2004: The Year of the Hybrid Manager?

The hybrid manager will be faced with the challenge of fully understanding both traditional IT and mobile worlds, and will need to acquire a skillset around how advanced mobile devices such as Smartphones fit into the existing corporate environment. A failure to keep up with these developments will result in unemployment in five years time, when it will be essential for those responsible for corporate technology to have full knowledge of both the wired and wireless worlds, from software, to applications, to devices. There are two main drivers changing the traditional job role of the enterprise IT manager - the location of the workforce, and the devices they use. Increasing numbers of employees are working remotely, either hot desking, working from home, or on the road. Added to this will be a widespread dependence on advanced mobile devices for accessing business applications such as email and calendar management. As more business executives purchase devices such as Smartphones, IT managers will be required to understand the capabilities of the new devices and come to terms with the associated support issues. Support will be the biggest challenge facing the hybrid manager in 2004. Email is currently the number one problem for mobile network operators support staff, and with increasing numbers of business users now attempting to use their Smartphones for email, this problem will soon be the responsibility of the IT manager. In todays corporate environment IT managers take service level agreements (SLAs) from service providers for granted. However SLAs are not currently applied to the mobile world, and traditional call centres supporting voice alone are ill-equipped for the task of supporting enterprise-level data applications. In fact the IT world has no knowledge of - and no access to - the provisioning systems which are the only real support tools that operators have today. For business users who embrace the many benefits of using Smartphones as business tools, they will increasingly look to the IT manager for support. The new hybrid manager must be supported by the network operators, who have a role to play in ensuring that they can provide a comprehensive service level guarantee for support of business applications.