Last week, BlackBerry users, including myself, got a taste of what it’s like to work without their smartphones. This server outage was a nuisance for individuals, but a real productivity problem for large enterprises.
It didn’t occur to me that I was one of the many victims of the BlackBerry blackout last week when my e-mail messages stopped streaming onto the device’s display screen. My immediate reaction was to take out the battery and reboot. Nothing. Hmmm. In need of professional advice, I turned to my desktop and sent an e-mail to my company’s corporate help desk. It was then I was told that the Research In Motion server outages that were impacting users in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, had spread to the North American continent.
OK, no big deal, I thought. It will be fixed soon enough, I mused, as I moved from my desk to the conference room for a meeting, cradling my BlackBerry like a wounded bird, while thinking: “You’ll be back to normal soon enough, my little friend.”
That was at about 10 a.m. By 4 p.m., I was no longer mollycoddling my little friend. Instead, the smartphone that was no longer so smart–it was now just a phone–was on the receiving end of my evil eye, which would periodically shoot invisible daggers its way. I have to get on the train soon, I thought, and I don’t want to be completely unconnected while traveling the Northeast corridor. Of course, I have my notebook computer with the Wi-Fi connection, but it’s just not the same.
It was then I realized how completely BlackBerry-dependent I am.
Listening to other people moan and groan about the lack of service clued me in that I was not alone. The fact is, most companies are now considered a mobile enterprise. People work productively when they have information sitting literally in the palm of their hand. Take that tool away, and productivity suffers.
Or, if you happen to be a company that has standardized on BlackBerry smartphones, last week’s outage could have brought your business to its knees. According to a Wall Street Journal article, some companies are now evaluating a backup plan for their BlackBerrys. Meanwhile, other corporations are reconsidering their choice of smartphones altogether. All this, as RIM struggles to win back the trust of its 70 million customers.
One way RIM is trying to do that is by offering free applications to individual users, and one month of free tech support for its enterprise customers.
For CIOs that know it is not that easy or cost-effective to just switch plans and distribute new handsets to every employee, the RIM offer is a good start. But now when it comes to managing enterprise mobility, IT departments have yet another thing to worry about. On IT’s current to-do list: application deployment and management, security, and governance. But reliability has always been a given, right? Not anymore.
It is not just the device manufacturers or makers of mobile OS and apps that pose a risk; carriers could experience bandwidth issues in the wireless spectrum that would cause service disruptions. This latest incident serves as another reminder that it is time to start forming a backup plan in the event of a wide-scale wireless infrastructure outage. Because, as we BlackBerry users know, it does happen.