Choices – in life we always want to have choices. If we don’t, we feel cheated. On the other hand, sometimes too many choices are not a good thing. Have you ever tried to pick out a shade of white paint?  Super White, China White, Ballet White, Linen White, White Silk, Navajo White, Mayonnaise…

You’ve decided that you want to begin an enterprise mobility project to enhance your business. So where to begin – what are your choices?

When envisioning a mobility project, it may seem natural to think that your first choice should be the devices. If that’s what you’re thinking – STOP right there! Hopefully I have reached you soon enough to save you from hours of confusing and contradictory reviews of various mobile devices and their capabilities. I’ve met plenty of companies who have deployed ‘single device type’ solutions – and what happens is that over time the users end up carrying multiple devices; the one with the app they need to do their job and the device they want to carry.

In my opinion, that is putting the cart before the horse. The device should not drive the project. Instead the project should drive the device(s). If the device is the focus it may be successful in the short fun, but success will last as long as the selected device is an ‘it’ device. 

If you let the device lead the project, chances are that the device you select today, may not be the best choice in 3, 6 or 12 months. It wasn’t all that long ago that popular opinion was that the iPhone would be the device platform which would wipe all competition off the face of the planet on the way to world domination.

Yet according to NPD Group, in the 2^nd Quarter of this year devices running the Android operating system lead the market. Of devices sold in Q2 33% were Android, 28% were BlackBerry and only 22% were iPhone. Understanding that the iPhone results for Q2 were likely hampered by those waiting for release of the new iPhone 4.0 – but none the less it is clear that the device race is far from over. So if you have launched a project which is iPhone dependent – are you feeling comfortable right now? 

I’m not here to tell you what devices will dominate or even survive as the smartphone arms race pushes forward. I can tell you that fierce competition for marketshare will push all the device makers to be innovative which is good for all of us.

I’ve met plenty of companies who have told me that they are giving iPhones, iPads or some other device to their teams – and now they want to build a mobility strategy around that purchase.

If you are already involved in a ‘device first’ mobility initiative – it’s not too late to ensure a longer term success.

To make your project successful, ensure that your approach provides for a device diverse environment.  Technologies are available which allow for deployment of applications across multiple device types. This will be critical for long term success.

The bottom line is to ensure long term success of the business initiative; the project can’t be tied to a single device. Even if you start on a single device type – you can be guaranteed that you’ll need to expand in the future to meet the whims of the users as new devices continue to catch their eye. 

Take a look at the following cartoon posted by Rosscott at SystemComic.com. It’s very funny, and it illustrates the conundrum which is keeping up with fast moving devices.

 Matt T –

Last night we went out to have some tapas at a favorite West Village spot called Las Ramblas, which reminds me of Barcelona. It is a little jewel box of a place –tiny and back-to-back but the waitstaff is so friendly and accommodating that you don’t really mind at all. As a result of it being so intimate, you can get a good look – and sometimes an earful – of your fellow diners quite easily.

Last night I was transfixed by a guy sitting a couple of tables over from us – and for something to interrupt my boquerones moment is quite a feat. What got my attention was that this guy was on a date — and he had a Bluetooth headset strapped to his ear the entire time. There it was blinking on and off continuously like he was some kind of air traffic control tower. He looked a complete tool.

I overheard the table behind us passing comment and snickering about the headset-wearer. I wanted to motion to him to take it off like someone discretely trying to tell someone he has spinach in his teeth. But he seemed oblivious and quite happily talking and laughing and signaling away.

I wondered was he some kind of modern day Cyrano de Bergerac receiving instructions from someone on how to entertain and seduce his dining partner? Or had this little silver slip-on become such an essential part of his wardrobe that it became less an accessory and more like a foundation. Like shoes and underwear. Or did he think it made him look important and in-demand? If he missed a call, stocks would tumble, worlds would collide, children would go hungry. His date didn’t seem to mind but why was it bothering me so much? Why is it OK (at least in fashion terms) to whip out your iPhone or BlackBerry but this thing looked so alien and un-chic geek? I can see using a headset when you are driving in your car but elsewhere…not so much.

I was just having a conversation the other day with a colleague about how I thought the iPad was going to fundamentally change things and might even make the smartphone just a phone again. I could see myself using a small connected tablet device for my apps and emails and another device that just excels at being my phone. My colleague suggested that it wouldn’t even be a phone – it would just be a headset or ear set or some thingamabob on or in my ear. Crike. He is probably right. Everything is moving so fast and I’m ok with that but for some things I prefer to linger for a while.

