Line of Business
Carry-on casualties
There are some barriers to mobile computing you can't do anything about8/10/2006 4:50:00 PM By: Shane Schick
Several years ago a good friend of mine was travelling on business around with a loud-mouthed colleague who was surprised to see my friend taking his notebook as a carry-on item aboard an airplane. “I always check my notebook,” he said, pointing to a bag that was already sitting on a conveyor belt. Needless to say, when they arrived at their destination several hours later, my friend was still toting his mobile computer and the loudmouth found himself without one.
So my heart goes out to business travellers in the U.K., where onboard electronics have been prohibited on all flights. Following the arrests of 21 people Thursday in connection with an alleged plot to blow up aircraft mid-flight en route to the U.S., the policy is part of a wider government directive aimed at liquids and gels in all forms. The Canadian government moved in step with the latter part of the policy, but for the moment you can still bring mobile IT with you to London, if not from it. That could change quickly as law enforcement probes into other terror plots begin to heat up.
This was something that wasn’t written in the script when mobile computing promised to boost productivity when knowledge workers found themselves in transit. In many cases, of course, the vendors of such technology tended to market their products with images of executives sitting in a park, on a train or, as a last resort, in the airport. There’s no getting around the fact that when senior decision makers aren’t in their offices, they are probably waiting for a flight or are flying – this is where having a laptop makes the most sense. It’s where people are seated, with a little pull-down desk and the time to work on the kind of things that just aren’t feasible on a BlackBerry or other personal digital assistants. To be cut off from that resource creates limitations around technology that was supposed to free us from them.
Not that carrying a laptop on a plane hasn’t become irritating enough in the last five years. I don’t know about other parts of Canada, but in Toronto the security measures around notebooks has eased up a little. Not long after Sept. 11, it became customary to see IT executives and everyday users whip out mobile computers, turn them on and balance them the way a waiter might a tray of drinks as they approached the clearance areas. I always wondered what the security people saw when they gazed at, in my gaze, a display of OS 9, but now Pearson only requires laptops to be put in a separate tray. When you’re in a long lineup it can still be irritating, but we’ve learned to live with it. So, I’m sure, will those in the U.K.
As enterprises begin planning and developing their mobile computing strategies, however, they may soon have to take into consideration government regulations that could have an impact on workflows and processes they set up around such devices. Employees might be expected to be “always on” or to have the kind of access that they need to complete certain tasks on the road, but physical security concerns could override any specific objectives linked to a particular user.
Thanks to advances in broadband, processing power and falling prices, mobile computers are delivering on the vision of anytime, anywhere IT. The problem is that terrorists can crop up anytime, anywhere too.
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