ACT NOW: Enterprise Mobility / Flexible Working

As we head into 2015 you have two choices – prepare to win with enterprise mobility or prepare for your company to be “disrupted into the ground.”

It is now mainstream. mobile working is no longer a pipe dream: over 5 million Brits do it every week already and every employee now has the legal right to request flexible working, but that does not mean that your firm is actually ready to cope with it, let alone make the most of the benefits that in principle await you when you enable enterprise

The Hardware Continues to Flow

Meanwhile, lots of tablets are now here, with Android certainly pushing “pure” market share numbers ownership, but none – I mean NONE - will overshadow or even remotely be able to challenge the iPad or Apple in the enterprise as far as mobile devices are concerned. And there are lots of ‘me-too’ mobile devices – a few new state of the art beasts such as Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 that in fact will become a vital enterprise piece of hardware. And because it is now 2014 we can’t ignore wearable tech, can we?

As I write we can also anticipate Apple having a renewed and potentially profound impact on the enterprise when it introduces its new iPhone 6 and iOS 8 - there is a lot at stake for the enterprise lurking here.

All of these many devices will somehow continue to find their way deep into the enterprise. And?

- All of them must be accounted for.
- All of them must be made fully enterprise-grade secure.
- All of them must be ‘enterprise-provisioned’ to ensure that policy management is properly enabled, that the right enterprise mobile apps and data are sitting on the right devices, that the wrong apps are nowhere to be found (or at least kept entirely separated from the business apps), that critical enterprise data is properly and fully encrypted on all devices, and that users are fully vetted and authenticated before they ever get near those apps and data.
- All of them must be made fully mobile content ready (it sounds simple but it is hugely non-trivial).

There isn’t anything new here. It is all common-sense IT. And yet, as enterprises gear up for what will, throughout 2014, be a major national and international enterprise mobilization effort, we hear a vast noise of confusion – and in some cases literally traces of fear – from CIOs, CTOs and CFOs everywhere. Too many devices, too much BYOx, too many options, too many great ideas from line of business people for mobile use, and always too much complexity!

There are three types of people important to the mobile enterprise. In order of importance they are –

- The line of business teams that want to increase and grow old business while significantly driving new business – they all get mobile, there is no doubt, and they are generating huge demand. They drive mobile complexity.

- And then there are the IT folks that have to figure out how to handle and meet the demand. They need to solve the issues of mobile complexity and security.

- And there are those pesky financial types that have to make the financial cases for all of it and actually pay for it all.

Executive management, meanwhile, is now fully in the business team camp – executive management (aside from the CFO, but even here they get it) now has zero tolerance for IT not being able to deliver or to meet mobile demand, no matter how complex. In fact, this zero tolerance is a key sign for me that 2014 is the huge mobile enterprise year.

It gets even more demanding than we’ve noted so far. What we’ve highlighted above is all the ‘prep work’ that has to go into the mix before IT even starts to think about actually building their mobile (native + HTML5 + mobile Web) apps. Complex backend and edge infrastructure – without the right approach, it becomes a downright nasty, hugely time-consuming and extremely costly effort just to get those preparations in place for building the mobile apps. Strategy is easy; implementation is the devil!

Worse still, as all of this is going on, the very landscape for defining what a mobile app is, is rapidly evolving, and represents an enormous moving target:

- B2B becomes B2C. C2C (i.e. we-centric social mobility) drives social mobility and heavily influences B2C and B2B. B2C and B2B must figure out how to, in turn, affect C2C in positive ways. Let me be a bit clearer here: if your business has other businesses as customers (rather than, say, consumers) you must still ultimately treat the end result of your interactions with those business customers in a C2C way – yes, well, something to talk about in depth another day.
- Native mobile apps merge into HTML5 Web apps. The Mobile Web becomes increasingly important. Apps evolve into pure content publishing and distribution (that begs the question: will there be anything left that isn’t defined simply as content?).
- Mobile becomes (and essentially already is) mobile + social.
- Enterprise app stores will take on far more importance.
- Public-facing enterprise app stores – especially those interested in creating socially vibrant mobile environments – must be able to securely expose their APIs to third-party developers.

I’m just touching the surface here of the new mobile world that enterprises will fully face as we begin to slide into 2015.

I know, there are many other issues of course – the Internet of Things begins to take on a large role in many ways we’ve yet to fully understand, for example. But let’s stick with enterprise mobile apps for now.

What’s an Enterprise to do to Maintain Mobile Sanity?

We’ve all seen numerous stats that suggest businesses know they need to go mobile and get on the social mobile train ASAP, but that most businesses – both large and small – have no real game plan or strategy for doing so. More often than not I hear variations of: ‘We’ll wing it and go from there – we’ll adjust as we need to and as we learn…’

Does your CFO think this way? Your CTO/CIO? How about your head of global sales? Marketing might think this way…at least under pressure.

“Now here is the thing: mobile + social, whether applied to advertising, publishing, corporate marketing or business, sales and customer development, is all essentially a marketing function. This means that we really, absolutely do not want marketing to build a mobile + social strategy under pressure.”

I’m quoting myself speaking to a fairly large business. The truth is that today (amazingly) so many companies are so far behind the mobile curve that this is what is happening in too many places.

So how do you get to a meaningful game plan?

First, let’s back up and remove ‘+ social’ from the mix. The real problem is that most companies do not have a mobile strategy! You cannot get to ‘mobile + social’ until the ‘mobile’ side of things is under control. There are too many companies – the great preponderance of them as it turns out – that are, in fact, not only winging it on mobile + social but that have absolutely no core long-term (or even short-term) mobile strategy in place.