After dinner we walked through the sultry streets of the Village, with Dylan’s Positively 4th Street on my mind, thinking about the uproar at going from acoustic to electric. We ended up at a lovely wine bar called The Upholstery Store. The chef walked in to chit-chat and said that David Byrne was on his way to his other downtown restaurant. The young bartender looked up and said who is David Byrne? Only one of the coolest guys on the planet I replied! One could argue that I was stuck in the past or he was musically unaware. Either way I’m sure someday someone in a tapas bar somewhere will be pointing at me – look at her on that old brick of a mobile phone. How quaint.

How long have you been providing service in the field? Have you grown through mergers and acquisitions? Do you have different processes in different regions or lines of business? These are some of the typical questions I ask when I engage with a customer. The answers are often shocking to the customer since nobody has ever asked them these things before.

Let’s face it, we all have a job and it usually isn’t contemplating the vast universe or how we ended up here. And when I say here I mean at this point in our companies evolution. The truth is that most businesses grow organically. They start small and grow as the business needs change. This is the most common way that a business grows but much like a plant growing in your garden, if you don’t have a plan you may end up with something far different than what you intended.

When a business starts out small there are people that know everything there is to know about the business and all of its facets and nuances. It’s easy since the number of moving parts is relatively small and can be easily comprehended by the folks who started the ball rolling.

The challenge is that as the business needs grow the standard solution is to throw more bodies on the fire and keep piling them on to stay up with demand.

This is a recipe for disaster since the intimate knowledge of the business that was held by the few doesn’t scale. This problem is compounded if there are any mergers or acquisitions considering the other company probably did the same thing as they grew.

It’s not uncommon for me to engage with a customer that has many different business units that they inherited as part of a buyout or merger and they run them as separate operations. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as it meets the true business needs of the company overall. But has anybody actually analyzed both the new business unit and the old business unit with a critical eye? Have they asked the hard questions? Are we currently doing it right? Will this process scale to the next level? What best practices can we glean from the new entity? Is it time to do a redesign?

The fact of the matter is that in the majority of cases this type of introspective review is usually only done at the highest level in the company and it stops there until something fails and when it does all hell usually breaks loose. There is never time to do it right but there’s plenty of time to do it over and over and over. So how do you prevent this from happening? Simple. Plan a little.

Now it is said that the best battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy and that’s as true today as it was with Napoleon but it never hurts to put the framework for success in place early. I’m always surprised when I start asking questions and a customer replies, “That’s the first time anybody’s ever asked that…” The simple truth is that most of us are too busy doing our job to take a step back and do any analysis of the current situation with an eye on a redesign. The fact that this redesign is critical to future success usually slips by unnoticed.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you need a complete redesign of your processes but maybe a nip here and a tuck there would help. If that’s not going to fix it then we are probably looking at major surgery which usually saves the patient and allows them to go on and live a long and fruitful life.

Only you can decide how far you push the change but you need to consider a few things as part of that decision. How much change can my organization tolerate? Can I put a plan together and execute it in phases? Will my existing systems, processes and people be able to support these proposed changes? And possibly the most important question of all: What don’t I know that I’m assuming I do?

I have been told that one statement I have made to customers in the past is very blunt: If we automate your current bad process you will simply have a faster bad process. I’m not trying to be blunt (or some folks use other words to describe me), I’m making an important point.

If I automate your current process but that process won’t support your business growth or current and future challenges you are wasting your time, money and people. Let’s use this opportunity to put a game plan together about where we are and how we got here (often the overlooked part of the equation) and where we need to be based on the business needs.

Can we quantify any of this required change in business terms? Will it improve billing cycles? Can I reduce stock on hand with real time data to and from the field? Can I improve my first time closure rate on service calls? Will my employees be happier? How can this change positively impact my customers? Can I use this as a competitive advantage? Could I possibly take that vacation to Disney World with the family?

Here’s my suggestion: Get the key stakeholders in a room (managers and a representative sample of staff and field folks) and start asking what works and what needs to be improved. You will be shocked at what you hear but keep dialogue in this session as open as possible.

Your managers have one perspective on what is going on but your staff and field folks are where reality meets the road. The things your people are doing to get the job done are a testament to their tenacity and the level of brokenness of your processes. When the process doesn’t support a successful outcome your staff will work around it because nobody has ever asked them to help fix it.

