Milja's Mobile Musings

There is nothing quite like the buzz of an acquisition to get me energized about being in the mobile market. The first quarter of the year didn’t disappoint with several acquisitions of smaller players by big companies. Now, as we are only days into Q2, the pace is already quickening with yesterday’s news of SAP’s plans to acquire Syclo. And, if an acquisition isn’t enough excitement for one day, we also announced collaboration with mobile vendors Adobe (PhoneGap), Appcelerator and Sencha to bring ease of use, cost effectiveness and more choice to mobile app development.

I decided to follow the news via Twitter and quickly got bombarded with over 1,400 tweets on the topic. The excitement from followers at the press conference in San Francisco, people following online, and even in the office was great. Some were surprised by the news, commenting “SAP goes big in mobility!” The EMF’s own Philippe Winthrop commented that “It’s obvious that SAP is in it to win it in enterprise mobility…”

Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates was quoted in TabTimes as saying “SAP is doubling down on mobile because it sees it’s a critical aspect of where business computing is headed. What they’re saying is “smartphone, tablet, whatever device, we don’t care, we’ll support it.”

The great news is that Syclo is no stranger to SAP. The companies have been partners since 2009. Syclo’s SMART family of enterprise mobile apps already integrate with SAP’s ERP and CRM products and are built on SAP’s Sybase Unwired Platform. Both SAP’s and Syclo’s apps can be integrated into a wide variety of enterprise solutions, staying true to SAP’s strategy to deliver mobile apps to both SAP and non-SAP systems.

SAP employees were quick to welcome Syclo to the family. Their domain expertise and industry-leading apps will significantly drive innovation in enterprise mobility.

To wrap up, I think Sanjay Poonen, SAP’s president of Global Solutions, put it best when quoted in the TabTimes article “We have the largest mobile sales force of any company and now we’re going to double down. We’re going to be aggressive with the speed of a cheetah and the power of an elephant.“

This week, the first ‘Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise’ conference (also known as CITE) was held in San Francisco. The event brought together hundreds of IT execs and companies who share an interest in exploring how consumer technology is relevant in the enterprise. The week was earth shattering in a few ways, not the least of which was experiencing my first earthquake. Perhaps the 4.0 magnitude quake that jolted me awake Monday morning and made my hotel room sway back and forth was an indication of things to come. It certainly gave me an interesting analogy to share in my speaking session at the event – specifically how mobile and social are driving how the news of the quake was shared throughout the city. While the quake was an interesting start to the event, the CITE conference itself provided an impressive lineup of fantastic sessions and speakers. Here, I’ll share a few key takeaways on how personal technology is changing and infusing the workplace.

