Nick Jones

Symposium is over and it’s time to share a few of the impressions from my many discussions with clients and vendors.

Everyone is busy. In the wireless and mobile space my overwhelming impression was one of purposeful activity. Most people wanted to discuss projects that were either under way or imminent. Wireless technology hasn’t yet caught up with all the requirements; for example I talked with a CTO who wanted to stream high frame rate, high resolution video over wireless from a helicopter. I guess the best you can do today would involve running up a huge bill for satellite data, and even then the frame rate might not be enough.

There’s going to be more Apple indigestion. Lots of people were interested in how far they can go with iPhone as an enterprise device and application platform. Some had started to deploy a few iPhone apps internally, and some of those who’d done so were regretting it. Apple still isn’t an enterprise vendor. By that I mean the level of management and control necessary to support large iPhone handset and application deployments isn’t there. For example one client commented that she found it impossible to stop employees updating their iPhone OS when they plugged into iTunes to replicate music. She has no way to know which OS updates everyone has applied, and can’t choose to defer OS updates on her corporate devices until after she’s tested her apps against new OS versions. If I were a CIO I’d fight to limit iPhone to thin client and email and resist deploying native apps.

Consumerisation. I had several discussions about employee-owned handsets or laptops and also discovered some large deployments of consumer products such as microblogging tools. Consumerisation is also forcing companies to think very carefully about some of the implications of employee-owned devices. E.g. some lawyers worry about who owns the intellectual property if corporate information is created on a device which isn’t owned by the corporation.

Federal achievement. I chatted with a lot of US government clients this year and I hope they’ll forgive me for saying I am amazed how much they manage to achieve despite the impenetrable regulations which surround every action they take. As an outsider who’s spent his life in the private sector, government IT seems to me like trying to drive with both hands tied behind your back. For example I regularly advise clients to survey their customers to better understand which devices they own and what mobile habits they have. But federal organisations aren’t allowed to do surveys. Amazing.

The bottom line: a good symposium with lots of mobile activity and innovation. It will be interesting to compare attitudes in Cannes and Sydney with the positive outlook I’ve seen in the US.