Once you engage your team to help with the plan you create change agents within the organization. In a past life I used to hate hearing the words “we’re from corporate and we’re here to help…” because I knew that what corporate thought was going on was usually far from reality.

By drafting your internal folks to help fix the system they become champions of that change and can do a great job steering the rest of your employees in the right direction. They will have pride of ownership in the new processes since they helped to put them in place and will always have the best interest of your customers at heart. And let’s face it, having happy customers is why we are here in the first place isn’t it?

There is a clothretail chain based in New Jersey called Syms. They advertise themselves as the ‘off price representative for over 200 authentic designer and brand names’. They run radio commercials heavily, which always tout their tagline – “An educated consumer is our best customer”. The sentiment here is that if a consumer knows what they are buying – they will pick Syms, if they don’t they may have regrets later. Speaking of the happy, educated consumer couple…

Business leaders need to heed this advice when reviewing mobility projects. Every decision maker should ensure they attain a level of understanding level reviewing technologies which will represent their company and brand through a mobile application. The application developer does not have their logo on the front page – you do. 

Mobility is more than a technology project; it is a transformational opportunity for how an organization conducts business. Mobility will (when done correctly) drive a fundamental shift in how an organization interacts with their continuants – customers, employees and partners. And the opposite is true, if done improperly mobility can tarnish a brand.

I am not the first to use Citi as an example of business mobility gone wrong; but I feel it provides a compelling lesson. If you have not heard, Citi disclosed that there was a security flaw in the iPhone consumer banking app. According to the Wall Street Journal article “Citi said its iPhone app accidentally saved information—including account numbers, bill payments and security access codes—in a hidden file on users’ iPhones.”

Accidentally? It sounds more like a developer used a ‘work around’ to get the app to work in the manner desired, and a release of the app without a proper security review. I’m not here to bash Citi for their problems, in many ways I give them credit for addressing the issue publically.

I’m sure we all feel empathy for the business leader who left this project in the hands of IT. The business had a requirement for an iPhone application to better serve customers and asked IT to fulfill the need. Citi’s competitors showcase their mobile banking apps across TV, radio and web; and Citi needed to get on board. I’m sure there was a level of urgency put on this project.

There are many providers of mobile technologies. There are design firms, software companies, consulting firms, independent developers, wireless carriers, and of course internal IT resources who all can provide some level of mobile application development. How should one decide the proper approach? The lesson for business leaders is to stay involved in the decision making process when determining your enterprise mobility strategy & providers. 

Typically, the independent developers create great looking flashy applications; many of these people also create mobile games and bring that perspective. Developing a standalone mobile game  requires a very different approach when compared to extending a business process to a mobile device. 

Both need to be compelling to the user, but the business application has much deeper requirements. A mobile business application has dependencies on back end systems, must operate both with and without connectivity, needs to be relevant to the business case, should be developed by a provider with industry expertise, requires a solid security model from host system to device, and many others requirements. 

While most business people want business applications to be as compelling as mobile games, they still need to represent the brand appropriately, accomplish the business task quickly all while providing a mature security infrastructure.

We should all take some advice from Syms and do our homework to ensure we understand what we’re getting when we make investments in mobile technology.

Matt T -

My wife works for a major advertising agency and she’s working on a big project for her high profile client. She’s putting in long hours and her team needs to be able to find her at all times of the day, so the company decided to give her a smartphone. IT ran out of BlackBerrys so they asked if she wanted an iPhone instead. “Sure”, she said. So as someone who has never owned an iPhone, what does she think?

Do you feel cool having a smartphone, especially an iPhone?

Yeah. I can actually talk to people about apps because my younger coworkers have iPhones and they talk about them all the time. Also, my colleagues are jealous because I got an iPhone for work while others have BlackBerrys.

What apps do you find cool?

Well I haven’t downloaded any apps, but there are already a bunch of apps downloaded by previous people that used the iPhone. Urbanspoon is useful to get lunch, but there are mostly games and other past-the-time apps on the phone–like the Voices app that changes your voice to sound like Darth Vader or like you inhaled some helium.

So IT isn’t concerned about what users download on it or other security issues?

They didn’t say I couldn’t download anything, but I haven’t downloaded anything anyway. And besides my login and password they didn’t have any other security instructions. They showed me how to access email and calendar, make a phone call and get online.

What apps for work do you use on it?

I just use email and calendar. I don’t even know if there are work apps on this thing.

So what work apps would YOU want on it?

