanting the laptop for key functions. As that happens, how can IT shops relegate handhelds to second-class citizenship with the kind of hacked-together management that had this CTO struggling into the wee hours?

The answer to that question is simple: They can’t. IT’s wait-and-see period for handhelds is over. It’s clearly time to elevate the handheld (phone and all) from tangential annoyance to first-class IT citizen. Fortunately, there are software solutions for centralized management of handhelds on the market already, including Good Technologies’ GoodControl and Intellisync’s Mobile Suite.

Nonetheless, many IT shops first must make the mental leap to view handhelds as fully managed devices. In the end, I was lucky that my Treo meltdown affected only me, but I can only imagine how angry a vice president of sales with a bum Treo might be making a collect call to the help desk from a pay phone. Now that handhelds can be fully managed, they should be -- plain and simple.