Unifying Enterprise Mobility - Mobile Phone as Primary Phone

Making a Mobile Phone the Primary Phone

In addition to giving employees integration between their desk phones and mobile phones, FMC will allow those who are always on the move to make a mobile phone their primary phone, says Redman, who adds, “They’ll get rid of their desk phone.”

There will still be classes of employees, such as call center workers, for whom a desk phone will remain the best choice. But Gartner is predicting that within the next five years, a mobile-phone number will become the primary phone number for most workers who spend a large percentage of their time outside the office, and FMC will help make that practical.

Traditionally, having a desk phone was inextricably linked to having an extension on the corporate phone system. Now, however, technologies such as voice over IP (VoIP) have broken the connection between the extension and a specific wired phone location.

In fact, many FMC solutions work with the same Session Initiation Protocol technology that VoIP solutions use to set up a phone call. So the mobile phone becomes just another SIP client, accessing the corporate telephony systems wirelessly over IP. If a highly mobile worker does have a phone in addition to the mobile phone, it will most likely be a “soft phone”—a telephony application that loaded on the employee’s laptop.

The laptop soft phone can also be another way to enhance mobility, with or without FMC. For example, at Scripps Networks, the parent company for cable networks such as HGTV and the Food Network, most employees are already on laptops, and the company has implemented VoIP on Cisco equipment. Brian Hinsley, director of enterprise architecture, says the company is already experimenting with soft phones to let employees work from home and is planning for the day when a soft phone will be the standard phone for most people.

“We would like you to have the mobility to take your desk phone with you wherever you go,” he says. One point in favor of that approach is that it would make the company much more resilient for maintaining operations in the midst of a pandemic or other disaster that prevented people from going to the office.

Strengthening the Network

One of the consequences of making heavier use of the wireless network is that IT managers have to make that network stronger. For example, FMC solutions that include routing calls over the WLAN may avoid some cellular air-time charges, but any savings will have to be weighed against the upgrades required to make the network robust enough to support voice calls, as well as ongoing network maintenance demands.

Helminen says that even though many locations on the Michigan Tech campus were covered by more than one wireless access point, coverage was not ubiquitous, and network parameters had to be tweaked to make the FMC pilot work.

While it may not take a degree in radio physics, you do have to understand the causes of dead zones and interference in your wireless infrastructure well enough to troubleshoot them, says Zoph of Northwestern Memorial Hospital. One tradeoff for his goal of convergence is that he is serving a variety of devices that have the potential to interfere with each other.

Trying to pack in too many antennas can also be counterproductive if they wind up clashing, rather than creating overlapping coverage zones. But staff members at the hospital have become adept at using laptop-based diagnostic tools to trace such problems to their source, he says.

“One thing that’s important is to retest and monitor the environment carefully after you’ve gone into production,” Zoph says. “This is not something you can put on autopilot.”

Smart for the Enterprise?

One of the key features of the new iPhone is that it’s better at connecting with corporate networks. For example, it has the ability to manage e-mail through Microsoft Exchange.

But just because you can connect a smart phone to your enterprise doesn’t mean you should, says Danny Shaw, global practice leader of technology risk management for Jefferson Wells, a company that provides IT audit and risk assessment services. “For the personal user, the iPhone is great,” he says. “But it’s not for the corporate environment yet.”

Shaw doesn’t just criticize the iPhone. He doesn’t give phones that incorporate Windows Mobile as their operating system any higher marks. Neither Apple nor Microsoft has convinced him that it has paid enough attention to security to justify connecting these devices to enterprise systems. He points to the inherent concerns of network communications over the airwaves and the vulnerability of these devices to being lost or stolen.

The one smart phone to which Shaw gives more credit for meeting corporate standards is the BlackBerry. He says this device “is better because of the inherent security built into the BlackBerry.”

Much of the risk involved in deploying these devices comes from their ability to retrieve e-mail messages containing important corporate information. Companies need to assess their tolerance for that risk before proceeding, Shaw says.

As for more advanced applications, such as fixed mobile convergence, his instinct is to just say no. “We don’t say companies should ever be on the bleeding edge of anything,” Shaw says. “So [FMC] is something we would probably recommend against at this point.”

With all of these devices, there’s a need to enforce corporate security standards, such as requiring a password before the device can be used for e-mail access. “You have to treat your phones and mobile devices as if they were little computers,” Shaw says, “and you need to require the same passwords and policies on them.”

Back to CIO Insight