In respect to asset management, Rose's challenges are significant. And she is not alone.

With an ever-increasing pool of devices, high demand by needy end-users, and limited staff, keeping track of devices' service status, repair/warranty/production information, carrier costs, as well as literal inventory, is an absolute necessity to Norwalk, and to other hospitals that rely on mobile devices. It's also one of a telecommunications/mobile asset manager's greatest challenges.

Mobile Devices: A Game Changer
Twenty years ago, life was much simpler for telecommunications professionals. "Whether you worked for a hospital or any other type of business, you bought your dial tone from whatever company supported you, like AT&T or Verizon, and basically they did all the work for you," said Rose, a member of Norwalk Hospital's IT staff for seven years.

Of course this was way before the proliferation of wireless mobile devices. (Even pagers were in their infancy back then). If you wanted to track something down, you could trace a wire and find the device on the other end of it.

In the intervening 20 years, however, customers like Norwalk Hospital recognized the cost and feature benefits of in-house systems and started bringing many of these services in house. At around the same time, consumers started to understand the value of mobile communications in the workplace.

As a result, today end-users are the ones often demanding or driving the adoption of new applications and mobile technologies, which typically cannot be supplied by a single vendor. And these end users can be very sophisticated.

"The audience that I support runs the gamut from administrative staff, to engineering, to doctors and nurses," said Rose. "Medical professionals know technology because they use it in their day-to-day lives. So now they come to us and say, 'this is what I want and this is what I want to be able to do. What can you provide to me that will allow me to do that?'"

Increasingly this requires obtaining mobile devices that are uniquely suited or configured to work in a hospital, where there is no such thing as downtime and instant communication is often critical. "Everything is much more critical, more immediate, because there's patient care involved," she added.

Multiple Devices + Multiple Providers = Multiple Headaches
Today, hospitals have many devices to choose from —and, as a result, the mobile device mix you find in a typical hospital can be dizzying. And that can often lead to asset management issues.

"Tracking everything is mind boggling, and it's never accurate," said Rose. "I think that's the most frustrating part. If you put all this work into it and it was always accurate, then you could at least feel like you were accomplishing something. But managing the devices and the pool of spares and who is financially responsible for them takes up more time than anyone would ever credit."

In non-profit organizations like hospitals allocating and managing costs for mobile devices can be a slippery slope. There's lots of turnover, but also users' needs and the devices they require can change very dynamically.

"We have to keep close tabs on people that have changed devices," explained Rose. "For example, a nurse may have only had a pager, and then she went to a cell phone. Then someone decided she should have a BlackBerry or a Vocera badge. If we haven't tracked that, we could reach a point where we're paying for multiple devices for this one person when she only needed one."

Rose's network of support vendors, resellers, and manufacturers provide her with information for ongoing analysis and review, but the information is far from standardized, and quite often unreliable. And even if her suppliers could provide accurate information in a consistent format, telecommunications and IT departments need to wrap internal information around this data to make it properly correlate to the users and business units within their organizations.

Like other organizations, Norwalk Hospital uses a combination of spreadsheets and homegrown internal database applications to track and report on this loose collection of information. Unlike more traditional IT assets like servers or desktop computers, however, tools for mobile device management and asset allocation are not widely available or common, especially for a standalone community hospital.

For Rose and her peers, the need for a distributed means of reporting on device allocation and service status is high, especially with the pool of mobile devices growing.

And the attendant fiscal responsibility for those mobile devices is high, too. Per Rose, department heads constantly ask her which devices their department is being billed for. And to get that information, Rose often has to sift through three or four different buckets of information. "I'd go to a carrier. I'd go to the pager company. I would go to a Vocera file just to figure out how many devices do I have for my nursing staff?"

Now, on top of their existing pool of mobile devices, physicians at Norwalk Hospital are suggesting the adoption of more and different mobile devices like iPhones. For these sophisticated users, this is a seemingly perfect converged device, but definitely will definitely create a whole new area of asset management challenges to Rose's already diverse mix.

"Being able to manage all of these disparate devices all in one place would be so beneficial," she said.

Hospital Mobile Device Management 101
While no two hospitals are exactly alike, they often have similar challenges and needs when it comes to managing their mobile assets. So to help hospital telecommunications and IT managers better keep track of and manage mobile assets, here are seven tips:

1. Be sure to communicate with departmental managers regarding users, devices, and services they need. Ongoing communication is key to avoiding an escalation of costs and to making sure key production devices get to the users who truly need them.

3. Get spares or backup devices (and accessories). People lose things. Be prepared so you don't wind up short.

4. Understand that you are in the asset management business. Whether you like it or not, the minute you get into the mobile device business, from a telecommunications IT management perspective, you are in the asset management business -—and you are going to need to have good communication with your suppliers.

5. Make sure you have good data and reporting tools. You are going to need some means of aggregating information together into some sort of holistic framework that you can share with your customers, so they can understand how devices are being used and where.

6. Get centralized. Having a means of centralizing the repair and disbursement of devices is critical to keeping costs under control, devices in production, and users happy.

7. Start practicing sound asset management the minute you rollout new devices. And let each department know what its responsibilities are. If you set up an asset management system from the get-go and get departmental buy in, your task will be a lot easier in the long run.

About the Author
Kenny Schiff is the founder and president of TPC Healthcare, an integrated healthcare communications solution and services provider, and DeviceKeeper.com, a software as a service developed to help hospitals with the ongoing management of mobile devices and applications for healthcare customers.