Time to get smart about smartphones

Smartphone technology is accelerating the consumerization of IT and transforming personal and business life, blending one into the other. The recession has done nothing to slow that trend; if anything, it has spurred it on. Employees who survived layoffs were left worrying about their own continued employment even as they coped with increased workloads. Needing to stretch the business day to stay on top of things and demonstrate their commitment to the job, people turned to a tool that lets them read that urgent e-mail, text that much-needed answer or grab that important phone call late into the evening. You can't take a notebook PC to the opera or to your kid's soccer game. But you can take a smartphone and stay connected -- and employed. And when you're spending more and more time on the job, a smartphone becomes a handy way to keep up with your personal life.

IDC predicts 20.9% growth in smartphone sales from 2009 through 2013. Symbian and Research In Motion remain the market leaders, but competition is sure to intensify now that three of the most important end-user tech companies -- Microsoft, Google and Apple -- have entered the market. That's a beautiful thing.

After all, we're starting from a low point. Today's smartphone is seriously wanting. Virtual keyboards are barely passable. Data transfer rates are pathetic (in the U.S., at least). Call quality is still only marginal. The smartphone is a jack of all trades and a master of none. There's clearly room for improvement, which explains why there's so much pent-up demand for a better user experience. Some people fall in love for six months at a time with models that offer only minor functionality gains over their predecessors -- and then they go looking for the next incremental upgrade. That's a sign of an immature product technology serving an engaged, demanding customer base.

For IT managers, such rapid change in a class of devices about which people have strong personal preferences can be a nightmare. At my company, a recent iPhone operating system upgrade killed the account-authentication process for corporate e-mail. Unable to access their e-mail, many iPhone users went out and purchased BlackBerries because they didn't have time to wait for the fix.

How do you support this huge shift to smartphones and the accompanying rapid churn of models and platforms How do you secure the connections to corporate servers How do you protect the devices themselves How do you safeguard your company from apps What is going to happen when, inevitably, mobile operating systems start being targeted in earnest by the bad guys What about the mixture of company-owned and personal devices