Two Strategies for Going Mobile: Which One is for You?

Editor's Notes

• #4: At the recent Gartner PCC Summit in May, Gartner gave their view of the state of mobile initiatives. According to their findings, BYOD is yesterday’s news; the devices are out there. What business people at those companies have been able to get from those devices so far is email, calendaring and contacts. But that is not where the real business value is. Companies want to employ mobile devices to let their employees work anytime, anywhere. And that is what companies are now trying to figure out how to do. The next steps? It’s what Gartner calls the “Second tier of value” – and a lot of it involves making better use of documents on the go; specifically – Content creation – generate and edit work documents related to contract negotiations, project management, etc. Content review – for contracts, projects, keep the daily business wheels in motion. High-value content – for expensive employees, time is money; for emergency personnel, time means saving lives. So making high-value documents available to people when they need them is hugely important. Note: that because the second tier of value involves getting value of documents, SharePoint and Office 365 will play a central role in driving mobile initiatives. It’s simply that 80% of organizations already have SharePoint for managing and sharing documents. So whatever strategy you take, using the secure enterprise tools you already have in-house, like Office 365 and SharePoint will be key parts of a successful initiative.
• #5: OK – so you know WHAT you have to find a way to give mobile workers secure access to important documents, AND let them work on those documents and share them to achieve that second tier of value. The WHAT is simple. But HOW do you do this? There has to be a strategy if you want this to succeed because just making the tools available doesn’t work. We all know that changing peoples’ behavior is the biggest impediment to adopting new technology. So the value to the user has to be super high and the amount of work involved in doing things differently has to be very low. It has to be really simple to get people to switch. In fact there are two approaches to providing lots of value while making it easy for workers.
• #6: One approach is to roll out mass-appeal apps to the general work population. Things like make it easy for people to take meeting notes on tablets and them upload them and share them with colleagues in one click. This approach places an emphasis on ‘ease of use’ – taking something that was complicated and making it easy. The other approach focuses on high-value, business, vertical-specific use cases. Things like enabling railway workers to access safety procedures during an emergency situation, offline, while not connected to the network. The ability to save lives and avert disaster by acting quickly has a huge benefit and payout. Here the emphasis is on providing high value to specific workers and work situations.
• #10: For mobile apps to be successful in the corporate environment, they need to strike a balance between the usability that consumers expect in their personal life, with the security and control that is required by IT to avoid data leakage. One such industry that really feels this pain is the Financial industry, where city bankers are highly mobile, and are therefore heavily rely on smart phones and tablets to access e-mail, but also need to collaborate with their colleagues in real-time. SharePoint is ideal for the collaboration part, but secure and usable access from mobile devices is a real challenge. Many financial companies have multiple mobility strategies for both corporate issued devices and Bring Your Own Devices, and as such have had to implement secure access via MDM solutions from security experts such as Good Technologies or Mobile Iron.