Mobility–The Key Challenge for CIO’s in 2011 - 12

Arriving at the mobility architecture/approach for the organization is going to be a key initiative for CIOs in 2011-2012. It could be an opportunity for a CIO to truly be the Chief Innovation Officer of the enterprise leveraging mobility to innovate his/her business/organization. But its not going to be an easy journey.

This slide from a recent Gartner presentation is a good depiction of the different aspects that CIOs will need to wrap their heads around before arriving at their mobility strategy for the enterprise.

Mobility is fast becoming a key dimension of discussion in any IT project. It has come in from left field in the last year or two and is now becoming an central tenant of most IT projects. A good example of this is Last month was I talking to a customer who had a failed implementation of CRM, and one of the points of failure or lack of usage of the solution they implemented was their poor or non-existent support for mobility.

Some interesting data on this topic from Forrester:

• Mobility is front and center for 62% of CIOs and IT leaders across the globe, with 16% seeing it as a critical priority and 46% seeing it as a high priority.
• Forty-eight percent of organizations interviewed by Forrester across the globe will be spending on mobilizing enterprise applications in 2010. Another 37% show an interest with no plans to implement in 2010.
• Around 75% of organizations deploy mobile applications to increase worker productivity, and 65% to increase employee responsiveness. Forty-eight percent are focused on resolving customer and internal issues faster. Overall improved customer satisfaction is an important driver of mobilizing applications for 42% of firms.
• Thirty-eight percent of companies surveyed are developing their mobile applications in-house, 27% are buying them from an application store, and 25% are having external IT services firms develop custom applications for their mobile requirements. Only 22% are using a mobile extension from an existing packaged application

Mobility in the RIM world was restricted largely to email & calendaring but in the Apple age, everything is mobile. I think the biggest disconnect GEN Y workers are going to have with corporate IT is probably going to be support (or the lack of it) of mobility.

The mobile device has become the primary portal to the electronic world today. And this has become possible by the improved capabilities of smart phones and tablet devices and the growing ecosystem of applications that are created on these platforms."...There is an app for that" has become common vocabulary and all apps aren’t just limited to some trivial functionalities there are a lot of useful capabilities becoming available through these apps that are very relevant and useful to the business user.

“What is mobility” – That seems to be a moving target too. Until 2010, it was only smart phones, now we are talking tablets, who knows what’s next?

The proliferation of smart phones and tablets has been phenomenal. A good indicator for this is that Apple has managed to sell a significant number of iPad2s in just the first month of release. The rate of their adoption in the enterprises is also on the up. Smartphone usage was always high in the corporate world but limited to middle management and above and was restricted primarily to RIM. But today, the proliferation is near complete across the whole organization and it's heterogeneous in terms of platforms – you have IOS, Android, Windows 7, Web OS etc.

CIOs need to take the challenge head-on and leverage this opportunity to innovate.

Prashanth Rai

Comments

[BabbleWareInc]

Prasanth,

The CIO can become the Chief Innovation Officer and shed the unofficial title of Chief No! Officer. Mobility is vitally important to any business as a majority of their work force is not in a stationary location for much of their work day.

This isn't just the white collar, knowledge workers who want to keep up with email. It includes the "blue collar" Operations people that make, store, sell, deliver, install and service all the products of the business. Extend that to the Vendors and their employees and the Customer and their employees and you have a mandate that mobility be woven into the fabric of your company.

Traditional architectures, such as those used by ERP and Best of Breed applications, do not support the agile, collaborative, social and mobile business apps that business requires. The data, process and technology needs of business move way too fast for these dinosaurs to keep pace. That does not require that the old systems be ripped out and replaced, or modified or even integrated.

Operating systems of a mobile device are irrelevant. Client based "apps" for business just don't make any sense in 2011. Browser based Apps that allow the user, whether employee, vendor or customer, to access the business process, communication and collaboration 'app' are device agnostic. Removing the device level control and responsibility out of the hands of IT. That saves a ton of work that can now be put to innovation.

http://babblewareinc.com offers a next generation of enterprise computing that protects the existing investments while making innovation immediate, measurable and repeatable. We decouple the data, process and technology constraints of the existing enterprise software. Without any change to those systems, thereby eliminating risk, business can now enhance the process to fit by adding missing data, aligning the process and adding new technology.