Mobility - But don’t forget the reality check

I speak with the nagging sense of personal guilt which comes from being an IT professional who has succumbed to non-rational buying decisions - leading to simultaneous ownership of both a Blackberry and an iPhone, and a laptop bag which just got a little bit heavier with the addition of an iPad.

I am not alone. Mobility is the buzz word of the day. The proliferation of appealing mobile devices, faster broadband, and Cloud-based applications, all conspire to add appeal and glamour to the ability to use technology anytime, anywhere, free of the physical constraints of conventional networks.

Industry growth forecasts add fuel to the fire. Last year Cisco announced – with understandable enthusiasm - that based on its Visual Networking Index (VNI) Mobile forecast for 2006-2013 - global mobile data traffic will increase 66-fold by 2013 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 131% over that period.

Gartner’s most recent forecast on global IT spending saw a reduction in year-on-year growth across the entire industry from 5.3 per cent to a forecast year-on-year growth of just 3.9 per cent. The reduced forecast is linked to the current Euro debt crisis. But at the same time, Gartner is forecasting 9.1 percent growth in hardware fuelled by growing demand for mobile devices and PC upgrades linked to Windows 7.

Everyone wants to be mobile and many of us have been guilty of buying the latest mobile gadget without really thinking through just what the business benefits will be.

This is harmless enough on a personal level, but buying decision at an organisation level must be underpinned by a hard nosed understanding of the business benefits and a solid business case.

The mobile device should come last in the decision sequence - post the establishment of the use case for the role and the actual applications to be mobilised. NOT first as is often the case. Deploying the right device to meet the use and business case requirements will often make or break the actual business case.

Clear use cases, by role, need to be defined prior to embarking on enterprise mobile applications.

Not every role has the same requirements for mobile application access.

At Oxygen we’ve developed a six step plan to ensure that the horse is placed firmly in front of the cart when it comes to advising on and managing the implementation of organisation-wide mobility solutions.

1. Understand the business requirements and the context of those requirements – go out on the road with the end users to understand and sanity check perceived requirements against real requirements.
2. Identify the application which most closely fits the business requirement.
3. Resolve the deployment, security and architecture issues.
4. Match the business requirement to the role and then establish what type of device meets the requirements.
5. Start with a small pilot to assess effectiveness and productivity or improvement results.
6. Finally – plan and manage large scale deployment based on a business case understanding of the costs relative to benefits

The hype around Mobility has been fuelled by the relatively uncontrolled nature of early deployments of mobile email – along with the proliferation of appealing devices – which have created the misperception within organizations that this creates a foundation for mobile access to enterprise applications.

The reality is that mobile deployments need to be highly structured and carefully managed. As with all technology deployments the business requirements have to be paramount and the cost benefits of mobile deployments need to be fully understood up front. Mobility has strong business advantages but it also has the potential to pose serious risks if security and architecture issues are not identified and managed to a robust standard.

The bottom line is that Mobility decisions have to be made without any emotional attachment to cool devices. Follow good process. A reality check after the fact will likely be one you won’t want to cash.