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Apr232012
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Confusion Around Mobile Application Management Can Be a Good Thing

Philippe Winthrop

Do you remember the whole glass half-full/glass half-empty mindset?  That’s what came to mind today when I saw an article talking about what Citrix might be thinking as it defines and refines its mobile application management strategy.  I say this particularly in the context of new markets that are often ill-defined and even more frequently ill-understood…ya, I know, I just made up a word (it should have been misunderstood, but it just sounded cooler).

See, I have a theory. When there are burgeoning markets, there are two things that happen.  First, more and more people start talking about it (which is a good thing) and second, more and more people don’t understand what the burgeoning market/trend is all about (which is not a good thing).  We saw this with Mobile Device Management, we are seeing this currently with BYOD/CoIT/COPE and I think we are starting to see this with Mobile Application Management (MAM).

Ahh…the pains of understanding a growing and evolving market.

So, I wanted to share with you all once again what Mobile Application Management is.  The common misconception is that if you have an enterprise app store, you have a Mobile Application Management solution/strategy.  You don’t.  In fact, I’ll argue that the Enterprise App Store is to MAM what BYOD is to CoIT.  It’s the lighting rod/poster child but not the totality.  Think of it as the tip of the iceberg…except for the fact that you are not steering the HMS Titanic.

Mobile Application Management is far more than just having your own private app store.  It’s about strategically deploying apps across your organization through rule-based policies…tied directly into your Active Directory/LDAP infrastructure.  It’s also about removing them should the employee leave the company or change roles within the organization.  It’s also about pushing out updates in a seamless fashion.  It’s about also ensuring that the applications are secure (separate but inextricably linked to mobile application development).  It’s about having a strategy for deploying commercial third party applications to your employee’s mobile devices.  It’s also about measuring and monitoring those applications and making sure that the custom apps that your organization is developing are actually being used and creating value for your employees….think of it as Business Intelligence for your mobile applications.

The author of the article I referenced at the beginning of this missive did say one thing:

You could almost think of mobile application management as a form of app virtualization for cell phones.

Frankly, I have no idea what this statement means and would argue that this fundamentally goes back to the increasing misunderstanding of burgeoning markets.

In any case….I just wanted to call to your attention the excitement around mobile application management.  It’s an exciting and burgeoning space.  We’re just going to need to make sure we tread the waters lightly to ensure that as this market evolves, we all understand it correctly together.

Apr192012
0 Comments

Mobile Brainstorming – Do you Doodle or Document?

Benjamin Robbins

Mobile Only: Week 7

When it comes to brainstorming are you a doodler or a documenter? In a meeting, do you instinctively reach for the dry-erase marker and head on up to the whiteboard – with lines, boxes, and stick-figures soon littering the entire space? Or do you prefer to sit down in front of a monitor and list out all the steps, nuances, and points of your idea? Whatever your preference, you are in luck when it comes to collaborative brainstorming apps on mobile devices.

First – for you doodlers out there – a plethora of apps are available on the marketplace. At the most basic level there are apps that are drawing specific with just sketching in mind. Autodesk’s SketchBook Mobile is an example of this. The goal of the app isn’t necessarily brainstorming or collaboration, but they can easily be leveraged to do so. If you are really into drawing out your ideas you may find these apps work best for you.

There are also a whole host of ‘whiteboard’ apps on the marketplace. They range from the cute, with virtual dry-erase markers, to full-featured that including text and image import capabilities. Just do a search for whiteboard in the marketplace and you’ll find plenty to try. The ability to import images, allows users to make additional annotations to the image. For example, Skitch and FreeNote, provide this functionality. Annotating existing images can be productive for a wide range of use-case scenarios – web design, presentations, etc. There is even an app under development, DisplayNote, that will allow you to do this style of free-form annotation directly with Microsoft Office Documents.

