A Brief Recap of The 2012 AppNation Enterprise Summit

I love being a road warrior.  While it can be a drag at times to have to explain to people that my office is seat 8C on United Airlines, it does keep me in check with my better half.  I may, however, have taken it to the extreme last week.  After an 18 hour trip back home from South America, it only took me 2.5 hours to be back at the airport to go to my first conference of the year.  One of my dear enterprise mobility colleagues called me mental.  He might be right, but I simply prefer to describe it as being intensely passionate about enterprise mobility.  Tomayto…tomahto.  I was on my way to the AppNation Enterprise Summit in San Francisco.

Let me start off by saying that I think this was a great inaugural event.  The conference organizers seemed to attract the majority of the “who’s who” in enterprise mobility (how the heck did I get in there???), as well as other organizations that are at the periphery of our sector (more on that later).

I moderated a session on mobile application lifecycle management.  That’s a big word (and yet another acronym in our alphabet soup (mALM).  The key takeaway for me from that session is that organizations need more and more to think about mALM.  The reason being, because we are very quickly (at least in the Western World) moving well beyond basic PIM functionality and thinking more and more about how we can mobilize back end applications.  That’s going to require organizations to think methodically about the entire process, which includes:

• Developing the business case
• Development
• Distribution
• Management
• Security
• Measurement (and Updates)

It’s important to note that this application lifecycle management applies to B2B, B2E and B2C mobile applications…and in fact, all three types need to be managed as part of one holistic strategy.  That’s a big issue in my opinion because, all too often, mobile application development and deployment is being done in silos within organizations.  My general belief is that it’s fine for various lines of business to develop their own applications, but it needs to be done in a centralized fashion spearheaded (read: supported) by the IT department…or preferably the Office of Mobility.

I participated in another panel, moderated by another EMF member, Maribel Lopez.  She asked me one very interesting question…and even warned me that she might hit me with her tablet if she didn’t like my answer.  The question was “What are we going to be talking about when we have this panel next year?”  I told her that I thought we were STILL going to be having the BYOD debate….you know, the topic that just won’t die no matter how much we try to put it to bed.  Fortunately for me, she agreed with me.  I think BYOD will still be a heated discussion at a global level.  Remember that North America is arguably at the cutting edge of enterprise mobility, and from my personal experience across the globe, it feels as if the rest of the world is between 12 and 18 months behind where we are here in America.

So back to my earlier point on the periphery of enterprise mobility.  I was referring to “consumer” apps that are increasingly getting entrenched in the workplace.  There were a lot of sessions at the conference with panelists from “consumer” mobile application vendors…companies like Box.net and EverNote.  These free apps are serving real needs for people (notice how I did not say employees) and are finding their way into the workplace.  Sound familiar?  It’s BYOA….bring your own apps.  I understand why this is happening (IT not serving the real needs of the mobile workplace), but I do also believe that organizations need to step up and get ahead of this growing trend before they start struggling with mobile applications in the same way that they struggled with BYOD.

So there you have it….my first conference recap for 2012.  It was definitely a solid first-time event and would encourage you to consider it the next time they hold it.