1. We are at the beginning of an incredible journey. The pace of change is this market is truly incredible and the adoption by enterprises is set to take off. In his session, Rick Bauer of CompTia stated that “The CIO and the organization face not only the consumerization of IT (CoIT), but also the increasing velocity of technology diffusion into the enterprise.” While we have to be sure not to get too caught up in every technology wave, we need to embrace the technology that users want, and don’t let it get away from us. This journey is one that no leading company can afford to miss.
2. Today’s technology is causing relationships to change. The connections that exist between IT and other lines of business including sales and marketing are morphing in a positive way. For example, one conference session featured both the CIO and CMO of a major insurance company, discussing how their departments work together in today’s CoIT-inspired environment. The CIO had a fantastic observation that “IT has to have enough insight to make a difference – and the relevance & credibility with the business to make a difference”. His observation as a CIO was that as he is approached for a technology request, “there are fewer times that a gap is a chasm when we are talking to LOBs about their technology needs.” Consumerization has driven users and lines of business to be better educated on what is possible and has made them more willing to work in concert with IT to meet their needs.
3. Apps are a significant priority. I’ve been talking about the importance of mobile applications in almost every blog I write, and the conference focus was right in line with this core belief. Just before the show opened I heard that Apple announced that the 25 billionth app was sold over the weekend. The economics of that are staggering! When was the last time anyone had sold 25 billion of anything? At the CITE conference, the apps discussion was around building great apps. I really enjoyed sessions by Brian Katz of Sanofi. His buzzword is that we need to avoid building “Crapplications.” Our focus should be on building apps that meet the needs of users and take a ‘bottoms up’ approach when defining use cases. To do this, go for a ride-along with your technicians, sit for a day with your users and observe how they interact with data before you decide what to build into the app. Design is key – but overdesigning and putting too many features into an app can be a major downfall.
4. Data is independent of devices. We’ve come a long way in the mobile world; if you look at the number of vendors who claim to manage some aspect of your mobile world (I’ve heard that today there are anywhere from 40-70 vendors) they will all tell you a slightly different story of how to do it. Soon, we will live in a world where information moves based on what device or system you are using. Consumerization has changed the model: BYOD (bring your own device) and COPE (corporate owned, personally enabled) combined represent what CoIT means. This forces us to rethink how we manage mobility. We can’t simply manage a mobile device; rather we have to think about management from a more holistic point of view – connectivity, security, application management and MDM are parts of a bigger, comprehensive EMM (enterprise mobility management) requirement.
5. Adoption is the new ROI. If you are trying to figure out how to quantifiably measure ROI in this new mobile world I think you’re going to have a pretty tough time. Can you quantify the value of mobile email? In fact, can you even remember a time when you didn’t have mobile email to compare to? Smartphones and tablets are significantly impacting how we do business – but exactly how significant is it? Forecasts are now stating there will be 100 million iPads sold by the end of this year. With numbers like that, perhaps we simply need to consider mobile as the new standard business tool and look at a new way to track success: adoption. If your employees and customers are engaging with you through mobile apps then perhaps you are already achieving the ROI you are looking for.
6. Think mobile first. Whether you are deploying apps to your internal employees, partners or customers, the crystal ball of the future predicts that taking a ‘Mobile First’ mentality would be a good strategy. I talked about how this concept in in use at SAP for both internal and external apps in this short video recorded at CITE. Mobile is a mindset that we are embracing wholeheartedly at SAP – it is driving how IT works internally and how we go to market with our product offerings. At CITE this topic came up several times as vendors and enterprises alike look to the future.

Overall, the CITE conference provided a broad perspective of the impact of mobile and social from industry CIOs who are embracing the technology. One of the best quotes I heard this week was in a session about what mobile consumer technologies can do for your business. Often we think about mobilizing existing business processes – but the potential new ways that this technology brings about are what is really compelling. One CIO advised “Don’t pave the cow path.” In other words, open your eyes to the potential that consumer technology can bring about to transform your business.

I recently had the pleasure of escaping the cold north and enjoying a week’s vacation on a Caribbean cruise. Perhaps it is telling that I specifically chose a cruise as a way to force myself to spend a little bit of time away from my mobile phone. When the kids learned that I wouldn’t have my phone with me, their eyes actually lit up. “You mean no work, Mom? It’s going to be the best vacation ever!” So I committed that I would not work for an entire week. After all, the WiFi on board is horribly expensive, and the cellular coverage is non-existent. So I said goodbye to my phone and placed it in the safe.

I thought that I would be completely disconnected from work for 7 days and 7 nights. It turns out that even in the middle of the ocean I couldn’t escape SAP mobility!

The whole family set sail from Florida on a Disney cruise. We had absolutely perfect weather (80 degrees and sunny every day) and we had a fantastic time at every port of call (except for when the Mexican bank machine ate my debit card – but that’s another story).

One of the highlights of our time at sea was dinner each evening. We had the pleasure of sharing our table with a family from Manchester, England each night. We got along very well, chatting every night well after everyone else had left the dining room. Our 4 year old daughters enjoyed hiding under the table, making faces and laughing hysterically. My daughter even started speaking with a British accent. But that is not what this story is about… This blog is titled “It’s a small world after all” for a good reason.