As well, whiteboarding with a mobile device takes the experience to a new interactive level. There are several whiteboard apps out there that are purpose-built for collaborative sharing. This allows you to draw with others in real time; no more waiting to be handed the pen. SyncSpace provides this functionality. There are improvements that could be made, but it takes the experience of a virtual whiteboard out of the realm of the PC. You no longer have to be sitting at your desk for that anytime, anywhere virtual whiteboard experience. It can take place in a conference room, or from across the world during your bus commute home. One last practical point about doodling – since I use the Galaxy Note as my device I have the added benefit of the stylus (did I just write that a stylus is a good thing?!) to draw in a more refined manner than the bluntness of a finger.

Next – for those of you with a more left-brained temperament – there are more relational approaches that you can take to brainstorming with your team. For a quick and dirty method, you could leverage a list or note based approach. There are many well-known cloud based apps that allow for shared notes. For a more traditional brainstorming approach, you should try a mind map app. One example of this is Mindjet. If you’ve never used a mind map, they are a relational approach to organizing ideas that branch from a central concept. Topics have sub-topics that all tie back to your central idea. Mind map apps allow for expanding and collapsing of topics which make consumption much easier.  As an aside, many of the mind map apps look fantastic on my monitor when my phone is connected. They are crisp and easy to navigate around.

Mobile devices are very well suited to capture ideas and thoughts. They are powerful notebooks that we carry everywhere in our pockets. In the future, when it comes to collaborative brainstorming on a mobile device, perhaps the most useful apps will have the best of both worlds – a whiteboard/sketch program that allows for relational connections. There are some apps that are starting down that road today. This would give you the flexibility to draw and organize lists at the same time! Whatever your particular disposition towards collective brainstorming, you’ll find that mobile devices are the new way to get your ideas ‘out on paper’! What is your preferred way to brainstorm?  I’ll let you guess which suits me best.

Benjamin Robbins is currently a Principal at Palador, a firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobility, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter. Mr. Robbins resides in Seattle and blogs regularly at http://www.remotelymobileblog.com

Apr172012
12 Comments

If Mobile Device Management Doesn’t Matter, Then What Does?

Philippe Winthrop

Thanks to the powers of the Twitter-sphere, I stumbled upon this interesting article called “Why Mobile Device Management Doesn’t Matter.” It’s certainly a provocative title, albeit not a unique one, particularly from enterprise mobility vendors that are trying to provide technology solutions to help manage the ever-explosive growth of mobility in the workplace via non “MDM” solutions.  Today’s missive, by the way, is by no means meant to be a direct response to the article, but rather to share some of the impact of that article.

Once I retweeted the article, an interesting, yet brief discussion ensued between myself, Chris Perret, Brian Katz and Maribel Lopez. (side note: if you haven’t connected with these people on this site, you should).

Maribel tweeted:

Its about data mgmt across all devices since devices keep changing

While Brian said:

What I’ve been saying all along – you need MDM hooks but not MDM, just like you need MAM but holy grail is MIM

Last, but certainly not least (in fact he was the 1st to respond), Chris said:

yeah. MDM is part of an overall management and security schema, not the whole thing … but not irrelevant either

I agree with all these statements, but I think there’s a broader issue at hand that wasn’t captured in 140 characters (I blame Twitter, not these three super smart people).

There’s no question in my mind that organizations MUST deploy a mobile device management solution.  There’s also no question in my mind that organizations NEED to deploy a mobile application management solution (assuming they are moving past basic PIM functionality). Don’t forget though that I am the guy who keeps on yammering away about how organizations need to have a holistic enterprise mobility management solution in place to manage all the facets of the mobility strategy.  In fact, one of my responses on Twitter was:

I’ll argue you need mobile device and application management tools to reach mobile information management nirvana

In this little Twitter discussion, we still didn’t reach what I feel is the crux of the matter.  Let me ask you all to take a step back for one brief moment and let me ask you a one-word question.

Why?

Why are we talking about Mobile Device Management or Mobile Application Management or any of the other components of Enterprise Mobility Management?  Brian is dead on when he says it’s about Mobile Information Management.  Enterprise Mobility Management solutions are a means to managing/securing/protecting corporate information mobile devices.  This has to happen at multiple levels…in fact, it has to happen at seven levels.

But why should we worry about Mobile Information Management?

