UC
A great many of our recent consulting engagements have focused on one thing and one thing only – mobility. Call it the iPhone/iPad/Android effect perhaps, but an increasing number of IT and business leaders are examining two key questions:
• Are there opportunities to save money by leveraging employee-owned devices?
• How can we take advantage of emerging mobile devices and platforms to improve business processes, deliver new services, or transform the company? Sure, there are certainly many managers whose primary concern is simply finding a way to respond to the “help me connect my new device to the network” question, but those looking at the larger picture are looking at mobility as a disruptive technology.
With both of these questions come the usual concerns – how do I meet availability/performance/security/compliance/governance requirements? Often this entails overcoming long-standing policies restricting company mobility platforms to a small number of devices or platforms. As IT managers establish plans to bring more devices into the workplace, they quickly realize their need to come up to speed on mobility management and mobile enterprise application development platforms (MEAP).
Crafting an effective mobility strategy requires answering the following questions:
• Who should own the device?
• If employees bring their own devices, what capabilities do we allow?
• What types of devices do we allow?
• What types of devices should we prepare for (e.g., tablets)?
• What mobile operating systems should we support (e.g., RIM, Apple, Microsoft, Android)?
• How do we support enterprise application access? (Here discussions usually revolve around HTML5, desktop virtualization, and flash)
• What are the security/governance requirements?
• How do we manage mobile devices and applications?
• How do we tie mobile service procurement into our overall communications strategy?
Often the best approach starts with defining roles and profiles – who needs what? What does the company “have” to provide versus what is “nice” to provide. Coupling establishment of user profiles with security/governance needs sets constraints that drive further decision-making. And, it’s important to look forward rather than backward. Spending six months crafting a strategy that covers devices on the market “today” doesn’t give you the flexibility for new devices as they emerge over the next several years. Few foresaw the impact of the iPad and now competing tablets. It’s a guarantee that the next few years will see similar transformative technologies and devices that will require a proactive strategy to enable companies to easily and quickly assess risks and opportunities.
The bottom line: Having a mobility strategy is critical to the success of one’s mobility initiative. More importantly, IT professionals should take the time to think through their strategies—because decisions that seem clear and easy often aren’t.