On day 6 of our 7 days at sea, our dinner conversation finally turned to work. Leah asked what my husband and I do for work and I indicated that we both work in IT. Interestingly enough, she was an IT Manager. Small world, right? Well, not quite. I explained that I work at SAP and focus on enterprise mobility. Now here’s where the small world part comes in. On the other side of the world, she is currently working on an IT project to implement SAP Mobile CRM and is evaluating Afaria to manage her company’s Android devices. Oddly enough, of all the products in the mobile market, I spent the last several years marketing these two products.

I find it interesting that 1500 miles from my home (and 4500 miles from her home) in the middle of the Atlantic ocean we were randomly placed at the same dinner table by Mickey Mouse himself. At the end of the dinner, we laughed out loud when the wait staff (and I am NOT kidding here) broke out into “It’s a Small World After All”. It’s the stuff movies are made of. While they circled around the dining room singing the Disney classic, I realized the power and reach of SAP mobility solutions.

Mobility truly impacts every business. Whether you work in a bakery, a consumer goods company, an oil refinery or a cruise line, SAP Mobility solutions can transform the way you do business. The number of companies who are deploying mobility solutions today is truly staggering. Even two years ago this chance meeting probably wouldn’t have happened. It happened because today mobility is everywhere.

The Consumer Electronics Show was held in Las Vegas this week, bringing together over 100,000 techies to ogle over the latest innovations. The hilights of the show include cool new connected devices including Ultrabooks, connected vehicles, TVs you can control from your iPad and yet another new form factor from Samsung called the ‘Note’. While there is a lot of excitement around the hardware, it is the application of this consumer technology in enterprise that I find more interesting.

I’ve spent a lot of time this week with SAP’s CIO Oliver Bussmann, talking about our predictions for what 2012 will bring (stay tuned for more on that topic). A good portion of these predictions center around how consumer technology will impact businesses around the world. The last two years have been significant – and it’s not going to slow down. There isn’t anything new to this story, but the adoption rates of consumer technology at work are skyrocketing.

Oliver had an opportunity here at CES to talk on a panel and discuss the impact of consumer trends on the enterprise. The panel discussion opened talking about the challenges of adopting consumer devices. Most of us are both consumers and employees so we can daily relate to this – I know I have the same expectation of a good user experience both at home and at work. The challenge then for IT is to satisfy the demands of employees while managing risk and security concerns. Oliver’s perspective on consumer mobility is that it has helped SAP to drive a mobility mindset of all employees. By providing developers, sales reps, marketing, operations and others with the tablets and smartphones they want, people start to think about mobility intrinsically. According to Oliver “Employees are embracing technology, using it, getting to know it, and want to use it in their work.”

One interesting perspective discussed at this session was that in the past IT had to drive users to accept technology. Today that has flipped – employees are driving the enterprise to adopt the technology they want. And because of this – price no longer drives the sale of technology. One panelist from Verizon stated that “it is the creativity – not the utility that drives the adoption of technology.”

Every discussion I have been a part of on this topic inevitably lands on the topic of management and security. I really liked a quote from another panelist: “Data and knowledge are assets and you have to protect those assets.” Everyone agrees wholeheartedly that any device (whether corporate owned or BYOD) needs to be secured. With the speed that the mobile market is moving, Oliver’s advice was to think beyond today’s devices – the future will bring many new devices and you need a tool that will give you flexibility to grow and change over time. Securing the content on devices is becoming more and more critical – driving to mobile application management as a key trend in 2012.

When we talk about productivity, we know that mobile devices drive increased productivity. Everyone in the room (including me) agreed when one panelist observed that “You don’t watch TV anymore without an iPhone or iPad in your hands.” Business doesn’t stop at 5:00pm or even 11:00pm – it is happening all the time. My phone is the last thing I check before owing to bed and the first thing I check in the morning. I believe that companies can probably recoup their annual costs of a device in a week or two simply through productivity increases.

Oliver noted “The combination of easy access and real time corporate information is what drives consumption.” We automatically think about productivity gains being achieved by replying to email, but the real benefit for executives is instant access to checking pipeline and the status of their business in real time. According to Oliver, this is the killer app. One last observation and bit of advice: “The CEO of the future has to understand the trends in the consumer market and make decisions on how to apply them. Consumerization is a trend that is unstoppable.”

