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Wireless Spending Trends and Tips

Are you paying more then 5 cents per minute for wireless voice?  Are you allowing employees to expense their business related wireless costs?  Are you buying unlimited data plans but don’t know how many MB/month are actually needed?  Is your company’s wireless cost-per-user going up instead of down?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, this article can help bring your wireless costs down and add money directly to your bottom line.

A recent survey by the Aberdeen Group found that 63% of companies do not have an accurate wireless device inventory, 44% have no formal program or policy to manage their wireless costs and 10% have not even identified someone within the organization to be centrally responsible for managing their wireless infrastructure.  At a time when the number of wireless minutes used has an annual growth rate of 27%, it is critical for companies and government agencies to take control of every segment within the wireless lifecycle.

Cellular usage and market penetration are at an all time high and the use of text messaging has sky rocketed.   Here are some of the recent statistics:

• There are 220+ million U.S. subscribers and 2 billion subscribers worldwide.
• In the U.S. alone, 1.7 trillion wireless minutes were used in 2006.
• There were 12.5 billion text messages sent in June 2006.
• There were 1.1 billion multimedia messages (MMS) sent in the first half of 2006 -- that’s more then were sent in all of 2005.
• Carrier revenue from data services rose 70% in the first half of 2006.

The best way to gain control of your wireless spending is using a two pronged approach: manage your existing plans and inventory and adopt and enforce a wireless policy to ensure that all new wireless spending is as efficient as possible.

Implementing a plan to optimize wireless plans is never easy.  While there is no single plan of action that will work for all companies, there are some simple steps that most can benefit from.

• Identify any internal organization issues and get management support before working to try and correct them.  Make sure that the group tasked with the responsibility to enact change has the authority to enforce any policy changes.
• Create a comprehensive inventory of all user’s devices and plans.  Identify lines that can be cancelled immediately such as former employees and lost phones.
• Migrate from employee liable to corporate liable contracts whenever possible. 
• Standardize the list of allowable devices, carriers and service plans.  If possible, adopt a wireless portal or other technology to ensure compliance.

The suggestions mentioned in this article are the most basic ones you can take.  TeleBright has the knowledge and technology in place to make sure you get the most for your wireless dollar.  Contact us today to see just how much we can help you save and see what you've been missing.

In our first installment of this three part series we acknowledged the foundation elements in developing a corporate wireless policy:

• Procurement
• Acceptable Usage
• Measurement & Expense Control in Real Time

We went on to discuss in more detail Procurement as being the first step in the development lifecycle process.  We move on to the element of Acceptable Use.

Acceptable Use

This is the most difficult development challenge because it is inherently “corporate subjective”.  Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) have long been an established principle within most enterprises in the areas of computers (email & instant messaging), vehicles, office equipment and even the 2nd floor “employee kitchen”.

The framework involved in creating an AUP does not differ tremendously and the process has been exhaustively documented and researched, but suffice to say the Wireless AUP is unfortunately a moving target and one that must be amended as new technologies become available and/or more pervasive within your corporate environment.

Examples of established wireless technologies and new amendments to wireless AUP’s:

• Wireless Data
• Wireless Web Access
• SMS / Text-ing
• Tethering * Wireless Modem
• Wireless IM
• Bluetooth
• Secure Intra-Access

Traditional web and email AUP’s had to be reconfigured to include wireless devices – especially for organizations that have deployed Blackberry’s, Smart and Windows Mobile Enabled devices.  So to establish a framework and amendable AUP for your organization the question again becomes…where do you begin?

There are two elements to be addressed within Wireless Acceptable Use, corporate & personal.

• Corporate: involves the traditional and established AUP’s for devices, access, applications, tools and company provided media involved in the performance of an employee’s responsibilities. 

• Personal: involves the company subjective and accepted practices for allowing their employees the ability to use company assets for personal or private matters.

With wireless the difficulty in establishing an AUP is compounded by the complexities surrounding the traditional inability to monitor and enforce those policies. 

The next step is defining the components of your corporate & personal wireless AUP:

• Scope                                      
• Purpose                                  
• Authorized Use                                   
• Privacy Expectations               
• Responsible Use                     
• Inappropriate Use                  
• Security                                   
• Enforcement
• Modifications
• Notifications

These AUP components establish the Who, What, Where, When, How, Why & Why Not involved in the protection of corporate and individual interests.

Monitoring these components is difficult, and certainly individual liable versus corporate liable compound the challenge exponentially; moreover operational bandwidth to review each individual invoice to monitor and enforce policy simply does not exist within today’s overburdened or understaffed corporate IT/Telecom departments.

To alleviate the operational burden some companies have established a “flat dollar” invoice expenditure amount that is considered “acceptable”. A solution that is easy to implement and monitor for exceptions, but unfortunately problematic. To contain and reduce costs and more importantly manage corporate security - wireless services and invoices must be more scrutinized than traditional landline/wireline services. A flat dollar policy fosters an environment of deficient security and invoice governance.

Therefore it is imperative from a policy and security perspective to monitor and examine each individual invoice and to establish and disseminate the elements involved with enforcement and consequences to properly implement your wireless AUP.  Solving the monitoring and management dilemma will be addressed in Part 3, the final installment of this series.

If you need immediate assistance receiving the entire wireless policy series as well as a step by step instruction guide on wireless policy development, we offer a RISK FREE wireless expenditure assessment and a custom policy outline for your business, contact Scott Jonasz at 301-296-3861 or by email (sjonasz@telebright.com) for more information.

Offering Evolved, Enabled, and Empowered Wireless and Wireless Management software and services.  TeleBright’s software platforms are empowered with BrightCare, the markets only proactive alert platform that monitors your telecom environment in real-time and notifies you via your chosen media when issues or opportunities present themselves. 

Affordable monthly licensing. Guaranteed ROI. Expense Conveyance Programs.
See what you've been missing.

Customized preferences are available for each user in the set up for issues such as policy breaches and invoice discrepancies. BrightCare will not passively report issues as you’ve defined them. The powerful new addition will proactively notify you by email. BrightCare's flexibility allows you to create multiple report sets with varing parameters for on-line reporting and unique report sets for users in distribution packages. Daily, weekly or monthly reports are at your finger tips.

For example, alert notifications can inform you that you have a 15% increase this month over last month's usage. That notification will create an entry in the Hot List and if selected a notice will be sent from the system to a distribution list that can include the Professional Services Team from TeleBright and/or your vendor account representative.

The TeleBright Professional Services team can investigate the cause of any increase. If the increase is erroneous then a dispute ticket will be generated for notification. BrightCare is involved with all invoice disputes and the associated tickets. This involvement ensures that each dispute is resolved and kept for a histrical reference.

Ticket lifecycles are also monitored by BrightCare and notifications are sent to include the Dispute Resolution Team upon any missed deadlines or commitments. Once the dispute is resolved, the MangeRight reports module will provide detailed accounting of all disputes and credits rendered to the invoices, thus closing the loop.

BrightCare is your virtual Telecommunications Manager allowing users to focus on other efforts and successful results.

Phase 2 of BrightCare will provide cost optimization and wireless usage metrics. We estimate the release of phase 2 by the end of the 2007 second quarter.

If you are planning a budget reduction consider Network Optimization. This process enables you to maximize your technology while saving money. During the review experts check for underutilization and poorly matched system requirements. At TeleBright a custom plan is developed with each business. Future growth and expectations for the business are accounted for in all the recommendations made by TeleBright. Here are a few of the items that we review when performing an optimization report.

Come visit TeleBright in Orlando at the tem2007, April 30 - May 3, 2007.