My Mobility Experience - Understanding the Rise of Enterprise Mobility

BYOD, CYOD, COPE and more recently COBO have been key buzz words in the mobile space for quite a few years now with a large number of organisations having defined an approach ranging from fully embracing to reluctant do so. I find it surprising that two of the most common questions I am  asked on a regular basis are;

1. How do organisations bring scale to their offering?

2. How do they get beyond a couple of capabilities namely email and calendar being the most common?

I get the feeling that some companies I talk to believe that all they have achieved is to add even more complexity to their already complex landscape. It is because of this I started to write this blog series to explain what in my experience has worked during my journey over last 5 years. I have made a number of mistakes at different stages and more importantly learnt from them so hopefully we can all benefit. 

So how did this all start? Over the years many of us working in Technology have been called in to their mangers office, be it the CEO, CIO, Head of IT or whatever,  to be presented with a new device they have purchased or gift they received and been asked to set it up so the can access work stuff on it, sound familiar? 

This has been a regular occurrence over time and a common challenge for IT professionals ever since the first home based personal computers starting being sold and lugged in to the office by management. In recent times the challenge has changed to not only include "can you set up my new device" but also "what are we doing about enabling our colleagues and partners to use their devices for work too as we should be doing something about this thing called BYOD”. 

In my experience when this question presents itself (which in my experience it will if it hasn't already) you will start looking at what these intrusive acronyms mean to your organisation! If you’re not careful you will disappear in to a world of Cloud, Social Media, Digital, Big Data and the Internet of things getting more and more confused with every page you read. This is where I started in 2010/11 when there was a lot less material available than there is today.

A number will be keen to point out inaccuracies in what I am about to say, but at a high level and because it suits,  the point I wish to make is that its broadly accepted that Consumerisation is a key driver behind where we find ourselves today. Technology and the components within them have been commoditised becoming cheaper, smaller and more powerful in turn making them accessible to the masses. 

This kind of started the 70’s with the Microprocessor, moving to the 80’s where IBM, Apple and Microsoft fought it out for dominance in the home PC space. Going in to the 90’s Microsoft looked to have won the battle. In parallel the Web and .COM boom took place with encyclopaedia’s and dictionaries giving way early version of Wikipedia and DVD based products shipping for free. By the turn of the century multiple devices started collapsing into individual things such as phones, cameras and MP3 players but most were cumbersome and low quality. 2007 sees the iPhone and iOS  start its domination of the smartphone space and later in 2010 the iPad is released. In parallel the Web became ever more dominant, data grows as usages rises entering the always on / connected age.

It is these very pertinent events that have culminated together to provide the consumer with more power and understanding over their technology than ever before giving them an increasing voice over how and what IT departments deploy and whether the experience is acceptable in terms of usability and usefulness. Get this wrong and your organisation will leak data not in a malicious sense but through employees that simply want to be productive and work flexibly no matter how big a stick you put in place to deter them this will, has or is happening now.

As these technologies have become more accessible the amount of data involved has exploded with a vast number of end points connected to the networks. Connectivity itself has almost become ubiquitous available anywhere, anytime and getting bigger and faster which in turn is driving increased productivity through higher levels of automation. Increasing the time available to be productive, fuelling the generation of even more data. So you can see it’s an iterative cycle that’s continually growing and propelling itself. 

Its this ability to organically grow itself which means it is unlikely to slow down in the near future, if ever! Given this it’s no surprise when we see statistics saying that data in 2020 will be over 44 times that of 2009. 

Moving towards a state of hyper-mobility with the majority of devices being used to consume information and interact with, many are choosing newer mobile architected hardware and platforms as opposed to traditional devices moving towards the post PC era. 

Since the iPad launch started to choke PC sales in 2010, to two years later when the tablet market grew by over 78% in a single 12-month period, mobile apps are starting to become dominant when compared to mobile web in terms of volume and experience, earlier this year saw mobile eclipse the web channel for the first time in the Banking sector for retail clients and more recently we see greater traction with converged mobile, laptop and desktop platforms paving the way for devices that themselves are Omni channel capable.

In Summary Enterprise Mobility has been gaining momentum for a while now and I am confident its going to stick around for the foreseeable future starting to dominate more and more as we see end user devices begin a new wave of convergence and align to emerging standards.

In my next blog I will outline one possible way to define an Enterprise mobile strategy. If you found this blog post useful or at least interesting please comment and make sure you like it or share it. Feel free to connect with or contact me directly, [email protected] or via twitter @StrataPrime or https://www.strataprime.com.