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Companies 'need to secure and control mobile devices'

4 May 2011 , BBc News, by Scott Petty.

Each week we ask high-profile technology decision-makers three questions.

The biggest challenge is securing the growing number of mobile devices, according to Scott Petty. This week it's Scott Petty, director of business products and services for mobile phone giant Vodafone. Vodafone is based in Newbury in the UK, and employs 85,000 people serving 341m customers. In the last financial year the company had a turnover of £44.5bn, and made a pre-tax profit of £8.7bn.

What's your biggest technology problem right now?

The biggest challenge is the growth of the plethora of mobile devices, and how to manage them. There used to be a time when the IT department could dictate to users which devices they used. That's changed now with all the new smartphones, tablets and mobile devices.

But how do you secure them and control them? A business can't afford to lose the content on these devices. So the industry has to build the right tools to manage them. Tablet computers, for example, are increasingly being used by senior executives. They store all the financial information on their iPad or Android device, and carry that around with them. These devices may not be encrypted. They may not have the appropriate security policies, and they may get lost. The sensitivity of data held by senior executives is very high, and making them as secure as on the PC is a challenge. Smartphones have an especially high rate of loss - they are left behind in taxis and on trains. We have a number of customers who left their devices on aeroplanes. Most mobile operating systems already offer some basic level of encryption. So the problem is not the provision of security, but how to configure it right, especially when the users bring their own technology into the workplace. For our own business we have deployed a device management solution that puts an access code on all devices, giving us the ability to wipe all data remotely and ensure location awareness.

The key thing for organisations is to get this into place. They can't leave it to the end user to do their self-configuration. It is important to have these technical solutions, but you also have to think about the training for users as well. Most importantly, any solution has to be as unobtrusive as possible.

What's the next big tech thing in your industry?

I think the continued mobilisation of the internet is fundamentally going to change the way the internet is being used. We once assumed the PC screen would be the consumption device, but in most markets the mobile internet will soon overtake fixed internet.

Then there is machine-to-machine communication that will connect new devices and drive the mobile internet. A good example is Unilever, who embed [mobile phone] SIM cards in icecream machines, to alert them when the machine needs restocking or maintenance. That is delivering huge savings. Then their marketing department came up with a great social media concept to market it. If you produce a big enough smile, you get an ice cream for free - and the machine uploads an image of you smiling [with permission] to Facebook. In both the consumer and business context, user choice will be driving future developments and there will be an increasing number of form factors. Where convergence plays a role, it's about the integration of what you do on all these devices. The applications will converge, and content will be shared across different form factors, through the cloud. But the number of form factors of devices will increase.

What's the biggest technology mistake you've ever made - either at work or in your own life?

The more time you spend in the tech industry, the more you realise that things don't change as quickly as you expect. For example when PDAs became available, I was an Apple Newton fan, then a Win CE fan, but these devices lacked the connectivity they needed. I was convinced we would all be using PDAs, not personal computers. I invested in a platform like the Newton that didn't take off because the technology was too early ... it only took off once we got smart phones.

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The politics of global disruption, and how they may change

THE 1990s was “the age of abundance”, argued Brink Lindsey in a book of that title. Round the world, incomes were rising; capital markets were processing endless flows of money and investment; technological gains meant that ever more information was available ever more cheaply. And politics in the age of abundance, Mr. Lindsey claimed, was all about values. In America this was the period of the “culture wars” over abortion and gun ownership; internationally, there was a huge expansion in concern over human rights. The 2010s, it is sometimes said, will be an age of scarcity. The warning signs of change are said to be the food-price spike of 2007-08, the bid by China and others to grab access to oil, iron ore and farmland and the global recession. The main problems of scarcity are water and food shortages, demographic change and state failure. How will that change politics? In the domestic debates of some rich democracies, things are shifting already. In Europe the talk is of how to distribute the pain of cutting public debts. In America the return of mad-as-hell populism looks like a turn away from the politics of abundance (see article). Now, a report for the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, DC, and the Centre on International Co-operation at New York University* looks at international politics in an age of want.

The sort of problems governments increasingly face, they say, will be much less predictable than those associated with old great-power rivalries. Pressure from demography, climate change and shifts in economic power builds up quietly for a long time – and then triggers abrupt shifts.

They claim that the current global system is ill-designed for such a world. It is not just that the foreign policies of big countries are in flux. Rather, the way states deal with new threats is, in the jargon, “stove-piped”. As a UN panel said in 2004, “finance ministers tend to work only with the international financial institutions, development ministers only with development programmes”. The authors say that what is needed is not merely institutional tinkering but a different frame of mind. Governments, they say, should think more in terms of reducing risk and increasing resilience to shocks than about boosting sovereign power. This is because they think power may not be the best way for states to defend themselves against a new kind of threat: the sort that comes not from other states but networks of states and non-state actors, or from the unintended consequences of global flows of finance, technology and so on. What would all that mean in practice? They cite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation as the sort of institutions they want more of: bodies that use technical expertise – leaving aside the IPCC’s mistake over the melting of Himalayan glaciers – to induce countries to recognise their mutual interests. Such agencies can promote foresight, and help governments think harder about the consequences of failure (unlike traditional diplomacy, which likes muddling along). They propose an Intergovernmental Panel on Biological Safety along the lines of the IPCC to improve biosecurity; they also suggest boosting the G20 by giving it a secretariat and getting national security chiefs together.

