We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

Image by michael_hughes via Flickr

Rejoice! Nick Jones of Gartner is blogging again! And anyone who quotes Douglas Adams is all right in my book...

I don't know of anyone who speaks more sense on the increasingly difficult task of how to manage mobile devices. For those of us in organisations too poor for a Gartner sub his blog is a precious free route that delivers unexpected pearls of wisdom.

Here's Nick:

Roughly speaking the management world splits into two camps: the traditionalists and the realists.

The traditionalists think that this is a battle which can still be won. They have 3 year strategies, roadmaps, user segmentation models, and a pile of technology such as device management tools, HVDs and virtualisation which they throw at their unfortunate users. They (finally and reluctantly) admitted they can’t stop iPhone but they’re busy building walls around what the users can do with it. They’re a bit like the philosophers in the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, they want rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty safely corralled within a neatly controlled universe.

The realists appreciate that the entire universe has become an area of doubt and uncertainty; control is no longer an option. Strategic segmentation models to define what facilities users need for their work are futile when new devices and services are emerging every month, the very nature of work is changing to become more autonomous, and adhocracies invent processes on the fly. Users – particularly knowledge workers – are saying: “I need new tools to do my job in new ways, and who cares if I downloaded them from an app store. I’m the one paying your salary and it’s unacceptable for the business to under-perform just to fit your outdated view of the world”. Realists are the inverse of the philosophers, they may implement a few rigidly controlled areas of certainty but they’re the exception rather than the rule.

Like many polarised conflicts neither side is entirely correct, but the world is shifting towards the realists...

The Gartner managed diversity model for mobile IT support has certainly influenced my thinking. I gave my take on it at our Futures Cafe last November. It included one Douglas Adams reference and a lot of restaurants, but not the one at the End of The Universe.

Here's something I wrote this morning, trying to establish the ground rules for our student laptop clinic:

We are happy to look at almost any hardware at the clinic, doesn't really matter if it is a laptop, netbook or iPad. The deal is:

1. we commit to look at something, even if we think we can't help we don't dismiss problems out of hand,
2. in exchange users understand there is no guarantee that we can resolve the issues,
3. users meet us halfway - they don't dump problems on us, we work with them on it and they learn in the process, and can finish fixing it themselves when we've pointed them in the right direction,
4. problems are contained within a fixed resource (time and staffing), they don't sprawl. Clinic finishes at 5pm prompt whether problem is fixed or not.

and on our forthcoming GetSatisfaction community support site for Mobile IT:

1.  we have a willingness to engage with problems, and not dismiss them,
2.  users understand we don't have all the answers and can't solve everything,
3.  a contained forum, at a slight distance from the more guaranteed support mechanisms,
4.  we work with users to produce answers together.

Hmmm. Am I being a traditionalist or a realist here? It rather looks as if I too want rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.

Perhaps I'm a pragmatist, recognising that a few such areas are all we can achieve in our current organisational context. If these work and prove themselves, then I may in time win the argument, and we'll let uncertainty take over Life, the Universe & Everything.