Here's a release from Gartner where they report an overwhelming majority of enterprises have moved to corporate-liable mobility plans, as a way of better managing this still-growing communications cost.I thought this was a significant point as well:
Gartner advises enterprises to look across IT for its wireless policy, rather than limiting it just to the networking or telecom group, because wireless encompasses many different areas in the company, from IT to finance (procurement), and goes across many lines of business and technologies. A wireless solution should impact the security group, servers and messaging, application development, asset management, hardware, networking, and possibly other areas of IT.
It might be worthwhile to see this cross-IT team as a model for efforts that may be necessary in the future around social networking and other technologies that come in through the "back door," as Gartner puts it--i.e., unmanaged, driven by end user choices in their roles as consumers. Mobility cost is going to be the biggest pain point by far, which is why it's logical that it would be the first thing to really drive this kind of an effort--but once established, it could be a template for a new kind of working arrangement that companies are going to need in the future as their communications environment "opens up."
Gartner also notes the growing importance of cellular data in mobile workers' routines, and encourages the inclusion of this cost factor in devising the corporate-liable contracts of the future.
