In the past few years, the consumerization of IT has pressured organizations to integrate mobile technology into the workforce – often without the proper foundation in place. Now these same organizations are lacking the necessary strategy needed to ensure their mobile platform will grow and scale with the business and many are going back to the drawing board. To avoid these headaches, I urge customers to focus on the basics. The first step is to map out a mobile game plan to avoid getting pigeonholed into a certain technology that may not be scalable, or, worse, will become obsolete. The two big areas to focus on are the infrastructure and digital sides of the mobile platform.
The infrastructure.
Any organization looking to implement a new wireless network or upgrade an existing one has a simple reason: to connect mobile devices. Regardless of device – laptop, phone, tablet or phablet – the end goal is to push out applications to end users quickly and securely, regardless of if they are inside or outside of their “four walls.” Instead of looking at the end device first, an organization would serve itself well to remember that all mobile apps are accessing data from within those four walls.
Support of applications.
The infrastructure that supports your mobile strategy must be designed to support all of the applications you plan to roll out to employees, as well as the data behind those apps. That data has to fit somewhere and be configured in a way that can support growth and increased usage. It doesn’t matter whether the data storage is on premises, in a traditional data center, or is in a private, public or hybrid cloud; it must be housed securely.
Securing access.
Once an organization has set up effective, secure and scalable data storage and support for its mobile strategy, it must establish posture for mobile access to that data – who and what can access certain networks and where, how and why.
Supporting end-users.
Now that you have a sound infrastructure to support the mobile strategy, you must plan for how that infrastructure will support end-users. Where are end-users going to be located? What devices are they going to use? What types of content do you want them to have? How are they going to connect back to the network, etc.? It boils down to a series of “who, what, where, why, when and how” questions that an organization must answer when determining how they are going to secure and enable mobile devices.
Making it work on any operating system.
Analysis of what makes, models and different versions of mobile technologies – Android, IOS, Blackberry, Symbian – how will your organization’s mission-critical apps interface with all of these technologies? When I work with organizations, I encourage discussions around developing applications or modernizing legacy/existing applications on multiple mobile platforms. How will it look on an iPad vs. an Android phone? Do I want it to be developed in Python or in HTML5? It is all too common when agencies are rushing to find that they want to roll out an app only to realize that half of the users are experiencing a bad interface because they are on a different type of device than the other half of the workforce.
Align with business processes.
In addition to these two basic needs – creating a solid, scalable and secure infrastructure and understanding the end-user, digital side of the mobile equation – I also strongly encourage agencies to set up clear business processes to support their mobile strategy. These background processes create rules for access to data, methods of gaining access, tracking of devices, setting up security, restrictions surrounding certain data, such as HR information, staging of devices for employees, etc. These processes also will help fortify security of data by ensuring that scenarios for all business functions and groups of users have been explored ahead of time.
Don’t let today’s fast pace of change force your organization to create a mobile platform that is absent of the foundation it needs to scale and grow to support mission critical activities and applications. Getting back to the basics and understanding the importance of a sound infrastructure and a solid digital strategy will serve you well today and in the future.
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