In this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond, we’re joined by Barry Fulk. Barry is known as the nicest guy in the world who specializes in stalking Mac podcasters. He also directs mobile device management at a large, highly regulated company. He joins us to explain what MDM, or Mobile Device Management is, and how it allows two people in his company to manage thousands of iPhones and iPads. His specific expertise is in the MDM tool called Mobile Iron. We wanted to talk about this to help explain what the County of San Bernadino could have, and should have been able to do with Mobile Iron, which they actually had in house but didn’t configure properly. Barry and I talk about encryption and tunneling and data security. It’s a good geek time! You can find Barry on Twitter at @fulkb.
Good interview and a fun listen. Working in a corporate IT environment, I had to chuckle over the discussion of whether the senior management should get special treatment. At least some of us use the term PDI (persons of disproportionate impact) to describe those folks. Which actually conveys the right sense, I think. Yes, they need to know what the peons are dealing with. But screwing up their data or wasting their time can have an overall impact far larger than it would for me, for example. One company that I’m familiar with put their PDIs on a separate email environment, but that was more because of information sensitivity and that environment was even more restricted than the one that normal mortals worked with :-).
Bruce – I love that PDI concept. The thing that made me crazy was that an engineer that was working on a critical deliverable item that was in the path of us getting paid for a huge contract had a FORTY-EIGHT HOUR wait time (in the contract) to get their PC fixed. But our IT exec who’s biggest deliverable was PowerPoint slides got instant gratification.
Eventually, they came up with a solution where every organization could designate 10% of their people as PDIs. That made me happy.