Top 10 considerations when developing a workplace mobile strategy
July 16, 2013 4:49 PM
Who is responsible for the companys mobile strategy?
Enterprise mobility is complicated not because of technology but because everyone thinks they own it, explains Dan Eckert, director in PwCs Advisory practice focused on mobility. Everyone has an option from procurement to IT to operations to security to business lines. In addition, confusion escalates when employees begin bringing their personal devices to work and expect the IT department to magically support these devices with all sorts of corporate applications that do not exist.
What follows are 10 lessons from Eckert that employers should be aware of as they create their mobile strategy.
1. Avoid lagging engagement
At some organizations, the mobility challenge is a problem for IT or procurement. But in truth, mobility is everybodys challenge. Thats why its vital that any mobility program start with determinations of business needs, goals, and objectives.
2. Keep it simple
Deliverables ought to be written in business-speak, not IT-speak. And when possible, employers should host workshops focused on user experience, customer-segment needs, use case examples, and align information with big-picture corporate objectives. Overall, the key thing to remember is making it simple. If it's too complicated to explain to your mom, then its too complicated.
3. Set business expectations according to technology, operating, budgeting and timing realities
Workshops, work papers, and executive meetings should aim to educate business users about what their requests mean in terms of impact and cost. Its easy to demand a feature, but informed decision-making can happen only when impacts and costs are understood.
4. Connect the technology roadmap with business strategy
Technology and business roadmaps must be aligned with each other. Successful mobile initiatives build a matrix that aligns both the technology and business requirements with objectives, and ensures the needs of these constituencies are met.
5. Create a broad and encompassing governance model
Mobility governance can get complicated. The problem is that everyone thinks they own it. From the user (its personal) to purchasing (its expensive) to engineering (its technical) to security (its risky) to application development (its not in our skill set), it seems everyone is responsible for a piece of the strategy. And, indeed, they are. Mobility governance makes lots of room for discourse and for collaboration.
6. Think through and prepare for cultural impacts
Different device camps within the same organization can cause great cultural rifts. Not surprisingly, millennials and boomers adopt and embrace different mobility solutions differently. Listening-and-response cycles and training-and-measurement cycles become critical to the success of a mobility effort.
7. Build understanding of the technology
Successful mobile strategies optimize the end-user experience by offering information and content via the device types and delivery methods that users prefer. This is not a one tablet versus another tablet argument. Just as with PCs and laptops, the hardware is a commodity. In fact, its no longer practical (or even possible) to limit the hardware to a single platform. So, instead of controlling the hardware, the focus should be on controlling access to data and building flexible services. Deciding which particular device to buy is far less important than what software should be created and what goals the enterprise is trying to accomplish.
8. Show clear executive ownership and support
Working closely with leadership, keeping leadership up-to-date, and drawing attention to risks and other business issues are sure ways to keep a project moving ahead.
9. Find and keep the right talent
Attracting and retaining the right talent to build and maintain BYOD initiatives is one of the most difficult challenges. This skill set is in high demand. You may not realize you have a lot of talent already in your organization. Moving from HTML4 to HTML5 is very painless. Moving from C++ to Objective C is not that difficult. A best practice for organizations that lack mobile talent is to hire a very small team and have them train and cross-pollinate your existing resources. Taking talent for granted can be very expensive and result in project-destroying setbacks and delays.
10. Embrace failure
IT must work hand-in-hand with the companys functions to build a fast-fail capability. Such a capability fosters low-cost mechanisms and processes that let an organization launch and run multiple mobility experiments at the same time. That way, initiatives that aren't working can be shut down quickly, and those that are can benefit from added investment. Enterprises that get good at mobility often apply an agile-like development methodology that allows for cost-effective sprints of short duration.
