Eighteen months after CPS Energy deployed the first new smartphones under its Magellan Program, it became obvious to Barron and his team that their efforts to manage users' wireless service costs, as well as the devices themselves, were failing.

At first, smartphone bills were being charged to individual CPS Energy cost centers. That meant that for more than a year, a group of internal staffers was dedicated to analyzing every single bill, as well as trying to spot trends in underused voice minutes or data usage overages.

So Barron decided to outsource that work to Richardson, Texas-based Advantix Solutions Group, a provider of various mobile phone consulting services. Finding and choosing Advantix was "simple," Barron says, because research on the subject yielded only three or four companies that could meet CPS's individual needs, and after a request for proposal (RFP) process, it was clear Advantix was best suited to serve the company, he says.

"Utilizing Advantix to handle our communications contracts with AT&T has allowed our internal IT resources to focus almost exclusively on developing new services and offerings for our smart phones," Barron says. "We are 'light-years' ahead of companies that try to manage this service in-house."

CPS also created two separate divisions within IT, the communications and technical services departments, to focus on smartphone infrastructure and device management. Communications focuses on managing relationships with Advantix and AT&T, as well as device procurement and support. The technical service department concentrates oninfrastructure upkeep and data transfer between servers and systems, such as the company's BlackBerry Enterprise Server or Exchange Server, and mobile devices.