December 2009, Volume III, Issue 11

Yonemoto’s Inferno: The 7 Circles of Wireless Purgatory
By Art Yonemoto

Congratulations! As the person responsible for managing your company’s wireless environment, you are a valued member of your organization. You oversee a vital function that allows your company to increase sales, improve productivity and/or increase customer support.

Condolences. As the person responsible for managing your company’s wireless environment, you are in a position that is usually misunderstood and underappreciated. While overseeing a vital company function, there is no real understanding by others of all the issues and headaches you address to minimize the cost of wireless and ensure that it does not become a mess (or remain a mess, if you inherited the task).

Congratulations and condolences … You are in the weird limbo state of being both valued and unappreciated. In other words, you find yourself in the seven circles of wireless purgatory.

These circles are similar to those in Dante’s Inferno, each leading to more pain and despair. The deeper you go into the seven levels, you lose more control and gain more stress.

The First Circle: Bill Paying

Bill paying is rather innocuous. After all, your company has a well established process for paying vendor bills. What types of issues could you possibly have?

In addition to wading through a 10-pound bundle of wireless bills every month, Murphy’s Law comes into play here. What if you have multiple accounts and your vendor applies payments to the wrong accounts? How do you handle late payments? What if a check is “lost in the mail”? While minor, paying bills correctly and on time is the first circle.

The Second Circle: Expense Allocation

Allocating expenses should also be rather benign. After coming up with an initial algorithm, processing this expense should be a piece of cake.

Of course, coming up with the algorithm in the first place might be difficult. There are numerous permutations on allocating your wireless bills.

Do you simply group department members together on their own account? Will this cause problems with pooled minutes?

Is there a standard charge for a device, regardless of the number of minutes used? Do you charge on a per-device basis (regardless of usage)? Is it “fair” to charge one user to consume 1,000 minutes while another user has minimal usage? How do you account for plans where one user carries all 10,000 minutes and everyone else is an add-on? How do you come up with a fair process that can be administered with a minimum of work?

Expense allocation problems are relatively minor and fall into the second circle of wireless purgatory. Just hope and pray that the department managers do not ask you to justify your chargeback system.

The Third Circle: Vendors

How easy or difficult it is to work with your vendors will determine the amount of pain in this, the third circle of wireless purgatory.

Are your wireless vendors responsive to your changes and requests? Do they get back to you in a timely manner with clear and correct information? How do they prorate charges, assess early termination fees, handle phone replacements, etc.?

If you had to assign a grade to your wireless vendor(s), what letter grade would they receive? Why? What would it take to receive a higher grade?

While you might be dissatisfied with your current vendors, your company can still exert the ultimate control and change vendors. The problem of working with your vendor is third circle of wireless purgatory

The Fourth Circle: End Users

The employees you support – your end users – are the fourth circle. While you can change your vendors, you cannot change your employees.

Even in the most well-run companies, the ugly specter of office politics is always an issue. Do all the employees follow company policies and procedures? Or are there special departments and/or employees who get their way?

How do you track data cards/modems? You can’t call them to see who answers.

• Leap of Faith #1: You see no usage on a data card and you cancel the card, hoping that it is no longer in use.



• Leap of Faith #2: You see usage on the card, but you know the name assigned to the card is incorrect (i.e., all data cards have your name as the company contact, or the data card has a name of an employee who has left). Do you hope that the card is being used by someone who still works at your company?

How effective are your wireless policies and internal communications? Are you told when a person has left the company and returned his or her cell phone? Are you informed when a mobile device is transferred from one employee to another? What about zero-usage phones? What happens if you see excessive downloads, texts, directory assistance calls, etc.? What about the proliferation of apps, including some that are useful for business?

Congratulations on your unannounced promotion to “phone police commissioner”!

When working with internal employees, you are not working with one or two vendors. You are working with a large number of people, each with his or her own personality and perspectives. The fourth circle of wireless purgatory is your end users, especially if you are expected to manage/police their usage.

The Fifth Circle: Executives

If working with employees is difficult, it’s nothing compared to employees who have the ability to directly affect your job, the executives. Employees with ultimate control, your executives, are the fifth circle of wireless purgatory.

The VP of sales just bought the latest phone, which, of course, is not supported. Now she wants the device to be her “company phone.”

While you might have bent the rules with certain employees or departments, are these rules shattered with your top executives? How many times can you recite company policy in denying an executive request? Or is discretion the better part of valor and it is better to just look the other way?

To survive the fifth circle of wireless purgatory, reconciling executive demands with company policy, many will emulate Hogan’s Heroes’ Sergeant Schultz: “I know nothing, I see nothing.”

The Sixth Circle: Performance Evaluation

Your annual performance evaluation falls into the sixth circle of wireless purgatory.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If you are the only thing standing in the way of absolute and total wireless bedlam and exploding costs, and no one in your organization realizes this, are you really a valued and appreciated member of your company?

While your manager thinks you are doing a good job, how does he or she measure this? What is the difference between doing a good job and an exceptional job? Can your job performance be quantified (i.e., by the number of bills you process, the number of employee wireless devices you manage, the number of requests/orders you handle, the number of complaints that get to your boss, etc.)? Or is performing at an exceptional level a little more subjective, such as avoiding problems and headaches in the first place?

How accurately does your performance plan reflect the actual job you do? How much does the plan miss? How much are you doing in communicating with your management about the issues you face?

While in theory you have some control of your performance, the reality is that your performance evaluation is somewhat arbitrary. It is this high level of anxiety that places your performance evaluation in the sixth circle.

The Seventh Circle: The IRS Audit

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” – Dante Alighieri

The worst circle of wireless purgatory is the IRS audit. Imagine the IRS coming in to perform a “telecom audit.” Unlike a consultant’s telecom audit, which is designed to help you save money, the IRS audit is designed to make you pay more taxes.

How much work will be required to compile the information for the IRS? How much will you have to pay in back taxes and fines, because your company was non-compliant with IRS’ listed property regulations? How do you explain all of this to your executives who were blind-sided with this problem?

While rare, and hopefully going away in the near future, the threat of an IRS wireless audit falls into the seventh circle of wireless purgatory. Being the target of investigation by the IRS and your top executives is the worst.

Conclusion

Much of your work and time is designed to minimize the time spent at these various levels of wireless purgatory. There are several tools and ideas that can help;

Mobile Explosion 2010 – The Mobile Explosion conference covers current hot wireless issues. By learning from industry experts and case studies from other companies, you can avoid the problems/traps that others have encountered. www.MobileExplosion.com 

Free Webinars – Compare your efforts with those recommended by Stephen Leaden, a leading wireless optimization expert, to learn and implement tips for future savings. View the recorded webcast at www.thevoicereport.com/OptimizeCellular

Voice Report – Keep up to date with current topics like upcoming changes to the Universal Service Fund fee, new wireless device announcements and cellular spending metrics. It’s a one-stop resource that will put you and your team on pace with a rapidly changing industry.

For example, an article on hands-free devices can be forwarded to highlight your work on developing/maintaining company policy. You can review the article and show how your policy addresses this issue (or does not, which might prompt a re-evaluation). www.thevoicereport.com

Telecom-Talk Listserv– Communicate or read about the current issues within the enterprise telecom manager community. “Listening” to the dialog of your peers and leading experts can be priceless. www.thevoicereport.com/TelecomTalk