Enterprise Mobility: It’s The Apps, Stupid

Sorry to have what could appear as a potentially offensive title to today’s missive, but I am solely trying to paraphrase the famous quote attributed to Democratic political strategist James Carville during the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign.  I think of this phrase when I read an article on eWeek today about the “enterprise readiness” of Windows Phone 7.  The link I provided is the 2nd half of the article, dubbed “Windows Phone 7 Needs to Gain Enterprises’ Trust.” One question….one word even.  Really?

What does that statement even mean anymore?  What is “the enterprise?” I know that the author means the IT department’s blessing, but isn’t that so 2007/2008?  I will argue that enterprise trust has for better or for worse gone out the window – at least in the case of mobility.  How so?  The continued onslaught of individually liable devices.  Now we all know how strongly I feel about the need for a mobile platform to be enterprise friendly in the context of allowing the IT department to have visibility, command and control of a device, but that is a completely different question than general enterprise readiness.

I’ll admit that I have had to swallow a bitter pill lately as I have been rethinking my views on mobile platforms.  In the ITSM world that we should be living in – the world where the IT department is not a roadblock but instead, the catalyst for increasing business velocity, IT needs to provide to its workforce the tools they WANT in order to do their job as quickly, conveniently and effectively as possible.  By the way, isn’t that the promise of productivity?  Better, faster, easier?

So what makes a smartphone platform enterprise ready?  Back to Mr. Carvill.  It’s the apps, stupid.  Right now, with all the talk we have about mobile application proliferation, it’s still very much a PIM world out there.  Growth in other sectors WILL come, but I will not venture a guess as to when we will see the hockey stick.  I know it’s coming…heck, we might be in the middle of it now, but the bottom line is that today, we are still living in a PIM world. (By the way, Madonna is now stuck in my head)

Now, as far as the USER is concerned, enterprise readiness should be in my mind the ability to sync up to their work email, as well as having calendar and contact synchronization.  Some will say that being able to edit documents will also be important.  I for one am not a huge fan of editing documents on a tiny screen, but that’s me.  Microsoft is arguing that we will want to not only do that, but also collaborate with colleagues in that document editing, and as such, has provided SharePoint integration into Windows Phone 7.  That’s all well and good, but we’ll have to wait and see how attractive (and easy) that is to the workforce.  I won’t even begin to venture a guess on it.

Back to PIM – so if enterprise readiness is that a mobile platform can do OTA PIM, then they all are ready, right?  Not so fast.  Some platforms talk the talk, and others walk the walk.  I still find the ActiveSync implementation on iOS to be kludgey – I still have calendar sync issues, it’s hard to navigate through your mail when you have scores of folders, and there are no tasks.  Android’s worse.

Other apps such as CRM, SFA and supply chain management will also become increasingly important, but again, as long as the users find them useful.  The kitchen sink approach will NOT work, hence why I always suggested that companies go through a business process reengineering exercise as they think through the mobilization of a business application.

Now before you think I have completely fallen off the mobility management bandwagon, hold on.  IT also needs its own apps.  They need apps to manage the devices (see I wasn’t going to let go of my favorite topic THAT quickly).  They need apps to secure the devices.  They need apps to track the recurring costs of the devices and they need apps to manage the apps on the devices (that last one can get a little dizzying).  See where I’m going?

Just like mobility is both inwardly and outwardly facing for the company in terms of people interaction, I will argue that the applications must be both inwardly and outwardly facing.  Give an individual all the applications they need to be mobile, and give the IT department the applications it needs to manage the mobile initiatives.

That’s an enterprise ready mobile platform in my opinion.