Mobility, mobile computing, mobile devices, and mobile apps are all buzz words in today’s world.   Things have changed dramatically and rapidly since the first iPhone was released in June of 2007.  Just think of how much our society as a whole has changed in the six short years that followed. The entire paradigm of computing has been turned on its head. Innovation and speed are no longer controlled by a limited set of large, well-funded enterprises. Today it’s about the speed of information and disruptive business models, and it’s the nimble and ambitious that will dictate the agenda of tomorrow.

With technology changing at an increasingly rapid pace, figuring out which way to head next can be an intimidating task. This is why it’s extremely important to take time to properly define a strategy – and the organization to deliver it – before you make the jump. Getting this right is a key to success.

Take your time to define the strategy that best fits your organization. Too often companies fall into the trap of “me too” and end up running with a variety of mobile initiatives without any coherent strategy in place. The result is typically a patchwork of solutions that don’t meet the needs or expectations of your users. Users form an impression within the first few seconds of using an app. If this impression goes poorly, your rate of adoption will fall flat and, in turn, erase your credibility.

Before starting your journey, take your time to educate yourself about the mobile landscape as a whole and clearly understand how specifically mobile fits within your business. Align with your overall business strategy and define a mobile strategy that best supports and accelerates it. Just remember to take sufficient time to execute the following seven steps properly.

1. Evaluate Differences in Workforce Segmentation and Use Cases

Every business is different. Different industries, business models, processes, geographic regions, and cost structures all heavily influence what use cases are the right ones for you to pursue. Even within a business there will be distinct differences in how your workforce gets through their day-to-day responsibilities. As a first step, walk through your organization’s different types of roles to categorize them.

Some workers, such as those in sales, are on the road constantly and require the absolute latest information to make effective decisions. Others, such as a clerical worker, may be behind a desk all day, but would like the convenience provided by allowing them to do certain activities while at home, freeing up new kinds of work-life balance.

Understanding the different job functions and specific use cases for each will allow you to start to paint an initial picture of the areas where mobile will bring you the most value for your investment. Value can be viewed in different ways.  For some value may be improved efficiencies that allow you to reduce cost of operations or get more out of your existing resources, allowing you to spend more energy on growing your bottom line. For others it may simply be about the "soft" benefits of providing more convenience to your employees so that they can improve their work-life balance.

Work with your business partners to identify opportunities and start to generate the demand that will be needed to fund the implementation of your strategy once it’s completed.

2. Classify Applications and Their Data Into Risk Categories 

• What kind of information is actually stored on the device itself?  
• What happens if someone with malicious intent figures out how to access the device and the data on it?   
• Will your business be put at risk as a result of the data being leaked?
• Will you face litigation or serious damage to your company’s reputation?

Before making anything available on a mobile device, it is important that you categorize the kind of data needed by each use case and what type of exposure – financial, legal, reputation-related, or otherwise – you face as a result of a sensitive leak. Take this very seriously. 

Table 1 has examples to help guide your own thought process.

As data increases in terms of sensitivity, the more important it becomes to ensure that it is not stored locally on the device itself. Once a device is lost or stolen, if it falls into the wrong hands, it is only a matter of time before a hacker can get root access (and your data).  Although security measures to help prevent this are improving with each new mobile operating system version, these mechanisms are far from perfect. Storing data locally on a device will of, course improve, the user experience from a performance perspective, but in doing so you may put your organization at risk for exposure without the proper controls and encryption in place. Better to be safe than sorry. 

3. Understand the Strengths and Weaknesses of Each Mobile OS When Deciding Which Ones Will Be Permitted Within Your Organization

Although mobile operating systems all share the word “mobile” and have similar functionality, they are by no means equal with respect to security and manageability. Similarly, there are fairly substantial differences in terms of hardware costs, vendors available, and third-party application ecosystems.

