Enterprise Mobility – Strategy vs. Technology

Enterprise mobility is a hot topic these days. It is a big buzzword, right there in the same league as Cloud and Big data. There are so many views, articles, journals, blogs, and whitepapers about why it is good for your business to go mobile. A number of these promulgations also go beyond the why to the how. They would tell you to a lot about mobile strategy – how important it is, how to create one, how to staff for one, and even how to execute it. There are others who harp about the benefits of smartphone technologies, with an elaborate oration about what are your options, feature comparisons, and everything short of making your choice for you.

As an enterprise, it is easy to get confused when deciding the best approach for your mobility initiatives. Even within your core team, you would have people who want to invest in technology for technology sake, and others who would want to enable functionalities and use cases, which may or may not be relevant to your enterprise.

Technology centric view – Mobile devices are, well, cool. They offer a multitude of functionalities from within their small form factors. They are portable, powerful, and once again, cool. People who use them, swear by them, while ones who don’t understand them, stare at their users with bemused puzzlement. True, smart mobile devices find a use in different verticals and functions, but are they right for ‘your’ business and ‘your’ task? The answer to that question is not in advertisements and propaganda. A lot of organizations invest in mobile platforms and devices basing their judgment on what the commercials or the analysts have to say about them. Once locked in, they try to force their people and processes to make use of the technology, often ending up with failed projects and sunk costs, not to mention the hundreds of man-hours of effort wasted in the wild goose chase.

‘Strategic’ view – The proponents of mobility strategy are focused on just that. They want to mobilize the existing processes, and create new ones. They want to evaluate the technologies that will fulfill their goals, and have them implemented. The challenge with this approach is that the strategy itself may be flawed, because it is again a technology strategy. The focus is on ‘what’ and ‘how’, not ‘why’. This is the same reason so many companies lost money in ERP implementations. They were focused on getting SAP or Oracle suite implemented, not on whether they needed it in the first place.

The ‘business’ view – The right approach is a mix of the above two with something extra – the business insight. Before you create your mobility strategy, or even think about technology roadmaps, you need to understand the business needs. If the business is looking for agility in operations, an app with a consumer catalog will not help. Similarly, just because a competitor is using a mobile warehouse management application, it does not mean that your delayed delivery problems will be solved by having a similar app. It is therefore very important to first understand the business use cases, analyze them and create a mobility strategy to fulfill the specific asks, and then decide on the technology to enable your cause.

If the m-strategy is not well plugged into the overall business strategy, you are likely to end up wasting time, money and effort with nothing real to show for it.