I think that that is the core question we need to answer.  Let me offer you, if you don’t mind, my answer to this question.

It’s all about managing risk.

At the very core of everything we talk about, whether BYOD, COPE, CoIT, apps, smartphones, tablets, whatever….it’s all about managing the potential risk that comes from using mobile devices.  Now risk actually goes beyond information management (which arguably is going to be predominantly about indirect costs – think lost IP or business secrets), but can also include direct costs.  Anyone who has ever gotten and expensed a 4 or 5-figure wireless roaming bill knows what I am talking about…or what about if a B2C application loses sensitive data…or if a B2B app loses 100,000 credit card or social security numbers.

Oops…

Risk.  Risk is about what happens when things don’t go according to plan.  You lose a device. It gets stolen.  You leave it somewhere without a PIN code.  You are justifiably and correctly using your device, but with an unsecured connection….or you inadvertently downloaded an app that has code in there to do “nasty” things.

Risk management should then be all about mitigating that risk or having the tools to minimize the impact of a negative externality once it has occurred.  This is why you need a means to ensure that your corporate data is protected…this is why you need to have a mobile information management strategy in place.    And how do you protect that data?  With application, device and security management solutions.

See where this is going?  Brian is right.  It’s all about information management…but the reason why it’s all about information management is because organizations need to better manage their risk profiles in the mobile era.  I wonder how many are truly ready for this new world.

Thoughts?

Apr122012
7 Comments

Enterprise Mobility – Teaming Up

Benjamin Robbins

Mobile Only: Week 6

Mobile devices, with their native capabilities of voice, video, connectivity, and portability are an enterprise productivity power-house. They have the possibility to allow teams to collaborate in ways that used to require separate pieces of equipment. However, as with many of the topics I have been covering, the capabilities of the PC for collaboration are much more mature and thought-through in the enterprise setting, than for mobile.

There are several aspects to collaboration – a few of the high-level tenants are:

  • Content creation
  • Brainstorming
  • Communication
  • Project Organization and Management

We’ll be examining these different angles of collaboration over the next few weeks to assess their current state and capabilities from a mobile perspective. I’ll begin with content creation since we recently looked at office productivity suites.

Expertise and knowledge is often shared across a team. Collaborative file creation is a very common task. This allows each person on the team to contribute his or her subject matter expertise to arrive at the best possible outcome. As we saw last week, the tools to create the files, though not fully mature, do exist for mobile devices. However, the initial file creation is just the first step in the collaborative process. Files need to then be distributed in a frictionless way to the team.

Many mobile apps have a public cloud infrastructure they leverage to allow for the sharing of files to a team. For example, Evernote, Quickoffice, OfficeSuite, Box, Dropbox all provide the facilities to share files quickly and easily with others. By default many of these file shares lock down the content, which is great for security. The challenge with sharing files, however, is the effort to control user access permissions. At best, they are on a folder level and at worst, on a file by file basis. That might be ok if you have a single picture of your kid you want to share with a friend, but real projects have dynamic teams, complex file structures, and need the ability to be managed quickly and at scale. Having to manipulate file permissions on a file by file basis will not work in an enterprise setting.

Feedback is also a large part of document collaboration for a team. In that regard, mobile has a gaping hole in capability as compared to the PC.  It is not possible to track changes that users make on documents on a mobile platform. This eliminates a much needed feedback mechanism for team collaboration. Track Changes is simply a must-have feature. I do not see how any organization could operate without it in a mobile-only capacity if their teams need to collaborate on documents.

There are a couple of less than ideal workarounds for the time being to make up for not having the capability to track changes. But, these should be in no way considered a substitute. Some apps/services offer the ability to comment on a file. Box, for example, offers this capability. Users can select a file and add a free form text comment to it. This at least allows multiple users to give feedback, ask questions, and manually note any changes made to the file. Another less-than ideal option is for users to leverage services such as CloudOn or OnLive to run the native Microsoft Office application. Lastly, users could use RDP to connect to their desktop and again run the Microsoft Office application. All of these options are lackluster. The exclusion of the Track Changes feature is a huge black-eye to mobile collaboration.