That is great news for any of the too few businesses that are already significantly mobile-savvy…these companies constantly raise the mobile bar and threaten to leave a vast collection of laggard competitors in the dust. Tell that your CEO ASAP. You know who you are.

Long Term Strategy Saves Business Lives – Yours!

Enterprise mobility comes in many flavors: Employee facing. Customer facing. Vertical industry specific. Horizontal. Simple (actually, ‘almost’ simple – e.g. mobile email deployment). Complex (composite, multi-backend, multi-device, multi-OS, highly secure, carefully managed). Pure consumer facing (always complex, but add to the mix network bandwidth detection, network throttling (to ensure app responsiveness), offline data security, and the ability to scale to millions of users, logins and transactions per day.

Enterprise complexity also includes enterprise politics (Who owns it? Who controls it? And my favorite – Who pays for it?). Larger enterprises also bring varying layers of IT to the mix (e.g. How is the CIO/CTO relationship faring? Is the CMO now part of the mix IT must deal with?). The enterprise politics list is endless and every enterprise has its own permutations and similar stories to tell.

Let me (please!) quote myself again still speaking to that fairly large business:

“BUT – and this is a major ‘but’ – there is one underlying factor here regarding building mobile applications – from simple to the most complex – that crosses ALL of the above: there is no such thing as a quick or cheap fix, and any specific mobile enterprise application or larger mobile strategy that is not built with careful long-term planning in mind will result, without fail – I guarantee it – in stranded mobile apps (or siloed apps, island apps, poisoned apps, disenfranchised apps – pick any one, and add your own, you know what I mean).

Without the eye to full long-term planning, the right mobile partners and the right mobile development platform, the longer term TCO – the real costs of securing, managing, maintaining, updating and modifying these mobile apps across multiple devices and platforms –will skyrocket in short order and far surpass any up-front cost savings by going fast and cheap.”

Clearly, there’s a lot to deal with here. And yet, dealing with all of the above only solves half the problem. The other half involves your mobile users and the critical user interfaces that will go with your mobile apps.

It is certainly possible today to build mobile apps fast, cheap and on the fly (especially for a single platform (e.g. iPhone) – I strongly suggest that you think of this approach as using cheap, disposable point and shoot pocket cameras. Who remembers this little piece of high tech:

As always, you get what you pay for. The trade-offs you get are: ‘pretty good, most common denominator, cross-device UIs’ that ultimately suffer, however, from limited UI and backend capabilities. As with the cheap cameras that give you disposable prints, you end up with disposable mobile apps – that are in fact disposed of in a hurry. The mobile apps are gone before you can even consider the social piece of the strategy.

Rather than well-designed, custom and unique UIs that truly speak to your workforce, partner and customer needs and that truly express your company’s social persona (yes, that social persona matters a great deal – especially relative to brand loyalty, recommendations for your business and its products and services and social success!), you will instead end up with generic UIs that will significantly undercut what your mobile apps can really achieve, and will deliver far lower or more likely negative ROI both short and long-term.

Not only in the long run, but in the short run just as well, the old adage – penny wise, pound foolish – will replay itself over and over. Build mobile enterprise applications with a clear, coherent and forward-looking strategy that takes the big ‘B2B enterprise’ and ‘B2C/C2C marketing’ pictures and the entire range of your mobile/social-driven users (employees, business partners and consumer/retail customers) deeply into account at all times.

What’s an example of penny-wise, pound foolish here? Would I seek to cut corners by eliminating the need for extensive end-user testing? NEVER! The ultimate TCO will alway be far too high to ever justify cutting such corners up front.

Here’s another: Did you know that HTML5 apps may seem easy and cheap to piece together but that enterprise grade security, management and in particular securely dealing with persistent data residing on the device are monsters to deal with? HTML5 is a potential Trojan Horse – simple on the outside, complex on the inside, with a ton of hidden enterprise mobile app and security challenges!

I don’t know about you, but I have never met a business plan (of any sort, mobile or otherwise) that inherently and unavoidably leads to low or negative ROI and high TCO that ever allowed anyone to keep their jobs.

The Need for Mobile Speed is Very Real

All of the above said, while strategic thinking must be long-term, amazing and rich cross-platform mobile applications that will handle all of the above should never take more than three months for even the most complex of them to be built and deployed.

What is critical for enterprises going forward is to smartly jump-start mobile operations. Let’s be fair here – while there are numerous mobile pioneers, the vast majority of enterprises are still only now getting started on the mobile front – the window of opportunity is still there and awaits. There aren’t yet any real enterprise mobile laggards – but if 2015 rolls around and you still aren’t in the mobile game then you’ve effectively killed your business off (or you will have begun your business’s inevitable downward spiral).

For the rest of this decade mobility will be a fast-moving and shifting target. If you aren’t fully on board before 2014 ends you will forever be chasing your competitors.

How then to jump-start the mobile process? How do you prepare and handle the groundwork?

It all begins by tapping into all of those very excited line of business execs and start your mobile apps planning and development processes ASAP. This is the HUGE first step.

The second important step is to ensure that you drive an IT decision to adopt a Mobile Application Platform (MAP) and strategy into place ASAP. The MAP will either be fully deployed in the cloud or on-premise. Both options are always on the table and require careful consideration – don’t forget your financial team, it will be critical here.

I realize I’m begging an important question: how does an enterprise effectively evaluate and select a MAP? It’s a damn fine question to ask, but the answer must be left for another day…

But get moving! The enterprises pioneers and those enterprises already well on their mobile way in 2014 will take no prisoners and otherwise leave you in the dust.

Where is your mobile business planning today? If you need help then speak to Backbone UK or RTW Hosting who have been at the forefront of flexible working and enterprise mobility since 1998!