Creating a mobile strategy

Do you have an over-reliance on populist models?

Several models exist for planning mobility around broad categories of mobile worker. While useful, these models are being overused, placing emphasis on the wrong aspects of mobility without deep consideration of the processes and applications being addressed.

The basic tenet appears to be "build it and they will come". That's fine if you are building a field of dreams, but not so good if you are spending $1.5 million on a new IT architecture. Instead, strategic plans for mobility should consider that different workers will use different applications at different times for different purposes. Planning for mobile collaboration must start with a thorough understanding of staff functions, their information and application needs, and then apply these information needs and applications to categories of mobile usage, not users.

Over the past 24 months, mobility has become a major issue for CIOs and CEOs, especially in the utilities, mining, logistics and construction sectors. The drivers are many and varied, but at the heart of the issue is the need to enrich the ability of an organisation to more fully utilise human capital in a very tight labour market.

The problem with overly simplistic models

During the past year, IBRS has reviewed mobility strategies from a myriad of different companies. While all differ in terms of scope, many are strikingly similar in terms of their general goals. Unfortunately, many of the reviewed strategy documents suffer from the overreliance of abstract models for mobility. These models set up categories of mobile worker (for example, alert, email, power user). Some also claim that workers can be mapped on a sliding scale of different aspects.

While useful to gaining a framework for discussion, these models all suffer from a single, terminal flaw: they assume that workers are static (rarely move out of a specific mobile network environment) and mono-modal (have a single job function or job functions that all require the same type of mobile communication mode).

A major benefit of mobility is – or at least should be – its ability to enable deeper levels of collaboration. Collaboration itself is a broad topic, but, in short, it centres on providing flexibility and empowerment for staff. Today's collaborative workers are not static, nor mono-modal. They fulfil many roles and functions and frequently change duties depending upon work demands.

By pigeon-holing workers into abstract categories, we limit our ability to provide them with adequate mobile services and solutions. There is no such thing as an 'alert' mobile worker. Rather a worker may be an 'alert' worker in specific situations and a 'power-worker' in other situations.

Likewise, individual workers do not sit uniformly on a sliding scale. A worker may not need a great deal of 'reach' in one situation, but a large amount in another. Put simply, workers flit between categories and requirements. Strategies that place rigid categorisation on workers result in mobility deployments (and even security and access policies) that are not flexible enough to cope with the changing roles of today's workers, and investment in an infrastructure that cannot readily address the needs of individual workers.

Strategic planning for the real world

Despite the admonishment of the current batch of popular abstract models for mobile planning, they do have a role in strategic planning: they give us common vocabulary for describing different types of mobile application usage. Rather than applying these model categories to workers, the categories can be applied to specific applications. This allows us to return to a more formal strategy development process that focuses on business goals, processes, the tools required by workers to meet those goals and the necessary infrastructure requirements. This robust mobile strategy formation process is outlined in the mobile strategy development figure below.

Next steps

Developing a mobile strategy for your organisation should not be undertaken lightly. Organisations should avoid using overly simplistic, rigid user categories. Instead, it must include input from many aspects of the business. When creating a mobile strategy:

• Define organisational goals. While most organisations can articulate highlevel goals (such as improving staff efficiency through innovation) from the highest levels of the organisation, it is the joint task of business and IT executives to tease out specific, actionable goals in relation to mobility (such as allowing road crews to remain in the field rather than returning to an office). Although these goals may be informed by what is possible with mobile technologies, they should not dictate the use of specific technology or approaches, but focus solely on business issues.
• Examine processes. A team comprised of both IT and business management (or process experts) should examine the current processes surrounding the scoped goals and determine ways in which these processes could be improved. At this stage, key performance indicators may also be developed in relation to mobility projects. It should be noted that until recently, businesses have only evaluated formal, structured processes and cases where exceptions may occur. With mobility planning, the organisation must also consider where and when ad-hoc process will be needed, the need for collaborative processes (see Rethinking Collaboration, IBRS, September 2007).
• Identify needs. Armed with process knowledge from step two, IT and business management can now prioritise specific business needs where mobility should play a role. The sources and types of information required to meet these needs must be identified, along with processes that need to be empowered through mobile technologies.
• Evaluate environments. IT should then determine the environments where the new mobile applications will be needed. Obviously, a focus should be placed on evaluating the network environment of these locations. However, it is also important to consider the physical aspects of the environments that impact not only on the type of device that could be deployed, but also on the type of user interfaces that would be appropriate.
• Define applications. At this stage an organisation will have sufficient information to create formal specifications for specific mobile projects, and also to determine an overall (though likely to evolve) mobile application architecture.

About IBRS Intelligent Business Research Services Pty Ltd (IBRS) is an Australian company that provides research and advice to IT and business managers in Australasian organisations.

Joseph Sweeney is an IBRS advisor specialising in the areas of unified communications, collaboration, mobility and Microsoft products and licencing. He was a founder and Vice President of Asia Online, where he assisted the start-up of one of Asia's leading Internet and online services. Joseph was also the lead research analyst with Gartner covering internet and business solutions.