Give up! Winning the mobility war by conceding

IT is engaged in a costly and lengthy military campaign with mobility. Upper management drafts fleets of new tablets, while users introduce their own mobile devices to the network. All of these must be secured and managed - refusing to do so can cost you your job. So what’s an IT manager to do? According to Joe Sweeney*, analyst at IBRS, the only answer is to lay down your arms.

Over the past two years, IBRS has come to the conclusion that many IT departments are at war with consumer mobile device trends. We have been inundated with enquiries regarding mobility and mobile devices. Questions range from how best to support secure email on iPhones, or how to manage a fleet of iPads, to how to plan for Android application deployment.

These enquiries have one thing in common: they all focus on the device.

This is the wrong way of looking at the whole issue of mobility. If we keep on asking questions about how to manage specific devices, or create software for the next cool mobile platform, we will forever be on a treadmill of mobile development, while always one step behind the consumer market. There is no way we can plan for, nor keep up with, the rapid changes taking place in the consumer mobility war. We simply cannot afford to constantly redevelop or tweak applications for the latest consumer gizmo as big brands come and go. And evaluating the security profile of each new device Â… forget about it!

So what’s an IT executive to do? We certainly cannot ignore the influx and influence of all this consumer technology. Increasingly, refusal to support external devices is a career-limiting move. We have already seen one senior IT executive lose his job for refusing to support Apple in an organisation. Likewise, we cannot bank on supporting just a single platform of consumer device.

The secret to winning the mobility war is to give up. Cease thinking about devices and control. You can’t dictate the device your staff will carry, nor the device format, or even the network their device will access! Forget about the device. Forget about the UI. Forget about the data network. Instead, focus on what really matters to the user: appropriate information access.

By ‘appropriate’, we mean that the information presented to the user - no matter the device - will need to have value in the specific context of what the user is doing. This means working with users to truly understand their roles and day-to-day tasks. For example, does the user really want full sales information for a customer available on a smartphone when they are on the road, or simply a snapshot of outstanding orders? Understanding the context of information usage leads us to a very important insight: mobility is not about the device, it’s about creating new processes or extending existing processes. Ideally, these processes will assist the mobile user in making an immediate but informed decision, and/or assist them with taking action on the spot. This is the real power of mobility!

IT’s challenge is therefore not one of supporting XYZ product, but of working with users to understand what processes can be expanded ... which has the benefit of making the users responsible for articulating the value of mobile solutions, and taking explicit ownership of security risks associated with making such processes mobile.

Once the focus of mobility is shifted away from support for specific devices to processes, decisions on technology become easier. IT can either support processes on all devices by adhering to common ‘lowest common denominator’ standards (rendering UI in HTML) or by using a third-party, cross-device presentation tool (such as Citrix). At the end of the day, the users don’t really care, just as long they can get the right information into their hands, at the right time.

*Joseph Sweeney is an advisor at analyst firm Intelligent Business Research Services (IBRS), which is found at www.ibrs.com.au. He specialises in cloud computing, unified communications, collaboration, mobility and Microsoft products. Joe has 30 years of experience in IT development, planning and strategy.