Who doesn’t love the Olympics?  I know from personal experience once you’ve had the opportunity to be at a live Olympic venue you are hooked on the games for life.  Just to experience the host city during the Olympics is a rich experience not to be missed.  So being in Portland, Oregon working hard for our company AccuNW I thought, this is 2012 and with the amount of technology advances our world has experienced I should have the Olympics at my smartphone fingertips.  So after a little Google search I downloaded NBC Olympics Live Extra and was quickly reminded just how many events and sports are covered in the Olympics.

I don’t know if it was the amount of events or the layout of the app I was trying to navigate, but I thought this is about as convoluted as our industry’s current views on the mobile device tsunami that continues to deluge businesses and organizations today.  Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of white papers out there showing the need to develop strategy in mitigating risks for your mobile enterprise workforce, but excluding some of the progressive CIOs, most organizations are in denial as they push this new responsibility from the records department to the IT department back to the legal department and on to the records department in a dangerous cycle of risk and negligence.

So what can be done about it?  First thing is recognizing the paradigm shift and designating serious resources to developing a mobile device management strategy.  Such a strategy should not only include management of risks associated with tablets and smartphones, but it should also include ongoing research of apps and custom software that could potentially leverage those devices to your advantage.  The sooner we can embrace best practices concerning the security and retention of information on these devices, the sooner these devices will prove their worth in elevating ourselves, our employees and those we do business with to the next level, or should I say the gold level.

So as I look out across the records management landscape and see many organizations developing various strategies in regards to enterprise mobile devices, I say “Let the best strategy win”.  And may that winning strategy soon be everyone’s strategy.

And don’t forget to enjoy the Olympic Games, too.

Tags: mobile device management