Developing an actionable mobile enterprise application strategy

Most businesses need an execution plan and roadmap for mobile enterprise application rather than a strategy. Too many companies spend months and months developing strategies and usually come up with a plan that simply justifies what they wanted to do in the first place. That is why we have developed the fast track process for mobile enterprise application strategy.

The process consists of 5 simple steps that almost every company could deliver in about 4 weeks:

1. Evaluate how your company and employees use mobile devices and applications today
2. Benchmark competitors and companies in adjacent industries
3. Interview key stakeholders and identify use cases where mobile can transform your business
4. Prioritise the use cases based on opportunity size, complexity, cost and commonality
5. Analyse use cases and determine which processes should be centralized across the business

We will explore each one of the deliverables here to get you started with an actionable fast track mobile enterprise application strategy

1. Evaluate how your company and employees use mobile today

Whether it’s accessing and sharing files, synchronising calendars, managing tasks or presenting to customer off iPads - most companies are in for a big surprise when they realise how much their company already uses mobile applications.

This exercise brings to life many opportunities and challenges. The upside is that the employees are already mobile application savvy and the downside is that there is no or little control of company data and devices.

This leads you to the first two activities of your mobile enterprise application strategy:

1. Implement a mobile device management platform (MDM) and mobile application management platform (MAM) if you don’t have one or upgrade it if it doesn’t tackle your newly discovered security challenges.
2. Consider quick wins for securing and consolidating existing enterprise apps used by the employees, such as a document repository managed by the company rather than employees (Box, Dropbox, SharePoint, etc), professional accounts for notes and task management (Evernote, DoIt.IM), contact sync and backup services.

Benchmark competitors and companies in adjacent industries

This could be challenging for enterprise apps since enterprise apps are usually not available on the app stores. Thankfully most companies and vendors like talking about what they do and therefore a lot of information is available online:

1. Search for initiatives online by competitors
2. Look for market research on enterprise apps in your industry
3. Check out case studies in your industry by the major vendors
4. Identify companies from adjacent industries and see what they are doing

Benchmarking is the best way to inspire and get buy-in from management (especially when they are skeptical about deploying apps), but the most valuable information for your strategy is identifying the “working knowledge” from other companies:

1. Strategic success: By learning from the failures of others (and their own prior failures), marketers may learn how to succeed in future.
2. Strategic failures: An application fails when it does not meet the objectives that were established before its release.

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Interview key stakeholders and identify use cases where mobile can transform your business

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.

- Fred Brooks

The best way of understanding the business needs is to ask the people that can most benefit from mobility services. Ask C-level executives, secretaries, warehouse employees and IT support staff to answer the following:

As an [actor] I want [action] so that [achievement].

This use case model is an excellent tool to communicate with users and stakeholders about mobile services in a language they can understand and set you up for the next two actions of your enterprise mobility strategy:

1. Break down a system into manageable pieces
2. Begin to define the functional requirements

Prioritise the use cases based on opportunity size, complexity, cost and commonality

Using the methods above companies easily identify 100s of potential use cases where enterprise mobility services can improve process and help their employees day-to-day work. The challenge now is to focus on the ones that will have the biggest impact and a few quick wins. Take all the use cases and rank them from 1 to 10 across the following:

1. Opportunity size: How much could it cut costs, improve productivity or increase revenue? (Where a 10 means it is a big opportunity
2. Complexity: How difficult or simple is the implementation? (Where a 10 means it is an easy implementation)
3. Cost: How much is this puppy going to cost you? (Where a 10 means it is a low cost)
4. Commonality: Is the use case applicable across multiple lines of business? (Where a 10 means it is applicable across the entire business)

What will have the biggest impact?

Calculate and...

1. Identify the top scoring use cases as well as a few quick wins to focus on.
2. Develop a roadmap for the next 12-18 months (Expect it to change over time as you’ll be learning from the initial development and user feedback).

5. Analyse common needs across the business

Most businesses have multiple business units (Sales, Marketing, Field workers, HR, Finance, IT, etc) with different mobility needs, but this does not mean that you will not find synergies. Any company planning to deploy more than 3 enterprise apps should consider a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) as part of the strategy to share technology, minimize time to market and cut development overhead across business units.

Use the results from the use case prioritisation exercise in Step 4 (“Commonality”):

1. Identify what use cases, if any, would make sense to provide centrally in the organization and start mapping out the requirements.
2. Set aside budget for a MEAP which centralises global functionality, but allows individual business units the freedom to develop their own apps (more on MEAP in Series 3).

Conclusion

Now that you have a mobile enterprise application strategy based on REAL business needs, it’s time to get buy-in and convince stakeholders to spend adequate amount of money to succeed with execution.