A scheduling app to build a schedule for our direct mail and other projects. We use Excel today and then PDF it. Also a mobile analytics app for response rates and other projected metrics would be nice because now we give someone the numbers and they do the number crunching.

Would you buy a smartphone for your next personal phone?

I don’t think so. I don’t think I need all those apps and some of the apps didn’t really work well–like an ATM finder app that didn’t find ATMs that I wanted. I use my personal phone now to check email and browse the web and check Facebook, so that’s enough. Plus a smartphone is a bit bulky.

So there aren’t any apps that make it worthwhile to buy a smartphone?

Well, maybe some shopping apps that give alerts for sales or coupons or when there are no lines at a store. The food and restaurant related apps are also nice.

Ah yes, it all comes back to food. What else do you expect from the wife of the Mobile Gourmet.

Today’s reality.

Html5 + Javascript + push and request/response protocols + Secure enrollment and app management = web ‘appiness’

You can do many new mobile “things” you never thought were possible before.

You can build a web application that can run offline. Yes, offline using a local database. When the communications are restored application messages flow once again from the device and backend without the user being involved.

You can deploy these web apps over-the-air. Over-the-air.

You can use our public-key infrastructure (PKI) to securely enroll users and devices in our service by using our patent-pending Web client technology, which powers the AT&T workbench solution on the iPhone. Soon this will be available on Android devices.

You can have the web apps exchange data with their backend servers simultaneously. Yes, simultaneously using an SSL transport to connect to our service nodes and then vpn connections to your data centers or any other hosted data centers. Frame-realy PVCs are also feasible as is MPLS for remote connections to web application backends.

You can use request/response and push protocols to communicate with web applications. Servers can send data directly to devices without it being requested. Of course you can also use conventional request/response protocols to communicate to backends from devices.

You can manage which applications are installed and updated from one administration interface. You can also arrange users and their devices into groups and install and update applications as a group all at once.

You can wipe the web based applications and data off of any device that has been compromised.

You can sleep at night.

You can. Really. I’d be happy to show you today’s reality. Call me. 732.543.4941

I write a lot about how mobile technology helps people stay more connected, so it was quite refreshing indeed to see another wholly different application –mobile as musical instrument. In a composition by low-fi indie-folk musicians The Low Anthem, the band artfully employs two cell phones on speakerphone to express a sad and beautiful refrain:

 

“It’s a song about having a hard time living with somebody. They call each other, and they’re both on speakerphone—I’m giving away my trade secrets here—and they get this feedback loop that creates a beautiful chirping sound, like crickets. You can whistle into it, and select the pitch that ends up in the feedback loop. It’s a little melody with this natural delay on it. What’s been working really beautiful lately is if we play in a church or a theater with a big acoustic sound, we’ve asked the audience to call their neighbor and put it on speaker phone at that point in the song. It sounds like you’re in the middle of the forest, and there are all of these little electronic crickets chirping away at random.”

Come to think of it, it’s still about connecting people – a new slant on audience participation. A shared experience. All possible because of the ubiquity of the mobile phone.

I have a feeling the folks in this band are not exactly pro-technology. In fact, I would bet they are railing against the technological revolution upon us and wouldn’t give a crap about this or that app. I appreciate that. The tension between the high-tech and no-tech is what produces creative heat.

I can romanticize about my halcyon days with the best of ‘em. I remember being a kid hanging on the telephone with the cord stretched tightly around the corner of the kitchen so I could talk without my mom hearing my conversation. I remember the plaintive sound of a busy signal. How when the phone rang, you simply answered it!  And I can recall the bliss of not being reachable for hours upon end – without having to go to the deep woods of Maine or some remote island for it to be true.  

Things have certainly changed. Yesterday we had a picnic in Central Park with a good friend I hadn’t seen in a while. She found us with her iPhone. The rest of the day unfolded spontaneously and wonderfully from there – could not have planned it any better. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a backpack in the Apple store on Broadway. The entire transaction was done on a mobile device – no paper, no hassle, no waiting, just marvelous efficiency. During the World Cup, my husband’s iPhone was chirping happily with tweets and texts from pals in England, Germany, Norway, Australia as they watched the games “together”.  

So for me, tapping into the past once in a while is a sublime luxury. But I don’t want to live there. I just need that space now and again for calm, for friction or for counterpoint – depending on where my head’s at. I like it here where I can experience all the amazing applications of mobile technology, from making beautiful music to solving big problems for business. Where we can all be artists, inventors and entrepreneurs on the verge of possibility.