A close cousin to Track Changes is version control. This allows teams to quickly roll-back to previous versions of the file should it be desired. This also allows teams to pick up content creation at a previous point or create a branch of the file. While this may be a bit more of an advanced feature, there are many companies that have become accustomed to its use in platforms, such as SharePoint For many teams, this is a non-negotiable and would be a deal-breaker to go mobile-only in its absence.

Another collaborative content creation feature that needs to be addressed in a mobile-only context, is file/paragraph locking. This assures that only one person can work on the file/paragraph at a time to avoid collisions and version issues. This safe guard saves a lot of headache and headache over the course of a project that has many team members.

Mobility holds the promise of connecting teams distributed across great distances and time-zones in ways that were not native to the devices of the past. However, at the present time, there are certain features that have gone backwards in terms of collaboration capabilities on mobile devices. Features such as Track Changes are must-haves in an enterprise, where content is created collaboratively by teams. What other features do you rely on during file creation that you see missing in a mobile context? Post a comment and let me know!

Next week – we’ll look at other aspects of team collaboration via mobile devices.

Benjamin Robbins is currently a Principal at Palador, a firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobility, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter. Mr. Robbins resides in Seattle and blogs regularly at http://www.remotelymobileblog.com

Apr052012
4 Comments

The Enterprise Mobility Forum Turns Two

Philippe Winthrop

You know the expression “Time flies when you’re having fun?”  That’s exactly how I feel today.  In fact, I hate to admit it, but I actually didn’t realize what today was until my wife pointed it out to me yesterday.  Two year ago today, the Enterprise Mobility Forum came out of stealth mode with the goal of becoming the Gold Standard for providing enterprise mobility enthusiasts a little spot on the Internet to commune, learn and share their experiences around enterprise mobility.

Last year, my thank you note shared a few metrics regarding our burgeoning community.  Frankly, I thought we were in a great spot.  I could never have imagined the growth we have experienced since then. In April 2011, our community included just over 1,700 members.  Today, we are well over 4,000.

People are talking.  People are connecting…and hopefully people are learning from each other on how to best navigate the highly turbulent waters better known as enterprise mobility.

As I was reading back on last year’s personal note, there was one paragraph that caught my eye that perfectly summarizes how I feel today:

Today’s missive is a thank you.  Thank you to all the thought leaders in enterprise mobility who make their own contributions to this site.  Thank you to all the enterprise mobility experts who have taken the time to share their views on enterprise mobility.  Thank you to the amazing advisory board that helps us steer the EMF in the “right” direction.  Thank you to all the enterprise mobility vendors that allow us to do what we do.  Thank you to all our partners.  Thank you to the EMF team that works its tail off to make this site work.  Most importantly however, thank you to each and every member of the Enterprise Mobility Forum’s community.  Without you, this site is NOTHING.

Those words still ring true to me today.  This little corner of the Internet would not exist if the above paragraph weren’t as relevant today as it was a year ago.

Now, as I was looking back at what we were talking about one year ago, I was (not that) surprised to see that we are still talking today about very similar issues.  A year ago, we were talking about:

  • BYOD
  • Consumer privacy and device tracking
  • The impact of the cloud on enterprise mobility
  • Mobile applications and app stores
  • Security, governance, and compliance

Sound familiar?

I think it’s actually a good thing that we’re continuing on the same core themes.  In many respects, I think we’ll keep on talking about these issues for the foreseeable future, because they are very complicated issues…and there’s no one right answer in terms of how to tackle these issues.  This is what makes this space so much fun.  What makes it even more fun (at least for me personally), is that I get to have this fun with you all.

So in closing, thanks again to each and everyone of you for making the Enterprise Mobility Forum what it is….THE gold standard for discussing best practices on enterprise mobility!!!

