Wireless: the dark side

Over the past 18 months, InfoWorld has rolled out a number of technologies in its home and remote offices, including BlackBerry and 802.11b. Everything you hear about wireless — it will change the way you work, it will give your employees access to the data they need in real time — is indeed true. However, there is a multifaceted dark side to wireless technologies spanning the spectrum from the purely technical to the more important human side of things.

First of all, how the term “wireless” took hold as an umbrella term for a wide variety of completely different technologies is a source of frustration for me. When people ask me what I think the next big wireless thing will be, I have to scan my brain for the latest in cell phones, PDAs, 802.11, Bluetooth, and for good measure, printers that receive data over infrared. When you get down to it, “wireless” means very simply “anything without a cable or cord,” which broadens the discussion considerably, especially for IT people who are accustomed to dealing with specifics.

As I wrote last April, 802.11 is revolutionary (www.infoworld.com/article/02/04/05/020408opconnection_1.html), but with emerging technologies such as 802.11, relatively rapid adoption combined with developing security models can make for problems in the enterprise. Most of what is written about 802.11 focuses on keeping the wireless enterprise secure. For most people educated in 802.11, this is no big deal — if you use WEP or MAC address filtering, you’ll probably be in decent shape.

In practice, however, the increasing pervasiveness of wireless outside your enterprise can make support a difficult proposition. InfoWorld’s headquarters is in downtown San Francisco, and engaging in some simple wardriving reveals high concentrations of access points in our general area. In the real world, that means that some of our employees on occasion boot up their Windows XP laptops and attach themselves to our neighbor’s access points, which results in calls to the help desk asking any number of questions such as “Why can I browse the Web but not print to the network printer?” This is not a huge deal, of course, but in an IT environment with hundreds of dependencies, 802.11 just introduces another layer. If you’ve ever had an employee whose machine will not detach from a rogue access point, and you’ve gotten to the point of looking in the Windows registry, you know what a big problem this small thing can become.

Convenience and portability — usually touted as the key benefits of wireless technologies — can also be the biggest drawbacks of wireless in a business environment. Before we rolled out wireless technologies at InfoWorld, meetings were focused on the particular agenda at hand, and although we had our share of boring meetings like everyone else, most people were engaged in the discussions. After all, meetings are only called when teams need to discuss issues face-to-face in an environment where everyone needs to contribute or be aware of other points of view. Now that we have 802.11 in conference rooms and BlackBerrys in use by a number of employees, the quality of the interaction sometimes declines as the people in the room check e-mail, and send and receive instant messages. In some cases, I have been to lunch with BlackBerry users who feel compelled to check and read e-mail while I’m talking to them (I can see your furtive glances under the tablecloth, and I can hear the telltale clicking a mile away). Although wireless technologies promise to link teams more efficiently than ever before, when managed improperly, they can erode the basic fabric of business: human interaction.

I’ve heard that the ability to hold somebody’s attention is the most valuable currency in today’s world, and if we’re not careful, wireless could just make us all a little bit poorer.