Consumer BlackBerrys are good for business
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
The new BlackBerry Bold sounds like a hot new smartphone: half VGA resolution, 600MHz processor, 1GB of internal memory, 2 megapixel camera, H264 video in hardware, GPS and Wi-Fi, 3G and EDGE, HTML email and a better Web browser ready for Web 2.0. Think YouTube, hi-res movie trailers, photo blogging, Facebook updates, ringtones, online shopping…
Oh, and think SAP CRM, encrypted email, secure Bluetooth for authenticating with a smartcard and all the other enterprise tools you expect from a BlackBerry. The Bold has a QWERTY keyboard and a screen you might point at but can’t touch (wait about six months for that). This isn’t a sleek little Pearl designed for consumers and the pockets in tight jeans; this a full-size BlackBerry aimed at the business. But it has all the consumer features – Bluetooth, 2 mpixel camera, multimedia player and a microSD slot – the absence of which was once the reason business picked BlackBerry in the first place.
RIM isn’t only relying on the security options in BlackBerry Enterprise Server to lock those features down to keep the IT department happy to ensure that BlackBerry stays popular in business. It’s deliberately putting consumer features into business devices to make sure that business users like them enough to keep using them. And businesses might want consumer features in more devices - to encourage employees to buy their own BlackBerrys and bring them to work. If your users are going to bring in a smartphone, RIM could argue, wouldn’t you rather it was one you can control and secure?
If you’re bemoaning the consumerisation of IT because you have to deal with users bringing in social networking applications – the way they brought in IM, Wi-Fi and PDAs – try thinking the RIM way. The consumerisation of IT isn’t going to stop any time soon. Your users have a faster network connection and more advanced communication options at home than they do at work; they probably find it easier to share photos with their extended family than to share planning documents with partners. You can complain about them not thinking about the security implications or not being able to judge which systems are good enough to work in a business setting, but you can’t stop them trying new tools and bringing them to work in an attempt to make their jobs easier.
And if you’re one of the IT professionals who Computer Associates says feels ‘disenfranchised’ because business decision makers don’t think about the IT impact of their business decisions, you definitely need to try thinking the RIM way. IT adds value to the business – but don’t expect the business people to know that (especially if you just told them not to use their favourite social network to talk to their peers in other companies). And expecting them to worry about impact on IT? That’s kind of forgetting who pays the bills and why a business puts in IT in the first place. To get the business to see IT as a value rather than a cost, a source of innovation rather than administration, try figuring out how you can leverage the technologies business users are trying out and give them what they want. And if you just don’t have the budget or the visibility to do that easily, remember that giving them that support will buy you a lot more consideration than burying your head in the sand.
Those technology-aware business users aren’t going to make your job easier on purpose and they’re not going to use the tools they bring in purely for business purposes, because there aren’t neat dividing lines between work and play any more. Instead of trying to lock down everything, look for how you can partition personal and business use – something RM makes easier than a lot of other vendors.
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