Apr052012
0 Comments

Mobile Office Apps – I Have One Simple Request

Benjamin Robbins

Mobile Only: Week 5

Spell check – is it too much to ask?! Seriously. I don’t feel like its a big request but perhaps it is. OK, so I admit it, I am a terrible speller. As far as I am concerned, the best feature in the history of computing is the red squiggly line underneath misspelled words in Microsoft Word. At work and at home I have a Bluetooth keyboard I pair with my phone. I switch off the on-screen keyboard by using a null keyboard (yes, there is an app for that, though this is a failure unto itself that should instead be handled by a context aware operating system – but I digress). But when I switch off the on-screen keyboard I lose the predictive text capabilities which provide correctly spelled words. There is a gap between use-case and capabilities.

The absence of a complete spell-check scenario is partly due to the fact that on-screen keyboards offer predictive text. However, that is a narrow view on how users interact and create content; it only considers the moment of entry. If errors slip by then it is a challenge to identify later.  In an enterprise setting spelling and grammar are vital to presentation and professionalism. They need to be examined in the whole context of a document. I think the absence of spell check also stems from a subtle bias that exists, whereby people think that mobile devices are great content consumers but terrible content creators. I am here to tell you that this isn’t true. I create content left, right, and center on my smartphone and twice on Tuesdays. In order for mobility to be mainstream in the enterprise, content creation has to be taken as a serious use-case.

I have been asked several times recently as to how I assemble these, and other, posts. What do I prefer for an office productivity suite? There are quite a few options for Android and I have been taking them through the paces. I’ve tried the lot of them; Documents To Go, Quickoffice Pro, Google Docs, OfficeSuite 5 Pro, Oliveoffice Pro, Kingsoft Office, Polaris Office, well…you get the idea, hoping that one of them would have spell check functionality. Sadly, none of them do, and while they all have their quirks and advantages, 3 of them seem to stand above the crowd; Kingsoft Office , Quickoffice, and OfficeSuite 5.

If you want a great, free office productivity app then Kingsoft Office is for you. While Kingsoft only allows you to edit and view Word and Excel files, it has a great user interface, and many of the features of the Pro versions. The other two apps, Quickoffice and OfficeSuite 5 offer PowerPoint functionality in addition to Word and Excel. Though Quickoffice has garnered a lot of attention in the press, I find that OfficeSuite 5 Pro has it bested in several areas from a content creation perspective.

To start with, OfficeSuite 5 has thought of, and implemented, use-cases that work with a physical mouse/keyboard scenario. With OfficeSuite 5 I am able to select text the same way I would on a PC, by clicking and holding the left mouse button while dragging over the desired text. This blows away standard Android text selection which all the other apps rely on. OfficeSuite 5 also also has menu + key functions built in. For example menu + c for copy, menu + v for paste, menu + s for save, etc. This is important because the middle scroll wheel of a mouse, when clicked, is the same as clicking the menu button on the phone. The result of these extra features makes a statistically significant improvement in efficiency. These features are critical in a content creation scenario due to the mouse’s exactness and the speed of using a keyboard. OfficeSuite 5 also has an autosave and recover feature that has already saved me some heartache on several occasions. Lastly, OfficeSuite 5 has a word count feature that is conspicuously missing from Quickoffice. It is such a simple feature – why would you leave it out?

Both Quickoffice and OfficeSuite 5 are integrated with cloud file-shares such as Box, Dropbox, and Google Docs. This makes the sharing of docs with colleagues and clients simple. This also allows these products to be part of a larger ecosystem from a workflow and management perspective. However, in using the cloud file-shares, I have noticed and witness strange behaviour when the docs created on my smartphone are opened in Microsoft Word on other’s PCs. Hopefully these minor issues will be resolved in short order.

When it comes to spell check for productivity apps I feel like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers “You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!” Am I really asking for too much?The sad, but true, workaround is that I actually have a spell check app. This is a complete fail. My spell check app, another fantastic case of “there’s an app for that” is also a fantastic example of how mobility is not quite ready for the enterprise; not ready for prime-time. The spell check app is not integrated with anything. It provides great functionality but I have to manually copy and paste the text over to office suites. In the end I, like Dr. Evil, am forced to exasperatedly ask “What do we have?”  Mutated sea-bass being the reply.  Would love to hear if you have any ideas on spell check – post a comment and let me know!