In my last blog I started a new series on setting the stage for a mobility center of excellence. Now we’ll talk a bit more about what a center of excellence is and some key dimensions of them. This information is based on a whitepaper written by SAP’s Vishy Gopalakrishnan. Vishy works with Global 1000 customers to develop and deliver on their mobility strategy. He is also a co-author ‘Work Goes Mobile” (Wiley, 2006). If you are interested in more detail on this topic, I encourage you to join Vishy and Mike Golz, SAP’s CIO of the Americas, as they discuss this topic in a webinar on December 1st. We’ll also send you the whitepaper when it is available.

Now, getting to our topic… What is a Mobility Center of Excellence? To make typing easier, I’ll shorten this to MCoE going forward. Vishy defines an MCoE as ‘an attempt to coalesce around a set of principles for an effective and efficient use of mobility across the entire enterprise’. The goal is to capturing learnings, best practices, and reference architectures from mobility projects within your company. Of course collecting is one thing – but the ultimate goal is to accelerate the adoption of mobility within your company.

A Mobility Center of Excellence can facilitate success by:

• Leveraging existing IT processes (standards, governance) and people;
• Defining standards, vendor and technology selection and security policies relevant to mobility;
• Acting as the trusted advisor to the line of business leaders;
• Reviewing, evaluating and approving mobility projects;
• During implementation, providing technology expertise to the business, authoring best practices, facilitating training and technical support;
• Post deployment, offering thought leadership, consulting on mobile technology, and providing metrics reporting and support.

If you think that this kind of approach makes sense for your business, it important to next understand how mature your company is in mobility. Everyone reading this is probably at different stages of mobility adoption and maturity. Regardless or where you are in terms of comfort and expertise, a mobility CoE has three dimensions to consider; scope, organization and governance. We’ll introduce the areas here and talk more about them in the next blog and in the webinar.

Scope: As a first order of business, you need to define the scope and the charter of the Mobility CoE. This is an essential element to grounding the MCoE for everything it does going forward. We recommend that you answer the following questions to help define the scope of your MCoE.

• What is the core function of the MCoE?
• How broad is the span of mobility capabilities that the MCoE covers?
• How will the MCoE interface with your existing IT organization?

Organization: Once the scope for the MCoE has been defined, the next element to review is the underlying organizational structure and associated ways of working. This starts with securing buy-in from major stakeholders across the organization. Since mobility has an impact across most of the organization, it is important to get sponsorship from senior and influential individuals across business and IT for the MCoE. The next steps are to outline the key roles and reporting structure and finding the right person to lead the CoE.

Governance: This element of the MCoE defines the ground rules for its operations, the funding model, the mechanism by which decisions are made, the criteria used to track its ongoing effectiveness, and the process for communicating key decisions and milestones to its stakeholders

These three areas will form the basis for what your CoE becomes and will evolve to. I encourage you to register for the live webinar to dive into this topic in more detail and to ask questions of Vishy and Mike Golz. Registration is available and the whitepaper will be available soon.

As mobility adoption across the enterprise continues at a rapid pace, IT organizations are trying to deal with many challenges that are unique to mobility. We are often asked to share recommendations on how companies can structure their business to support this environment. This is the next topic that we are exploring in the Mobile Sense series; specifically we’ll talk about Best Practices for Setting up a Mobility Center of Excellence. A whitepaper was written on this topic by SAP mobility expert Vishy Gopalakrishnan. A webinar on is being held on Thursday December 1st from 1-2pm eastern and registration is now available.

To get started on this topic, first we should explore some of the unique pressures that mobility is placing on enterprise IT departments. In future blogs, we’ll dive deeper into specific recommendations.