Many of these ideas may go nowhere; national sovereignty is hugely resilient. But to those who call the whole exercise pointless, they cite Milton Friedman, who, when monetarism was being mocked in the 1970s, replied “our basic function [is] to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

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Overstepping the boundaries

Executives must go beyond cliché to fathom cultural differences in business. What's the problem with British managers? This question briefly did the rounds recently after Ratan Tata, Chairman of India's Tata Group, complained that the British managers at his UK subsidiaries didn't go the "extra mile". Mr Tata had flown to Britain for a meeting only to find that several key staff had already gone home. Commentators responded angrily that his acerbic assessment was unfair: in the spirit of English self-deprecation many offered up alternative shortcomings instead, such as elitism, self-importance and parochialism.

The problem with stereotypes, apart from being simplistic, is that there is often an opposite one in circulation to match (indeed in response to Mr Tata, some complained that the problem with English managers is that they work too hard). This should not, however, deter business executives from attempting to fathom cultural differences, especially as companies increasingly operate cross-border teams–a subject covered in a new series of executive training courses to be launched shortly by The Economist Group.

A rigorous and objective approach to this thorny territory is, if not easy, certainly possible. In her entertaining book "Watching the English" anthropologist Kate Fox, for example, attempts a more scholarly deconstruction of English (as opposed to British) attitudes and behaviour – one that is queasily familiar to the English reader. At core is what she terms "social dis-ease" – namely, deep discomfort with most forms of social interaction. From this, she claims, flow many of the familiar English characteristics including: an all-pervasive humour; an obsession with privacy (one's own as well as others'); a "believe it when I see it" empiricism; disquiet about boastfulness; inadvertent hypocrisy; ridicule of earnestness; tolerance, moderation, grumpiness and much more.

The book is not about business, but the business implications will be obvious to those who operate on these shores. For example, English embarrassment when talk turns to money, a reluctance to boast (even when selling one's own product), a tendency to joke around in meetings, endless office grumbling, and even the wearing of dark pinstripe suits in sweltering climates, are all, arguably, manifestations of the same «dis-ease».

Guiding principles

Anthropology and other disciplines can certainly aid our understanding of business behaviour worldwide. And while all national cultures inevitably contain a range of attitudes, some key guiding principles do provide valuable indicators as to likely behaviour or expectations in a business setting. In a 1973 study of IBM employees in more than 70 countries, Dutch organisational psychologist Geert Hofstede identified several key sources of cultural difference. One of the most important was "power distance", or “the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally”.

One possible, extreme example of the "power distance" phenomena is illustrated in Norman Dixon's study On the psychology of military incompetence (a fascinating insight into poor management). He cites the case a century ago of Britain's navy in which no crew member dared question, let alone correct, the course set by the ship's captain, even though it was about to collide with another ship in the fleet, with the predictable result that both vessels sunk and the crews drowned. But "power distance" can shorten: Malcolm Gladwell noted in his book Outliers how Korean Air's high accident rates in the late 1990's were overcome after staff were encouraged to question their pilot's commands.

Hofstede identifies other vital factors that help us analyse cultural-based behaviour, such as whether a society is generally more comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity and nuance; or if a society stresses group harmony and "saving face". Cultural anthropologist, Edward T Hall, includes the degree to which cultures rely on gestures, tones and context in their communication. And management researcher Fons Trompenaars adds into the mix the extent to which cultures separate business and private lives; or express emotions in public.

The lesson here seems to be that sweeping judgments about the right way to conduct business in unfamiliar cultures, apart from the risk of giving offense, is also likely to be incorrect. A 2004 study, Global Leadership and Organisational Behaviour Effectiveness, from Wharton Business School, found that most of the 65 desirable leadership traits mentioned around the world were “culturally contingent”, in other words, not universally shared or admired. These included such attributes as “ambition”, “enthusiasm”, “compassion” and “logic”. Moreover, some attributes triggered quite opposite responses, with "risk taking" for example, scoring top in some countries and near the bottom in others. Executives should at least be aware of the extent to which their management style is likely to cause friction in different locations.

On the other hand, while familiarity with the cultural kaleidoscope may be important, accommodating those differences has its limits. Beyond a certain point, the risk is that cultural over-sensitivity can paralyze a manager, and serve only to embed differences ever more deeply. While managers may, for example, see no reason to stay late at work, they shouldn't forget that the boss is still the boss, no matter what his nationality.

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