It's a smaller world

Anyone who has ever had to hike a long mile to the nearest gas station to call AAA will attest to the fact that the world can sometimes seem very large. These days it is almost unheard of for someone to have to walk anywhere to make a call. Last month I arrived at the scene of a car accident and my first action, after ensuring the occupants of the car were safe, was to dial 911 from my blackberry.  The mobile device also provided me with the altitude, latitude and longitude of the accident to better inform first responders.

The world has gone mobile. Nobody can dispute this fact.

The ramifications of a mobile world are broad. Motorola’s fad has turned into a cultural phenomenon with rural villages in developing countries now having mobile phone service, but no sewage. The steady buzz of the blackberry can be heard everywhere from ski lifts in Colorado to weddings in India. In major economies, the workforce is now steadily becoming more mobile, where just a few years ago – it was unheard of to work from home. These days I work out of my home full time, for a company based on another coast, and hook into client systems half a world away on a daily basis.

The advent of the mobile workforce has created a huge infrastructure that requires a somewhat high level of maintenance. If I work remotely in Denver our IT staff in Virginia need to be able to push patches to my laptop, maintain my blackberry and keep my VPN secure, all without affecting my ability to produce the work for which I was hired to do in the first place. Stuck on a client site with no access to the internet, but need to urgently send an email? No problem. Pull out the blackberry and the email has been securely forwarded in a matter of seconds.  Need to quickly get online and log into a clients system to fix an urgent production issue? No problem, the mobile broadband card that came with your laptop will get you on there in seconds.

But what happens when things break? What if security has been compromised or if the new patch that Microsoft just put out renders other work critical software inoperable? What then? I can no longer log into my network let alone my clients’ networks.

This drives the need for a high level of automation, exception based monitoring and what the medical field might call Preventative Care. IT is now a business service and must be treated as such.

Working for a company that pioneered BSM puts me in a unique situation, as I watch this transformation firsthand. In some cases the transformation has been dramatic, with entire workforces becoming mobile. The fact that this has made these workforces more productive is no surprise and to maintain this trend, it is essential that corporations move towards practices like exception based monitoring, Service Level Agreements and proactive interdiction. The future of the mobile workforce lies in managing the business of IT as a service to its customers.