The truth is that the majority of companies don’t maintain a complete and accurate list of all their employees’ mobile devices. This is a huge oversight that leads to inaccurate company financials, inaccurate employee paychecks, and inaccurate employee and customer data.
There has been a lot of discussion and debate about this subject in the tech community lately, so I’m going to put my two cents in here. A company that has mobile devices for employees to use on a daily basis should have an electronic version of their corporate records with the names of all employees who own a mobile device. This doesn’t mean you need every single mobile device to be an employee, but it makes it easier to identify those who are employees.
The reason why this is important is because companies want employees to be able to accurately record their own mobile devices and for employees to be able to easily access that information. That means that companies should be able to keep the entire corporate database of the devices (and its data) in one place, and if they wanted to they could easily obtain a copy of the entire database. This would also make it easier to identify which are employee-owned devices and which are corporate-owned.
Some companies are doing this already. For example, IBM has a very detailed database of its employees’ smartphones, and the Android Police has a very detailed database of all their Android devices. In fact, the Android Police has the complete database. But it’s important to note that these companies, while they are doing this, are not actually keeping the entire corporate database in one place, so it’s always possible that the company data could be altered.
This is important because while device companies and other corporate record keeping entities are already keeping all the data of their devices on the net, they have no way of knowing which devices are their own. And the most likely way that we may get our hands on this information is if they sell us a device that is manufactured by a different corporate entity.
Mobile devices are a huge part of the computing landscape. As a result, corporate record keeping records are quite large and easy to alter. So it’s no surprise that there has been a lot of focus lately on how to keep your corporate device database up to date. I guess the first step in doing this is to make sure that all your mobile devices have their own unique corporate identity.
This is a big one too. A lot of people do this in the form of a SIM card. They put their contact information on the back of the SIM card, so if the phone company gets hacked, they would have a way to identify the owner. But a lot of people don’t do it that way. They just have the SIM card with them wherever they go.
On another note, I’m not sure we do this in two ways, but two things are clear: (1) We need to find out how many other people have mobile devices on the planet, and (2) we need to know how many other people have mobiles on the planet, or whether or not the other people have an account on the phone company.
For the first, we can ask Google. This is a lot more fun than it sounds. Google has a Google+ account, which means in addition to the regular Google+ presence, it also has links to all of Google’s other services, including YouTube, Gmail, and Picasa.
And for the second, I’m going to quote from a blog post by John Gruber: We can use Google’s mobile tracking APIs. It’s the same API that the phone companies use to build their mobile “counters.” This means that your phone company or whoever it is who manages your account on their mobile will have access to every piece of data regarding your phone, and in this case, a lot of it.