Remember the line from the great Talking Heads song "Once In a Lifetime": "Well, how do I work this?" That was pretty much what I heard today at our Over the Air Mobility Forum on mobile device management.

The assembled audience had a lot of questions about MDM, starting with, "What is it, anyway?" (In fact, one attendee asked me to repeat my personal definition: for the record, it's "The entire process of purchasing, provisioning, securing, updating, and controlling the applications across the entire life cycle of every device being used by all your mobile employees.")

After hearing a presentation from myself and one from John Nichols, the group presales manager of Sybase's iAnywhere division (which also sponsored the event), one exasperated IT director asked, "So you're telling me I have to figure out what type of device every one of my employees is using, who their carrier is, and what they're running on it?" (He didn't say it, but the thought bubble above his head clearly read, "Fuhgeddaboutit.")

Actually, there are now pretty powerful systems from vendors -- from startups like Movêro Technology to major tech players like HP that'll do all that for you. But that question pretty well sums up the current formless market for MDM, which is packed with different types of vendors offering products that vary widely in their implementation and functionality, and with potential customers who are unclear on their own needs and on the technologies that can help fill them.

Those conclusions are borne out in the research from an original survey of several hundred IT decision-makers, conducted by InformationWeek's research arm, that asked about mobile device management strategies and practices. That data will be the primary subject of an analytics report that will appear in the next few weeks. Suffice to say here that, while more than half of the respondents said they have no plans to deploy an MDM solution in the near future, virtually all of them rated device management as "extremely" or "somewhat" important in a vendor's overall mobile applications portfolio. Go figure.

What's clear from the comments today is that, as Nichols put it, "If you're not managing these devices today, you will be soon whether you like it or not." So MDM is one of those "Pay me now or pay me later" issues for IT. When it comes to tracking, provisioning, and securing large numbers of mobile devices used for work, you can manage by foresight and planning, or by default. The winning strategy is not hard to pinpoint.