• There is an unprecedented rate of change across the ecosystem – The pace of change in innovation and technology in mobility is faster than other IT areas. This rapid pace of change results in the need for greater alignment between lines of business and IT on mobility initiatives, to prevent duplication of effort.
• Mobility has the potential to be applicable across the entire organization – Mobile devices are everywhere and being used by everyone from true road warriors to information works and well beyond. This pervasiveness creates opportunities to make employees more productive, to engage with customers in a more targeted and deep way, and to collaborate with partners in a streamlined fashion. IT needs to be ready to meet a diverse set of requirements while being agile to meet these needs in a timely manner.
• End user expectations of delivery lifecycles are significantly different – As consumers ourselves, we are used to the relatively smooth and easy process of downloading and using mobile apps from the various app stores. This experience has conditioned people to expect a relatively rapid application development (and enhancement) timeline, without compromising on the quality and user experience of the application.
• There are implications for security – Enterprise IT needs to put in place the appropriate infrastructure, processes, and organization to ensure it can get the desired visibility and control across the lifecycle of these mobile assets (devices, users, and applications). The blurring of lines between professional and personal devices leads to diversity and complexity, as well as data security considerations. IT needs a robust set of tools that automate as much as possible the operational complexities of a mobile infrastructure and still provide actionable insights to deal with issues and exceptions as needed.

Now that we understand the context of today’s mobile environment, we can next look at what a Mobility Center of Excellence actually is. In essence, it is an attempt to coalesce around a set of principles—organizational and architectural—for an effective and efficient use of mobility across the entire enterprise. I’ll dive deeper into Vishy’s opinions on this topic in the next blog. For now, don’t forget to register for the webinar. You’ll also receive a copy of the whitepaper when you register.

Yesterday was the SAP World Tour event in Toronto – and it was an awesome day. The excitement started early when I pulled into the parking lot of the Toronto Congress Centre to find a sea of cars and an entry way packed full of people. The buzz in the crowd was awesome.

A highlight of the day was the keynote session discussion with Mark Aboud, Managing Director of SAP Canada and Amanda Lane, CBC reporter. One of the lines that stuck with me was that “productivity is about working smart”. Amanda Lane speaks and writes about productivity and innovation and she explained that “productivity is an indicator of wealth – when productivity goes up we get richer, when it goes down we get poorer.” The conversation got me thinking about how mobility can help employees, partners and customers work smarter and be more productive.

The conversation dove deeper into the topic of innovation – since this is what makes businesses more productive. Today’s enterprises need to focus on innovation. But how exactly do you innovate? According to Amanda, “you simply encourage people to ask why or why not… Ask yourself ‘what am I doing to be more innovative every day’.”

Sometime we think that innovation has to be a big deal – perhaps a think tank set apart from everyday operations of your company. But the more important venue for innovation is with every employee in their everyday activities. Innovation is not about invention. It is about finding ways to do things better. I think executives wrestle with how to encourage innovation at the ‘everyday’ level – and with how to use technology to do this. Mobility is an area where we can truly innovate in everyday activities. I recently spoke with a customer who ran a contest for their employees. The concept was simple – submit ideas on how mobility could possibly improve your day to day job. The response was overwhelming and the ideas came flooding in. All submissions are being considered as a possible use cases for the company’s mobile applications initiative. Now that is innovation.

In the World Tour keynote, Mark About made a very valid comment; “If people don’t have the right tools and information they get dissatisfied.” If they have the potential to contribute to innovation and increase their own productivity, employees will be happy. Mobility really gives enterprises a fantastic opportunity to innovate.

During the keynote, they talked about Service Innovation being one of the most important areas for companies to focus on. I think the opportunity for mobility to truly transform how services are delivered is incredible. Just think of the potential for customer self-service via mobile devices, for retailers to offer customized services to individuals based on their unique needs, for employees to deliver world-class service based on up-to-the-minute data. The opportunities are endless and the technology is here today.

The mobility sessions and conversations at World Tour Toronto offered a lot of food for thought in this area. The first mobility session, delivered to a room filled to overflowing, featured John Ramsell (VP of mobility at SAP) who discussed how SAP not only offers a wide range of mobility solutions to our customers and partners, but also how we run mobility in-house. Josh Bentley (IT at SAP) shared how SAP had embraced mobility across the company with over 11,000 iPads, 22,000 BlackBerry smartphones, and over 3000 iPhones. Carol Richardson (operations for Canada) shared fantastic demos of how we use our own mobile analytics solutions to gain instant insight into company operations. This has transformed how we run our business with a change from weekly reports to instant reports.

