Many enterprises and government agencies have seen use of the BlackBerry smartphone transition in recent years from small-scale productivity tool to widely used mission-critical platform. The shift has prompted IT organizations to actively explore what key technical capabilities (such as proactive monitoring tools) and internal process standards are needed to ensure superior performance and availability. Initial exploration of traditional, infrastructure-level and application-level monitoring technologies such as MS MOM/SCOM, HP OpenView or Net IQ has proven them incapable, as the fundamental architecture and design approaches of these tools cannot effectively tackle the unique technical and business challenges that mobile users present.
What has emerged in place of these traditional tools is a user service-level architecture and modular design approach known as Mobile User Management. As this White Paper will explain, true Mobile User Management, and not the old, traditional monitoring approach, has become mandatory for an IT organization to effectively support a mobile workforce that relies on BlackBerry smartphones to stay connected and reliably perform business functions anywhere, any time.
Studies of the mobile strategies of hundreds of organizations show that the IT/Business challenges in ramping mobile BlackBerry service across an organization can be summarized in two key areas:
- Challenge #1: Provide highest quality of service that mobile BlackBerry users demand at the most reasonable cost and level of effort.
- Challenge #2: Upon recognizing that BlackBerry has become a mission-critical platform to the business, deploy supporting technology, best practices and processes (e.g. escalation rules, service levels and compliance auditing) that conform to the organization’s internal IT standards and regulations.
Beyond the IT/Business challenges, experience also shows that the mobile user service environment presents some truly unique challenges that the enterprise has not faced before. These can be summarized in three key areas:
First is the mobile user community itself. BlackBerry smartphones are often used and relied upon by demanding VIPs who expect VIP service. IT operations and messaging teams are in turn expected to ensure high availability and superior performance for every single user; to proactively resolve emerging issues quickly before users are impacted; and to prevent problems from happening in the first place.
Second is the technology service delivery environment. Any mobile service tethered to the enterprise depends on a fundamentally complex multi-technology environment, as shown in Figure 1. In this world, one-half of the infrastructure for service delivery is outside IT control (RIM NOC, carrier, device itself). Tougher still, studies regularly show that 95 percent of issues affect only a subset of users. The result? IT cannot quickly determine root cause and resolve issues simply by looking just at the general infrastructure or infrastructure software patch levels, such as when email delivery or application connectivity slows or fails.
Third is the constant state of change. Most organizations find themselves in a rapidly changing and growing environment. The multiple overlapping growth vectors typically include adding new users at a rate of 30% to 3000% per annum; adding internal support staff (often 2X-8X) to cope with support across the growing user base; and trying to meet new demands to deploy more applications beyond email (CRM, Bloomberg/Reuters, SAP, Salesforce.com, corporate portals, custom internal apps, etc).
Ultimately, these challenges can be boiled down into a clear need to:v __ Look at individual and overall user experience, because to executives and VIPs the quality of service and experience really do matter
__ Monitor all aspects of the service delivery environment, including what’s going on outside the firewall with carriers and the user smartphones themselves
__ Receive proactive alerts before incidents become widespread, and when incidents do happen to find and fix incidents very quickly
__ Prevent problems from happening in the first place __ Analyze continuously performance and utilization across the entire system, including capturing and storing historical trending data, baselining activity patterns, and applying analytics for root cause isolation and leading indicator analysis
__ Track and control assets, manage device lifecycle and ensure compliance
__ Address known and unknown problems of today and the future So how do most IT organizations address these combined IT/Business and mobile user service environment challenges?
