Mobile Mastery
Texas Instruments CIO Brian Bonner shares his strategy for managing mobile and wireless devices
CIO — Texas Instruments CIO Brian Bonner has a unique perspective on how mobile-device proliferation affects business operations and IT. That's because TI has some 31,000 employees around the globe, including in Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Oslo, Tel Aviv and Berlin. In an e-mail exchange, Bonner discussed the benefits and drawbacks of mobility, the cultural and geographic differences between the United States and Asia, and the fate of the laptop.
CIO: How does the huge number of mobile users affect device management inside your company?
Bonner: We realized early on that we needed to limit the number of device choices, corporate rate plans, centralized billing and chargebacks. This allowed us to manage costs and provide effective device support. We are using market-leading mobile middleware solutions that do an adequate job of device management as they evolve.
In what ways does the sheer number of mobile workers affect business and IT plans?
Mobile e-mail devices at TI are expected to double in the next three years due mostly to international adoption. This will drive increased focus on cost management. Also, we expect location-aware applications to grow as the number of GPS-enabled devices grows. The first will be maps and driving directions. We will probably need to start supporting an application in the next couple of years.
We expect employees worldwide to start figuring out how to do mobile entertainment on company devices. We'll need to set some sort of policy if that activity starts costing the company. We already have workflow approval projects in planning now, and we can expect more in the future.
As people become more mobile and rely less on a laptop PC, they will want to collaborate more with mobile devices. Mobile IM is probably the beginning, but online meetings will someday be on mobile devices. In fact, TI created its next-generation OMAP 3 architecture specifically for both of these trends, to enable even cooler mobile entertainment features—integrating features such as standalone digital cameras, gaming consoles, MP3 players and camcorders—while also enabling mobile workforce productivity, such as access to databases, spreadsheets, presentations, Web browsing and downloading, videoconferencing and e-mail.
We are a global business, so collaboration application use is becoming quite critical and is growing rapidly as a demand among our own global employees.
What benefits do you see emerging?
Mobile device management strengths and capabilities will start emerging in PC management solutions. For example, the ability to remotely erase a laptop, now emerging in the PC management space, first emerged in mobile device management.