As a consumer (especially working in this industry) I am sometimes frustrated by companies who aren’t addressing the opportunities of mobility today. But as an SAP employee, I’m excited that our customers are the innovators who will change this by deploying game changing mobility solutions tomorrow.

The technology is here people – let’s take advantage of it!

Analogies over the years (and centuries) talk about building your house on a strong foundation. In mobility, we’re not talking about driving up a ‘mobile home’, and camping for a few days. We’re talking about putting the right foundation in place to build a house that will last – a “sustainable, responsive and flexible” mobile enterprise strategy. In the whitepaper ‘A Guide to Successfully Deploying Enterprise Mobile Applications’, written for SAP by Chris Marsh of Yankee Group, outlines recommended principles that help enterprises lay the right foundation for any application mobilization program. The principles listed here are Chris’, and the comments are mine. For Chris’ thoughts on each topic, I encourage you to read the full whitepaper here.

1. Lay a mobile foundation.

Start with mobile in mind. I like the way a colleague talks about this. At a recent conference our Sybase Unwired Platform product marketing expert, Carolyn Fitton, asked “What do you get if you mobilize a broken process?” The answer is “a broken mobile process.” The truth of the matter is that mobility won’t fix broken processes – to be successful you need to start by rethinking the actual business process being mobilized.

2. Think agnostic.

The devices that are popular today may or may not be here tomorrow – things are constantly changing. If you look back over the year 2011, you’ll note that it’s been an incredible eventful year in mobility. With the loss of WebOS and Symbian, the rise of iPad, the quick uptake of Android, and the acquisition of Motorola by Google – we’re in for an interesting 2012. For this very reason, a long-term mobile apps strategy will require apps to be agnostic in many aspects. In the whitepaper Chris Marsh specifies that they need to be agnostic “of the different OSs supported, of the platform on which apps are developed and of the back-end systems they utilize.”

3. Focus on the UX.

In mobility, the user is king. You’ll see that the concept of user experience is a common thread throughout the entire whitepaper. Companies need to keep this is mind from day 1 – invest in UX so apps are easy to use and meet the standards that people are used to in their personal lives. You don’t have to make your app look like Angry Birds, but you do need to make it easy to use and navigate.

4. Build in security from the start.

When we talk about security, we are our own worst enemies. After all we’re only humans and we’re working with easy to lose devices (trust me I’ve lost a few). Unfortunately, we leave devices in airplanes or taxis (or both), and they can easily be stolen. Chris suggests you “carefully consider the degree and type of security required and make sure there are contingencies in place to handle a security breach if it occurs.”

5. Think about where social adds the most value.

Just as mobility is changing the enterprise, so is social networking. Chris discusses how social is increasingly used to “bind platforms together into a sticky proposition”. Consider how social features will add the best value to your mobile applications.

With a foundation that takes these 5 aspects into consideration, you’ll be in a good place to start. Please remember that you can listen to the webinar on November 1st from 1-2pm eastern. Chris Marsh and SAP’s senior VP of Mobility, Dan Mahowald, will also take live questions.

Looking back over the past decade or more in the mobile world is something I always love to do. Mostly because it reminds me how far we’ve come. I was at the Mobility Bootcamp at CTIA recently, and I love the way Philippe Winthrop put it – “We are at the end of the beginning of mobility”. When it comes to mobile apps I think this is absolutely true. Mobile applications in businesses have been around for a long time. Over the past ten years they have most frequently been for sales forces or mobile ‘frontline’ field workers. With the advent of mobility for everyone, the opportunities for the broader workforce to enjoy the benefits of mobility has grown significantly. So now its time to look at the next steps in getting started: which apps to deploy and the architectures to get it done. If you missed the first two parts in this series please catch up by reading Why are so many companies launching mobile applications? and So you want mobile apps… now what?

