A Springboard To Services

Many organisations tend nowadays to let employees carry the burden of owning their own mobile phone or PDA. This has benefits for the enterprise, particularly with the reduced cost that it has to bear. Increasingly from speaking with CIO's and IT Managers as well as services providers, the awareness of twin downsides for this is becoming clear.

There is the issue of data safety and integrity, particularly for sales and other holders of confidential information, once the phone walks out the office relationships and data walk with it.

Secondly and perhaps of most importance for IT directoris is the issue with the lack of compatibility of phones and systems, this makes management difficult, prone to error and less effective from a cost point of view. This is increasing as the penetration and capability of the PDA continues to increase significantly.

The simple answer is to have the enterprise own the phone, but that does not seem to be a price that enterprises are willing to pay yet, it will not surprise if this changes in the near future.

As some would know I started as an analyst looking at the outsourcing marketplace, so over the years I have perhaps developed a natural, or even unnatural bias, towards outsourcing as the "highest" level of IT Services. As a result of this, when advising vendors about support services I often have told them to make a natural progression to outsourcing, using support services as a virtual stepping stone. However as I have gotten wiser and had to embrace the full world of IT services and not just outsourcing my perspective has had to change and I believe, change it has.

This leads me to comment on the passion of the support and helpdesk manager. I have been talking to a friend who is a help desk manager in transition, he was indoctrinated into it's world, then took a year or two to step out of it. He has ended up stepping back in to the help desk firing line, and has the skills and temper to be able to deal with (or now manage a team to deal with it on his behalf) all types of IT Service desk requirements. It takes a special breed, and also suits many clients.

We often need reminding that the natural move is not always towards outsourcing, many firms culture is better suited by  a more support and transactional engagement model, they key for vendors is truly understanding the clients culture and to be able to wrap around effective client satisfaction to that.

This way if they can get the passionate support manager then everyone can be happy and make the most of IT investments.