Wag the Dog

Here at the Department of Hopes and Dreams we never used to support iPhone as a corporate platform. That was until the CFO got one and demanded access to his pdf reports on his handset. For two weeks our support desk has trotted out the offical line "best efforts but not officially supported" whilst scrathing thir heads and wondering why anyone would even want to view an A4 PDF on a 3.5" screen. Well the CFO has got his way and it has been mandated from on high that iPhone is now a supported platform.

I just wonder in how many companies similar discussions are being had right now. A friend of mine works for a large government organisation and they have officially supported Blackberry for a number of years. Anecdotally, he's told me that many of his peers are replacing these with iPhone's, even though they are not yet offically supported.

In our case supporting the iPhone was a fairly straghtforward technical exercise that consisted of configuring VPN on the handset to connect to the server hosting the PDF's. Case closed, asccording to my bosses. We'll not quite as I think they still haven't grasped the full ramifications of this. The problem we have is that the quick and dirty fix that keeps our CFO happy bypasses all the security models that we currently have in place for our data warehouse (normally controlled through Business Objects). What my bosses haven't yet grasped is that if we really wanted to service the customer properly then we should be developing an iPhone App dashboard for our data warehouse.

In all my years of IT I've never seen the likes of what is happening today. Private individuals buying mobile devices and then demanding IT support is unheard of. I can only imagine that it will get worse with the arrival of the Apple's Tablet Computer later this month because that's a device that will actually be worth viewing a PDF on.