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March 26, 2001

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Handheld Management Can Be A Handful

continued...page 2 of 3

Illustration by James O'Brien

More on wireless:

sidebar: Answer Policy Questions Now To Avoid Problems Later

IT Managers Seek Basic Wireless Commerce (1/22/01)

Wireless Gadgets Go The Distance For IT Executives (12/11/00)

InternetWeek: Hands-On (3/7/01)

Maritz Inc. in Fenton, Mo., is another company that's been invaded from within. But instead of living uneasily with wireless, Maritz, a business-services firm that specializes in travel and marketing research, did something about it. "We recognized that handhelds were beginning to gain in popularity, and we got the sense of an increased support burden," says Gerry Imhoff, Maritz's division VP of global technology services. "We didn't want to repeat the error of 20 years ago when corporate IT kind of ignored PCs in the hopes they'd go away."

So Maritz formed a team to establish standards, policies, and procedures. The company knew that managing a fleet of handhelds would be much different from supporting desktop PCs or notebook computers. For instance, handhelds' portability and diminutive size posed different security issues from those of notebooks. Setting procedures to manage and control the software would also be a challenge. Maritz wasn't even sure which devices to support.

So Imhoff went to the source--employees--and conducted a survey. What features, such as E-mail and Web access, were essential? What kinds of desktop or server data needed to be available on the road? Maritz designed the survey to determine the business requirements for handhelds and how much employees would be willing to pay for various capabilities.

Gerry Imhoff Photo by Michael DeFilippo Imhoff settled on four devices--the BlackBerry 950 and 957, the Compaq iPaq 3650, and the Palm IIIxe--that together encompass the full range of features he perceived his users needed. Standardizing on a few models minimizes training tasks while allowing IT to support a wide variety of user needs.

Employees use a PDA decision chart to determine which of the four handhelds will suit them best. If users express a need for Word and Excel compatibility, for instance, the decision chart steers them to the iPaq. If the top priority is E-mail, the BlackBerry wins out.

Unlike Maritz's somewhat reactive approach to handheld deployment, Recovered Capital took initiative: The Columbus, Ohio, expense-reduction and auditing consulting firm started a handheld program to boost its sales staff's productivity. The company chose Sprint PCS Touchpoint Web-enabled phones and Handspring Visor PDAs.

"We sat through two generations of these phones, waiting for [a device] that did what we thought we needed Web phones to be able to do," says Fred Hann, Recovered Capital's chief auditing officer. Hann also evaluated numerous handhelds.

Management of these devices has been relatively informal. For instance, the small company has no policy on appropriate business use of the phone, and there's no structured training on use of the phone or the Visor.