Benjamin Robbins is currently a Principal at Palador, a firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobility, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter. Mr. Robbins resides in Seattle and blogs regularly at http://www.remotelymobileblog.com

Apr042012
3 Comments

BYOD, The Secret Sauce

Brian Katz

Site Note:  We’d like to introduce you to Brian Katz.  Brian is an EMF member who works at pharmaceutical giant Sanofi and has a great blog where he shares his thoughts on enterprise mobility.  Brian has graciously allowed us to share those thoughts with you on this site.

There are a lot of articles floating around right now about how BYOD is the next big thing. It’s already here. 77% of companies are doing BYOD. You see these headlines everywhere and most of them are meaningless as companies are still trying to come to grips with how to really do Bring You Own Device.

You see most companies have this fear that if they allow their employees to bring their own device the walls of the company will come tumbling down and they will no longer have their corporate assets or secrets to themselves. While the computer revolution has certainly made a company’s data easier to steal – this has been an issue forever. What did people do before computers? They would carry home files in their briefcases (nobody used backpacks or messenger bags back then). How many of those people left their briefcase on a train or a plane for someone else to steal. Before laptops and home computers became the rage people used to print all their documents out on the big dot matrix printers, which eventually became noisy daisy wheel printers until the advent of Laser Printers. How many people do you know when it says “please don’t print this email to save paper” do it anyway. Where do they put that email –in their bag so they can read and later mark it up.

The trick to handling these things is to get the user to understand the common sense that they need to protect the corporate data. As the saying goes, common sense isn’t so common anymore. This is what leads to the secret sauce for enabling any sort of BYOD as part of the Consumerization of IT. This isn’t an epiphany either. In a previous life I spent some time back in the 90s as a Technology Coordinator for a school system. We realized early on that when it came to computers you had to take into account how the students might use and sometimes abuse them. Schools very quickly learned all about protecting their assets and holding people accountable. They created an Acceptable Use Policy or AUP.

Any company, whether it is rolling out corporate devices or letting users bring their own devices, needs to invest some time into creating an AUP. What makes an AUP work is that it becomes the agreement between the company and its employees on what is expected from them when they use mobile devices.

Now, realize this isn’t just a list of rules that are made up in a vacuum by the security department. If a company goes that route they will very quickly lose any enthusiasm they might have for the program. An acceptable use policy is made up by a group of people in the company, which while it includes security, should also include the business, the administrators and, most importantly, the users themselves. By allowing them to help create the document, you are insuring that they become stakeholders and want to take part in following the policy.

So what do you need to put into an AUP? Security is going to define a list of do’s and don’ts. Don’t leave your phone lying around unlocked, don’t use a simple passcode, do report your phone if its gone missing. There will be a whole host of rules like that. What’s important is that the policy doesn’t stop there. The business should define what they want you to do with the phone. They want you to use it when you go on a sales call, they do want you to enter your expenses when they occur using the app they have provided. This is where if it’s a corporate device you will probably agree to let the user install their own stuff/apps on the device. Let them install Angry Birds if it will make them more comfortable using the device. The users themselves will want to get in on this as well. They will want to have their private email account on the phone. They will want to understand how to use the data. Many times they will push for more restrictive policies for some things and more lenient ones on the others. They will appropriately suggest that the first you do is lock the phone if they call to report it missing instead of wiping it right away, especially if it is a personal device.

As one company reported recently – by locking the device first they found lost devices were reported missing almost immediately as opposed to the original policy where they did a device wipe right away – people would wait up to 2 weeks to report a device missing as they thought they might find it and didn’t want to lose their data.

Now that you have created an acceptable use policy with all these groups working together, first thing you will need to do is simplify it, 10 pages of writing will never get read by your users. Your goal is to try and keep it under 2 pages (and if your really good get it down to 1, you may need to single space). You’re going to have to let your legal team look at it, trust me – you’ve never had so much fun as when you get the doc back from legal. It will be dreadful to read at that point. Now comes the final test – you need to put the document into plain English (which you will later translate into every other language your company uses) and if you really want it to go viral you try to add a little humor to it too. This is what makes this document so powerful, it tells you what you should be doing (this is encouraging) while warning you of the pitfalls you shouldn’t be doing in an easy readable 10 minute document.

