Let's face it: Wireless is out of control. It's invading everything from tennis shoes to your skin. The days when wireless was a simple cell phone are gone. Wireless is everywhere.

Enter enterprise IT, trying to keep up with this chaotic growth and get control of it. Most companies I talk to have a pat answer, such as "Yes, we do have a cellular usage policy; yes, we track expenses; yes, we have a system in place for device inventory management, billing analysis, device configuration and application setup, help desk, security enablement and more." This is usually followed by a litany of buts: . . . but it only works for SyncML phones; . . . but only in the United States; . . . but not for personal phones owned and used by employees for work purposes.

And the band plays on. Verizon makes downloading music to phones less expensive. Sprint enhances our watching TV shows. Cingular adds features for the user. The opportunities for employees to increase spontaneously the expenses related to their phones are growing, and the ability to track these expenses is falling behind fast.

Most firms' internal resources and tools have too many limitations to manage wireless devices and services in a cost-effective, life-cycle way. You may have a handle on certain aspects of this problem (for example, if you're running a BlackBerry server, you may feel your policy server is doing a good job of handling configuration and security for those users), but when you look at the broader picture you're probably not as secure, economical or efficient as you need to be.

Mix into this the security and liability issues involved when mobile versions of e-mail, document management, ERP, salesforce automation and other applications are piled on top of the challenges of managing these things in the desktop-laptop PC environment. We all hear about the security issues when a laptop is stolen or lost, but the loss of handheld mobile devices is orders of magnitude higher - one survey noted that more than 85,000 cell phones were found in taxis in Chicago alone during a six-month period, only half of which were returned to their owners. Compliance with internal and regulatory policies regarding data security only gets harder when a document with vital customer data is left behind in one of these taxis - not to mention the bad press and lawsuits such exposure can bring.