Making The Case For Mobile Information Management

As you might expect, I enjoy spending as much time as possible talking to people about enterprise mobility.  Whether its vendors of mobility solutions, buyers and/or users of mobility solutions, or just about anybody whom I can learn from.  Obviously, most of these discussions happen over the phone, but outside of meeting people at conferences, I do on occasion have the opportunity for face to face interactions.  Yesterday was one of those days when I had the opportunity to grab a cup of coffee with one of the people I most respect in the industry.  While we covered a wide array of subjects, the conversation did take an unexpected turn that made me think about the nine facets of the enterprise mobility management framework.

There’s a piece missing.  Frankly, I’m surprised it hasn’t come up before.  Shame on me actually for not thinking about it before.  We so often talk about devices and security, application management, or individually vs. corporate liable devices.  In fact, one of the main arguments in the IL vs. CL debate is that it’s actually not about the device, but about the data that resides on the device.  OK, that’s a very fair point.  It’s about the data.  But there’s just one problem – what kind of data are we talking about…and more importantly where is it and where did it come from?

There are so many different forms of data that can reside on a device.  Certainly there are contacts, email and the rest of your PIM data.  There will also be the data used for the actual configuration of the device, as well as the data required for the policy configuration and management.  Your device does have business and IT policy settings in place, right?

But what about the application data?  Meaning, the data that you are pulling from a source (whether in The Cloud or behind your firewall or a 3rd party source).  How do you ensure that the data that is being pulled in and pushed out of the device is true and federated?  I’m not talking about device or data encryption, because that’s part of Mobile or Wireless Security (and we have that already covered in the Enterprise Mobility Management framework).  I’m talking about something that is more analogous to another MDM – Master Data Management.  If you check out the Wikipedia definition of MDM, you’ll see the following:

“MDM has the objective of providing processes for collecting, aggregating, matching, consolidating, quality-assuring, persisting and distributing such data throughout an organization to ensure consistency and control in the ongoing maintenance and application use of this information.”

Hmmm…that seems pretty relevant to me.  Now, we can’t call it MDM because we already have that.  So what about Mobile Information Management or MIM?

This is about ensuring that the data you are using on your mobile is true, federated, protected and available to you beyond just your device.  It’s also about the notion that in one transaction, you could be using data from multiple sources that will require SOA or Web Services.  There’s a cloud play, obviously.  But what about data back up.  Not just your contacts, etc., but  making sure you can access the data on your device from another place, again, either in the cloud or behind your firewall.

More and more information is passing through our mobile devices.  Duh.  I think it’s time we start thinking more about what is happening to that data and not just from a transfer perspective (i.e., encryption).

What do you think?  Should the CIO be thinking more about this?  Is this the 10th component of enterprise mobility management?