An AUP is where you try to make common sense common again to all your users who will be using a mobile device. Trust me, it resolves a lot of headaches before they begin.

Apr022012
3 Comments

Inside Looking Out: An Executive View on Enterprise Mobility with Naeem Zafar

The Enterprise Mobility Foundation

It’s certainly been a while, but welcome back to the latest edition of Inside Looking Out.  We had the opportunity to sit down last week with Naeem Zafar, CEO of Bitzer Mobile, an enterprise mobility solution provider that utilizes a secure, mobile app container to isolate corporate access and data.  We covered a broad range of topics, including mobile application management, mobile application development, mobile security, and BYOD.  You can check it out below.

The Enterprise Mobility Foundation:  Hi Naeem, Thanks for taking the time to chat with us today. There’s a lot of talk these days about CoIT/BYOD. Do you think they are one and the same or different? How so?

Naeem Zafar: It’s good to be here.  Consumerization and BYOD are different but related. BYOD is just one part of CoIT. A perfect example of CoIT is the fact that today employees are buying smartphones and tablets, which are consumer-centric devices, and they are requesting enterprise access. Then there are other aspects of CoIT that have their own life outside of BYOD, such as the cloud and especially social media.

EMF: How does that impact user expectations in terms of the experiences users will have on their business apps?

NZ: With consumerization come new expectations about the user experience. What makes Apple smartphones and tablets so popular is the incredible user experience. What has made these consumer multimedia devices explode is also the fact that they have raised the bar—they’ve set a “new normal” for users’ expectations of business apps and business access from their personal devices. IT needs to recognize that a new balance must be found between security and usability, because end users have entirely new expectations about how they interact with their mobile device.

EMF: So how does this affect how companies balance the BYOD vs. COPE (Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled) requirements?

NZ: More and more enterprise end users already own smartphones capable of running business applications. This means that companies don’t have to issue as many corporate devices to employees, although many companies have simply shifted their existing budgets from BlackBerries to iPhones and issued the devices as employee perks. The bottom line is that users don’t want to carry two devices. Companies therefore need a way to isolate personal use from business use on the same device, and they also have to find a balance between security and usability.

EMF: Speaking of balance…we haven’t really talked about security yet. How should companies balance the needs for high-performance security and high-performance user experiences? Can they co-exist?

NZ: They can co-exist, and many solutions are emerging to help IT tackle this problem. The big realization is that the data, not the device, is the most important thing to protect. If intellectual property is stolen or sensitive data is leaked, nobody cares that a $100 device was lost. What matters are the millions of dollars in lost business reputation and fines that result from compromised data. Once we realize the importance of securing data and focus on isolating enterprise access from personal access, then solutions start to emerge.

EMF: I would imagine that some of this must be handled via a combination of mobile device management, mobile application management, and enterprise mobility management.

NZ: Certainly all these solutions can come into play. I see MDM and MAM as part of a larger EMM strategy. MDM can still be an important solution for COPE deployments, but many privacy concerns arise if MDM is applied to BYOD, especially in Europe. MDM does nothing to provide authenticated access to data or to protect the corporate data propagated by backups of mobile devices.

We should be looking at EMM. The corporate asset is the data, and access to that data must be secured both in transit and at rest. On top of that, the strategy must include the prevention of data leakage, e.g., not allowing the backup of corporate data to personal PCs or cloud services such as iCloud. Again, a balance must be found between user experience and security. We ran a recent survey of corporate end users, and 47% of them reported that they would decline enterprise access if the company forced them to give up iCloud or Android Backup Manager.

EMF: So now what? The apps are developed and deployed to employees. Are we done?

