if connected

People’s unofficial use at work of personally-bought smartphones will lead to personal devices and personal information being managed by corporate IT departments. RIM has just announced BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, a new product to help companies manage the proliferation of employee-bought smartphones and tablets connecting to company networks.

Fusion has support for employees to use a single device for both work and home, the ability to manage multiple devices per person — critical in an era where individuals routinely use smartphones, tablets and notebook PCs in tandem — and self-service for individual employees to lock their phone if it’s lost or stolen.

But consumer smartphone owners already routinely have many of these abilities, even if their smartphones are not used for work, or provided by their employer. While RIM has been slow to extend its core expertise into the consumer market, other than with BlackBerry Messenger (BBM),  numerous other companies have jumped into the fray and offered consumer versions BlackBerry’s enterprise features upon which RIM’s phone success was originally built.

The ‘ITization of the Person’ is already well underway. Here’s a selection of the many examples where consumers have corporate-style IT tools to manage their digital lives:- 

• Enhanced account and password access. Valve’s Steam games system by default sends a code to a user’s email account each time Steam is launched for the first time on a new computer. In response to hacking from China, Google has a similar but optional two-step verification process that’s available as an option in each user’s Google Profile settings.
• Remotely controllable device security. Remote locking, remote wipe & find my device functions are available online for Windows Phone , iPhone, iPad, Lion-based Macs, or any personal device connected to an Exchange server etc. For Android, Lookout’s Plan B app has remote find functionality and can be installed even after a phone has been lost.
• Internet device backup. There’s a setting in modern Android smartphones — Gingerbread onwards, I think — for apps, preferences, wifi network access and a number of other settings for back up to Google’s servers. Apple’s iCloud offers this for iPhones & iPads.
• Cloud-based network file sharing. Examples: Dropbox; Microsoft SkyDrive for PCs, tablets and smartphones; Google Docs; iCloud; box.net; Sugarsync. For cloud-based music storage, Amazon, Apple and Google all have services although currently only in the US.
• Central application management. The web-based version of Android Market allows owners to remotely install apps. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, twitter, WordPress and numerous other web sites now have control panels which manage which other sites or apps can access a user’s information without requiring a password.

Widespread consumer smartphone adoption has driven this ‘ITization of the Person’ because of:

• High smartphone replacement costs. iPhones and other smartphones are expensive to replace if lost or stolen. Apple has an average revenue per device of around $600 but that excludes the effect of sales taxes and operator contract lock-ins on the real consumer replace cost. An unlocked iPhone 4S costs between £499 and £699 in the UK including UK sales tax.
• Greater digital storage of personal information due to smartphone adoption. They have extensive amounts of information that would be valuable to identity thieves: addresses, passwords, often credit card details as well as the potential of course for a thief to make numerous high cost premium rate or international calls.
• Mobility puts information and devices at greater risk. The rise of mobile devices increases the likelyhood that information and devices will be lost or stolen compared with older stay-at-home devices. Consumer desktop PCs are unlikely to be lost and hard to steal without breaking into a property and lugging away the heavy case. Smartphones are taken everywhere, are vulnerable to pick pockets, while laptop PCs are often left behind in bars, on trains or left at risk in parked cars.

These numerous new security services should lead to a wondrous world of greater security and convenience for consumers. Unlike paper, digital information is easy to recover from a backup if lost: Imagine the chore of photocopying a paper calendar and address book.

But the explosion of these personal IT tools is creating thousands of control panels for different web sites, devices, and services which I suspect few consumers visit and most do not even know about.