Monitoring Mobile

Perhaps you’ve seen those television commercials, the ones where the parents confront their kids over the jaw-dropping text-message charges running up the family’s cell phone bill.

Well, a similar scene is starting to play out across the Twin Cities—only this conversation is happening around the conference room table instead of the family dinner table.

Mobile devices are a growing source of cost and risk for companies today. With the economy forcing firms to cut costs wherever possible, more managers are playing the role of stern parents, establishing ground rules for devices and using software to help enforce them.

Cell phones, PDAs, BlackBerrys, and other mobile devices have quickly become as indispensable to business as they are to a teenager’s social life. A 2008 report by Arizona-based market research firm In-Stat found that 94 percent of U.S. businesses use mobile data applications such as wireless e-mail or mobile Web browsing. And it reports that nearly one in ten “road warriors”—business people who travel frequently—have severed landline connections altogether.

It’s a wireless world, and yet most companies still don’t have the right policies or procedures in place to effectively manage their mobile devices, says Cheryl O’Brien-Wilms, president and founder of Technology Management, a consulting firm in Shorewood. If anything, they’re working off outdated cell phone policies that don’t address key features—and fees—attached to today’s devices.

“It is not a telephone anymore,” O’Brien-Wilms says. “You have to stop looking at a wireless device as a phone and start looking at it as something that is on par with a laptop.”

A company that isn’t managing its mobile devices can easily end up with too many devices on multiple different contracts. That’s inefficient from a bidding perspective, but it also make it tough to track what employees are spending on extras like text messaging, ring tones, and Internet downloads.

“All of these things add up. If you have no way of managing it, it’s basically a black hole as far as an expense goes,” says Marc Agar, founder and CEO of CA Communications in Wayzata. His company offers a Web portal that organizes in a central location all the key metrics about an organization’s devices and contracts. It’s one of several software products on the market aimed at helping businesses better manage their mobile devices.