When It Comes to Mobile, You Should Probably Be Pro STD

As I started to think about what I was going to title this missive, I had come up with some other admittedly click-bait worthy options, including:

• When It Comes to Mobile, It’s OK If You Have STDs; or
• When It Comes to Mobile, I Have Nothing Against STDs

Now get your head out of the gutter.  I am not talking about Sexually Transmitted Diseases. I’m talking about your need to Support Their Devices. This came to mind when I saw a blog post on AirWatch’s site entitled “How Indiana University of Pennsylvania Makes BYOD So Easy.” Ironically enough, STD is even mentioned in AirWatch’s blog post:

Bill Balint, CIO at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). “For as long as students have been bringing information technology devices to campuses, we’ve had to support those devices.”

I guess that, just like in the medical world, there are various types of STDs. ;-)

Enough with the tongue in cheek bad jokes. In today’s world, I will argue that a University or any other place of higher learning, is not just in the education industry but also in the services industry. Schools and their faculty are providing a service to students and their families. Service industries, in order to remain competitive, need to raise the bar in terms of the quality of the services and “perks” they provide their customers.  They need to make things as convenient as possible for their customers…I’ll argue this applies not just in higher education, but in healthcare and obviously the hospitality industry (just to name a couple of others).

The organizations that take a service-oriented approach – one driven by a digital transformation – will be the ones who benefit most in the “as a Service” economy.  The key thing to note however, is that organizations need to understand who their customer is…and that they in fact have - broadly speaking - two types of customers.  The first category of customer is the obvious one…the people who are paying you for something.  The second, and often ignored, group of customers are the employees of the organization.

AirWatch’s blog post focuses on the BYOD aspect of supporting those devices, but I’ll argue that this applies just as much in the COPE (Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled) environment.  Organizations must support whichever operating systems and form factors their customers want so that they can stay at the apex of that service oriented “as a Service” economy.

Marc Bennioff, CEO and Founder of Salesforce.com once said something akin to “If you take care of your employees, they will take care of our customers and that will take care of the stock price.” Taking care of your employees is not just about paying them well, but providing them the tools they need (and most importantly want) to be most effective at their job.  You need to delight them so that they can delight their customers.  This is core, in my opinion, to how organizations can and should service their customers and their other customers.

So go on now and think about the importance of a STD policy in your workplace ;-)