So as you might know, I have been using an iPhone 3G for the last few weeks. I did this because I was tired of having no reception with T-Mobile...300 yards away from a tower. In any case, the first couple of weeks, reception was fantastic. Full bars, even in the elevator with HSDPA goodness. Life was great. However, all of a sudden, reception started getting weaker.
So I called AT&T customer care and did some hard device resets. A week later, I went to a local AT&T store and got a new SIM card. They say that sometimes that can help things, but I don't have a clue how a device's radio can be impacted by a SIM card. Whatever. None of that helped anything. My last resort was to go to an Apple Store and get a replacement device.
So given that my week was nothing but hellish, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I would go to my local mall on Saturday, get my iPhone replaced and then do my best to help the economy by spending as much disposable income as possible.
I got to the Apple Store and went to the Genius Bar to make an "appointment." 30 seconds later, I was talking to a "Genius." I explained to her the situation and without challenging me one bit, she went to the back area and got me a new device. Talk about customer care! That's not the interesting part (as far as I am concerned). The neat part was how the process went in terms of retiring my old device and provisioning my new one. I am talking about two of the most important parts of enterprise mobility management. While I still believe the iPhone is NOT ready for the enterprise, I do think however that mobility management companies can learn from how Apple did things for consumers....why? Because we are ALL consumers.
So the short version is this. The Genius gave me a new phone. She did a couple of things to make sure that my SIM card worked on the new device and then I inputed the information for my Exchange account. 90 seconds later, all my emails and contacts were back. What about settings and the configuration I had? What about all the apps I had downloaded and configured? This was going to be a pain. Unh Unh. The Genius tells me: "When you get home and connect your iPhone to your PC, open iTunes and when the phone pops up, right click on the phone and select 'restore'." Boy was she not kidding. It was that simple. All my downloaded apps, settings, ring tones, blah blah blah came back on my new device.
Enterprise mobility needs the equivalent. Self service device provisioning. Yes, it was the same device and that makes life easier, but there are enough times when that happens for organizations and the process is not as easy as what I experienced. So what can mobility management companies or platform manufacturers do that would make it as easy for employees to do what I did yesterday? The restore point was huge actually. I have not seen that on Windows Mobile....and I have gone through enough WinMo devices in my lifetime.
I guess the point I am trying to make is that Enterprise Mobility Management, as important as it is, need not be rocket science. It can be managed so easily that consumers (employees) can do it (with coaching). However, many MDM companies still think of the management being done only centrally. Perhaps there is a model that can allow self-service MDM and MAM (mobile application management)...