Here’s a quick overview of the most common OSes today:

Blackberry: Extremely manageable via the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) and secure, but may not exist in a few years due to plunging market share. Application ecosystem is extremely small in comparison to Android and iOS.

iOS: Very manageable and secure, especially when coupled with a Mobile Device Management (MDM) platform. They have the highest penetration of the enterprise-space. iOS7 brings further improvements to the enterprise in terms of features management, authentication, and application licensing. iOS boasts a massive application ecosystem and is often the first platform that third-party companies launch on when developing a new application. These pluses are offset by the higher than average cost of devices, since the only vendor is Apple.

Android: Becoming increasingly more manageable with each new release. However there are security concerns due to the presence of malware within the Google Play and other third-party app-stores. However, it has a massive application ecosystem and the largest market share globally in the consumer-space. They have lower than average device cost due to the large number of vendors building Android phones. This potential benefit, however, has resulted in significant Android version fragmentation, which in turn may increase overall ownership costs if you aren’t careful about selecting a very small, targeted group of the vendors and models to support.

Windows: Early days for this platform, so it’s difficult to predict where it will end up in terms of smartphone and tablet penetration into the enterprise. Right now, they have a tiny market share and mobile app ecosystem. Manageability and security is not yet on par with Blackberry and iOS, but will improve over the years to come as Microsoft invests to try to catch up with the Android and iOS duopoly. This is potentially a good fit for organizations that already have invested heavily in Microsoft tools and skills as they improve integration with tools such as SSCM.

Understand these differences in detail and validate whether a given mobile OS allows you to address the security constraints identified for your use case and risk classification exercise. Also, take into consideration the underlying - and often hidden - cost aspects. Will these be company provided devices or will employees bring their own?  What skills and tools will you need to support your user population?

It’s important to recognize that differences in mobile OSes bring challenges – and cost – if you want to provide and support a variety of them. The more OSes you allow the more complex your environment will be. Understand which one best satisfies your needs and start there. Keep it simple.

4.  Make Sure That You Have The Right Infrastructure And Tools In Place To Handle Growth

Depending on the size of your organization – both in terms of employees and number of locations – you will need to validate whether your infrastructure will be ready to handle the shift to mobile. Smaller organizations with fewer than 100 employees and a single location will need sufficient bandwidth, but a much simpler network architecture than a large multinational with 10,000+ employees and dozens of offices across multiple geographies.

Let’s start with your corporate network. Take the number of employees that use a computer today for their job, and then multiply it by 3 to 4 to take into account people using multiple devices. This is the approximate number of devices that will be on your network if you treat smartphones and tablets as network connected endpoints, just like a normal workstation. When you take into consideration other trends, such as machine to machine computing and rich digital media, you’ll start to paint an often scary picture of network bandwidth consumption growth. Be conservative and prepare for the worst. Make sure that your network infrastructure – wireless in corporate locations and VPN for remote users – is ready for the impending tidal wave. Remember the old engineering rule of thumb to design structures to be 2–3 times stronger than their expected load, just to be safe? Well a similar approach applies here. Having more bandwidth than you need will greatly improve the user experience and allow you to handle the shift to more and more cloud-hosted applications and rich media. If you don’t plan carefully the result could be disastrous.

How about managing all these devices?  Much like the network evaluation, it’s important to consider mobile devices as end-user computing endpoints. To ensure that these devices are compliant with security policies (password policies, VPN connections and certificates, black or white-listed applications, jailbreaking), software licenses, and related configuration you’ll need the right skills and tools.  Depending on the size of your company, it’s easy to see that managing all of these aspects will require automation or a small army of resources.  If you use tools such as SCCM to manage your company’s workstations, you’ll likely want to consider using an MDM solution. Additionally, depending on how stringent your security and data risk profiles are, you may also want to consider using a Mobile Application Management (MAM) solution to better prevent data leakage.

The bottom line is that, before you begin, make sure that you have the necessary infrastructure and skills to support your employees. Things snowball fast.  If you’re not ready, you’re going to be done before you start.