In the “A Guide to Successfully Deploying Enterprise Mobile Applications” whitepaper written for SAP by Chris Marsh of Yankee Group, there is a great chart that looks at apps that enterprise already have deployed, and the apps that companies plan to deploy in the future. (See Exhibit 4 in the whitepaper, which uses data from Yankee Group’s 2011 US Enterprise Mobility: IT Decision-Maker Survey, Q1-Q2, and 2011 European Enterprise Mobility: IT Decision-Maker Survey, Q2)

There are a few interesting things to notice in this chart. First, is that historically mobility was about extending access to existing applications – notice how almost everyone has email and many have access to corporate databases and intranets. What we are starting to see in the future is that smart devices (and especially tablets) are really transforming how things are done. They aren’t necessarily just replacing laptops or paper-based processes – today mobility is bringing about brand new ways to do business.

So now that we know we want to build mobile apps, it is important to figure out which apps to mobilize first. Of course, it will be different for every company and will be determined by how you want mobility to contribute to your own strategic or tactical goals.

In the whitepaper, Chris Marsh outlines a framework to help prioritize the focus for companies when making investments in mobility solutions. The entire framework is included here for your consideration.

• How will you measure success? A successful application will be one that provides measurable benefits. These will vary but could manifest in measurable productivity gains, staff engagement, new customer business or rationalized infrastructure. Applications that can tie back to measurable KPIs should be prioritized.
• What integration, if any, needs to occur with back-end IT systems? In addition to sales force and field force automation applications, there is growing interest in business intelligence applications that give information workers access to real-time data and operational applications addressing, for example, stock, order and supply chain management. The latter typically require deeper integration into back-end IT systems that will be a key determinant of the platform being used and the type of applications being deployed on that platform.
• How many users are being targeted? Clearly the scale of the implementation is a key factor determining how an application is deployed and the cost of deploying and supporting it. The degree to which this is an acceptable cost inevitably depends on the anticipated strategic benefits of the implementation.
• Are the targeted business processes B2B, B2E, E2E or B2C? Identifying which processes have a business-to-business (B2B), business-to-employee (B2E), employee-to-employee (E2E) or business-to-consumer (B2C) orientation lays the foundation for more specific considerations on user roles and application types.
• Is the process transactional, informational or collaborative? In tandem with identifying the target audience, it is important to establish the exact use case in the contact zone between these end-users. For example, a B2E mobile app might need to fulfill one or all of the following: relay information to employees, transact a particular process such as an expense form approval, or provide access to collaborative tools such as wikis and portals.
• How mobile are the user roles identified for deployments? The right combination of device and application features and, crucially, the policy management governing the application solution will be strongly determined by the degree to which the worker being targeted is mobile. While applications can have transactional, informational and collaborative capabilities, the extent to which the end-user is mobile will determine his or her mix in the final solution.

Once you’ve thought through these questions, you probably can begin to narrow down some uses cases that may make a good starting point. With a first well-defined use case, the fun part really begins – and its time to decide what kind of app to build. Of course, this new topic introduces yet another level of complexity since there are many mobile application types (nothings easy, is it?) Again, in the whitepaper, Chris Marsh outlines four main models of application development. Each one may or may not address every use case. All four models are briefly introduced here and are compared in detail in the whitepaper.

• Purely customized development and deployment: These downloadable apps are customized for specific business objectives, but they lack the agility and pace of standardized development and deployment.
• Prebuilt and off-the-shelf: These downloadable apps provide quick deployment and task-oriented applications but lack the close and customized alignment with business processes.
• Modifiable templates: As enterprises look to more closely align mobile apps with specific business processes, there has been a change in direction among vendors. Increasingly platforms are pursuing a middle-road solution attempting to offer downloadable apps with a combination of flexibility, customization and speed in design and deployment.
• Web-based/HTML5: Rather than being downloaded onto the device or via an application store as a piece of software, Web-based apps are more akin to a Web site designed specifically for a mobile device.

