Blackberry: Handy gadget or critical application?

Legal Technology Insider recently asked a series of questions in its online reader poll to see whether the Blackberry device was still regarded as a handy gadget or had now become a business critical application for law firms.

The first finding to stand out from the results was the wide range of tasks Blackberrys are now being used for:

• 100% said email (no surprises there),
• 95.5% said calendar and scheduling,
• 77.3% said they also used it as a mobile phone,
• 9.1% said it was being used for digital dictation,
• 4.6% said billing, and
• 22.7% cited accessing ‘other applications’.

This topic was also discussed at the lunch hosted by the Insider and Avanquest earlier this month where the point was made that the ability of the latest versions of document management systems to integrate with Blackberry and effectively handle the filing of email messages had significantly boosted the status of the Blackberry from handy to critical. This view was echoed in the survey, which found that 66.7% of firms agreed that the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) must be considered a critical application for business continuity and disaster recovery purposes.

When asked how long a firm could function effectively without access to a BES:

• 27.3% said it would become critical after between 30 minutes and two hours;
• 22.7% said between two and four hours, and,
• 41% said between eight and 24 hours.

But there were also 9% who said a BES crash would have no impact on them. Given this apparent importance, it is surprising that only 50% of respondents said their Blackberry infrastructure was part of their firms’ current DR and business continuity strategies. There again, the BES does seem robust, with 50% of respondents saying they had suffered no server failures over the past 12 months, and 45.5% saying they had only lost user connectivity on between one and five occasions.

Published on: 26-11-2007