5. Select a Mobile Application Development Approach, And Then Understand What Skills You’ll Need To Run With It

We’re almost done with our strategy definition. Now comes the fun part:  building apps. There are a variety of approaches available, each with their own pros and cons:

Native: Native apps written specifically for your selected OS platform offer the best possible user experience in terms of performance and taking advantage of device-specific features. Certain sensors such as the camera, precision GPS, NFC, and accelerometers are only accessible to the native OS. However, writing native apps requires specific skills for each platform and as a result are generally more expensive in terms of initial development cost and ongoing support.

Web-App: Web standards have evolved tremendously in the past few years, allowing functionality via your browser that was only previously possible with a native application. HTML5 and frameworks such as jQuery Mobile allow you to build a platform-independent application that has the same user experience across a wide variety of device types. Doing so allows you to build an app once and no longer be dependent on a specific platform like Android or iOS. Provided it is coded with responsive design your users can have a similar experience on a tablet, smartphone, or desktop. This flexibility however, comes with certain limitations. Storing data locally on the device can be somewhat limited and taking advantage of some device sensors, such as the camera or NFC chip, are not possible, at least today. That being said, the skills to develop with HTML5 are plentiful in the marketplace, so it may very well be your fastest and least expensive way to get an app off of the ground. It coincidentally is also a way to avoid betting on a single mobile OS. Just look what happened to Blackberry.

Hybrid: Viewed by some as the “best of both worlds” there are solutions on the marketplace, including tools within the SAP Mobile Platform, that allow you to wrap an HTML5 application with native code libraries. These libraries allow your application to access some of those nice “native only” features. This allows you – in theory – to code only once and then generate wrapped iOS and Android versions that can be published. Seems nice, right?  Keep in mind that you’ll need to buy the right tool to help you do this, and these tools come at a cost.

Regardless of the approach or approaches you decide are best for your organization, make sure that you have access to the right skills in order to architect, build, test, and deploy. If you’re a large organization with pent-up demand in the pipeline, perhaps these skills can be staffed within your organizations Mobile Center of Excellence. Undecided?  Well, at a minimum, select a few trusted partners that you can count on to deliver when you need it.

6. Start With A Pilot Group To Maintain Control And Acid Test Your Strategy

Now that you’ve done your homework, defined your strategy and scope, prepared your technical environment and support organization, and maybe even built an app or two, you’re ready to start dipping your toe in the water. It’s time to test whether your strategy is spot on or needs refinement before the big leagues.

Start with a small pilot – a specific team, department, or location – to get a manageable group of users on board.  The group needs to be small enough to contain risk and large enough to elicit real and valuable feedback from the users who will leverage your solution. After several weeks of usage, hold focus groups with these pilot users to understand what works – and more importantly what does not. Involving them in the process helps ensure that what you deliver adds value to the business, drives adoption, works out kinks with support, and stimulates demand for mobile solutions.

7. Measure Adoption

Welcome to the big leagues. Launch your mobile strategy to the broader population with a clear, prioritized roadmap of what use cases will be supported when. Much like the consumer world, employees will expect regular releases and improvements to keep them hooked. 

Actively measure usage in terms of employees, devices, and individual applications to get a real feeling for whether your strategy is on track. Build analytics collection into your application so you can measure things like number of users, devices, how many times the application is opened, and for how long did the user use it. As an example, if you built a web-app, there are a variety of tools such as Google Analytics that allow you to skim loads of insights about how your users use your app. High usage means that you’re doing things right. Low usage means you better take corrective action immediately.

There will be some bumpy days (or weeks, or months) at the beginning while everyone adapts and finds their way. Soliciting frank feedback at regular intervals from your user population will help you to keep track of the organizational pulse and adapt accordingly. Involve key business leaders (HR, Finance, Sales, Marketing, etc.) from within your organization to continually keep in keeping your roadmap aligned with their priorities, and seek sponsorship from executive leadership to make sure that your strategy and related policies have teeth.