It is important to note that one size doesn’t fit all. You should not attempt to choose one single model for all of your applications – in fact if you try this approach I can assure you that you will most certainly fail. This is because every use case and every user has unique requirements for mobility. I encourage you to read the full whitepaper comparing the pros and cons of each model for your own needs. I think Chris makes a great observation that is very important to consider. In the whitepaper he stated “The optimal solution for the CIO is to have a platform that provides as much of the flexibility to facilitate all of these ways of deploying applications as possible.” In other words, by relying on a platform you don’t need to choose – you can have the best of all worlds.

I’ve shared a lot of great detail from the whitepaper in this article, and I’ll continue to cover more this week and next. If you haven’t signed up yet, please register now for this webinar with Chris Marsh on November 1st.

In my first post in this series on mobile enterprise applications (Why Are So Many Companies Launching Mobile Applications?) I talked about the why companies are considering deploying mobile apps. Assuming you think you want to move ahead with some kind of mobile app, we can now talk about ‘what happens next’? And while you’re thinking about it, you probably want to register for the “Key Strategies for Enterprise Mobile Apps” webinar based on the whitepaper written for SAP by Chris Marsh, Senior Analyst for Yankee Group. Now let’s dive deeper into the content from this paper.

For many companies today, mobility can be approached in a haphazard manner. Many companies use mobile technologies that address a specific set of workers (such as field workers) or a specific business application (such as mobile CRM). At this point most people understand the benefits that mobility can bring to the organization (if not, read the whitepaper in detail). According to Chris Marsh, approaching mobility in a haphazard way with ‘opportunistic’ solutions can be limited in scope and not scalable and actually slow you down in the future. The following are some characteristics and limitations that Chris lists as opportunistic mobility:

• Point solutions address one specific application or business need, and in many cases are a bandage approach to mobility—a solution is rapidly applied to enable one specific application need (e.g., wireless e-mail access).
• These specific solutions don’t consider the broader mobility requirements within an organization.
• Projects are initiated before policies are established, and administrative and management tools to enforce policy are limited or nonexistent.</

So is this a bad thing? It can be in the long term, but it the short term maybe not. After all, these solutions can be used to show the benefits of mobility to executives. They can be used as a litmus test to reaffirm your beliefs that mobility is really worth investing in. I recently spoke at the EMF’s Mobility Bootcamp at CTIA and asked “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer of course is “one bite at a time.” So if you’ve gone the path of ‘opportunistic mobility’ as Chris describes it, just consider it your first bite of that elephant. But don’t stop your journey after one or two bites. Think big while you start small. In fact, starting small can often reveal the policy and management issues that you are going to have to face when you tackle a bigger company-wide mobility strategy.

According to Chris, the first step to creating a more integrated approach is to understand how mobility is critical to your success. This mobility assessment must consider the full scope of employees, assets and business processes. From there, executive management, finance, IT, affected line-of-business leaders and end-users can establish policies.
I really like the list provided in the whitepaper that demonstrates when you’re doing it right. Yankee indicated that you are on the right track when your mobility initiatives take on the following characteristics:

• The key focus is on specific business processes that will benefit most strongly from mobilization. This has to be the starting point if companies are to actualize the full potential of mobility for business transformation.
• Individual mobile projects “plug in” to a common management and security infrastructure. Mobility is driven by policy rather than by ad hoc end-user pull.
• Projects can be supported and management and security policies can be enforced. This is regardless of the type of network used (public or private, wired or wireless), the application accessed or the device used.
• A broader set of technologies and mobile tools is considered a “mobility package” for end-users. This includes integration and coordination of voice, data and remote access services.
• Common middleware, software and security architectures exist. These can be leveraged across different mobility services within an organization.

So there is certainly a lot to think about when you start ‘eating the elephant’. But don’t get overwhelmed! These guidelines are a very logical and tactical starting point when you think you are ready to move ahead. Once you feel like you have this checklist covered and you’re ready for the next bite, we’ll talk about how to choose which applications to deploy.