Dial Tone is from God

"Dial Tone is from God."

Dr. Arno Penzias spoke these words during a board meeting I attended with my first startup.

As a Nobel-prize-winning scientist, and at that time Chief Scientist for Lucent. Arno carried a lot of weight in our board room. ?When he spoke, others listened.

And this quote was meant to clarify the need for our wireless technology to always be available, working, and capable of supporting any user who needed to make a phone call.

Dial-tone is one of those technologies that few understand. ?But most know that even when the electrical power is out, traditional “landline” phones always have the dial tone sound and the ability to make a phone call to seek help.

Dial-tone is always available.?It’s ubiquitous.??It’s someone omnipresent.

As technology entrepreneurs, we should strive for the same, especially for any technology critical for an enterprise to serve its customers by delivering packages and services.

Enterprise mobile devices and apps fit that criteria for critical technology.

But it’s shocking to realize that we accept failure in these devices in the hands of our employees as a normal course of business.

Ask any IT person supporting mobility, and they will tell you that, on average, between 10% and 20% of employees report problems with the mobile device or apps each month - problems that keep them from doing their job shipping packages or delivering services.

But when you speak to this same group of employees who depend on their mobile device/app to do their job, the numbers are far more damning, with 70%+ of employees saying at least once a month they cannot do their job due to an issue with their mobile device/app, and over 50% saying it happens at least once per week.

How did we get here?

How did we move from a mindset where dial-tone and the underlying need for anyone to be able to use a telephone 7x24 is the defined standard to not having the same goals for uptime and reliability of mobile devices?

And more importantly, how do we move past this and provide the tools needed to spot problems with the enterprise mobile estate as they occur in order to proactively fix issues and fix them - before employees are even aware in order to eliminate the 10-70% of employees having problems each month?

My company, B2M Solutions , has a software offering Elemez which proactively monitors in real-tome for issues affecting employees in order to find and fix problems quickly.?It’s deployed around the world to enterprises who want to improve the uptime and reliability of critical mobile assets.

And while these mobile Android / Windows devices do not have dial-tone, they do have the underlying requirement of always being available for use. ??

It’s time for us to invest in tools that ensure uptime and reliability needs are met for mobile the same way they have been met in the landline network for years.

IMAGE SOURCE: NY Times / Getty Images / Julichka. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/magazine/who-made-that-dial-tone.html