iPhone and IT: A proper introduction

Anyone who pays US$600 for an iPhone probably wants to use it for work. If that person happens to be your CEO, and you work in IT, then face it: You have no choice but to make your enterprise support the thing. If you do it right, and make yourself highly visible while doing so, you can turn what is essentially a simple project into one that wins your department a great deal of good will.

The iPhone has finally arrived.

Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) sold more than 500,000 of the little darlings the first weekend, and you can be sure that some of the people who bought them are at your company. They'll want to use their iPhones for work. No matter what Gartner (NYSE: IT) says, if one of them is your CEO, you've got no choice.

Do users want these gadgets because they're useful business tools or because they're yuppie bling? Doesn't matter. They're here. We know that saying no won't work. Either we support iPhones on our own terms, or we'll waste endless energy in cat-and-mouse games with users, all the while generating bad feelings that will sabotage everything else we do.

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