NZ: Not at all. To gain the benefits of mobility, the first steps are security, access, and deployment, but after that comes continuous monitoring and improvement of the apps. The apps are what make smartphones and tablets shine. We need to follow what has worked in the consumer space and focus on making cool apps that users love. We should get the security questions out of the way as quickly as possible and start focusing on apps. Monitoring usage, user ratings, and feedback is what comes next. But apps come in many shapes. Users are looking for a solution that allows them to run HTML5 apps that they have written as well as third-party apps, not to mention a way to mobilize customized applications where no apps exist. Companies that address all of these use cases are likely to leap ahead in this emerging market.

EMF: OK – we’ve covered a bunch of topics here today. If you had to give one final “Net Net” recommendation to someone as they are planning their mobility strategy, it would be…

NZ: I always say, “It’s about the data, stupid.” That may not sound very kind, but it brings the point home that just adding MDM solutions does not address data security and enterprise mobility. Data is the corporate asset. To gain the advantages of mobility, data-protection solutions must retain the incredible user experience of modern mobile devices. One must address all four legs of the stool to achieve true enterprise mobility: authentication, data security, data controls, and apps. This is critical to the “net net” goal, which is delivering a rich, engaging user experience with excellent security!

Well there you have it. Thanks Naeem, for taking the time to chat with us about your views on enterprise mobility.  Do you know anyone who should be a guest here on Inside Looking Out?  Drop us a line.

Mar302012
8 Comments

Confused About BYOD? It’s Not Your Fault

Philippe Winthrop

Please note my friends, that I will do my best to not turn today’s missive into a rant, but do forgive me if sometimes it may appear as one.  I say this because I have spent the last couple of days immersed in several discussions around the matter, including with subject matter experts (e.g., industry veterans and members of the press) whom I feel need a refresher course on what BYOD means.

For starters, I’m guessing they had not seen my earlier commentary where I described the differences between BYOD and CoIT (The Consumerization of IT).  That’s OK.  Just like Robin Williams said to Matt Damon in the movie “Good Will Hunting”

It’s not your fault.

Then I find via the Twitter-sphere an article written in the United Arab Emirates called “BYOD makes work more like home.”  It’s not a bad article per se, but the title is inaccurate and hence only obfuscates the matter more.  The title should have said CoIT makes work more like home.  Too bad the article was shared by an enterprise mobility vendor.

Then I go to an event in Florida this week and I saw several vendors talk on the show floor about their BYOD strategy.  Here’s the problem though:

  • One vendor was using the term BYOD to imply that it’s Unified Communications system worked on iOS and Android
  • Another vendor was using the term BYOD to suggest that its WLAN infrastructure could support the extra devices that could potentially enter the workplace

What do either of these things have to do with BYOD?  Oh that’s right.  Nothing.

It’s not your fault.

BYOD is becoming (has become?) the next MDM.  It’s turning into this catch all phrase that does not accurately describe the subject and issues at hand….just like the world uses the term Mobile Device Management when they really mean to say Enterprise Mobility Management.  The problem is that the term MDM has gotten to be such a catch all phrase that it’s almost meaningless.  I fear the same has happened with BYOD.

You might be asking yourself, Philippe, why do you care so much about what it’s called?  Well, other than the fact that I am a language geek, I firmly believe that if we don’t have strict definitions for terms, it translates into confused policies and implementations that are ultimately less than optimal for IT departments and organizations at large.  Case in point, one organization I spoke with in Florida will let its employees purchase whatever device they want and the employer will reimburse all but $10 for the device (as well as pay for most of the service plan).  This is how they have developed their BYOD strategy.

It’s not your fault.

Mar292012
0 Comments

Mobility – The Skin That You’re In

Benjamin Robbins

Mobile Only: Week 4

When I first began this endeavor of working only from my smartphone, the experience was strange, unusual, and slow. Even with using a monitor, keyboard, and mouse I found it took extra time to complete tasks. I attributed this to years of executing tasks on the PC in the same manner, day after day, and then suddenly abandoning those well-worn paths for something entirely new. Yet this week, I got to the point where doing my work from a smartphone went from ‘doing my work on a smartphone’ to ‘just doing my work’. The medium itself melted away; the container ceased to exist and only the task at hand remained. I didn’t have to think about what I was doing or where I need to be to do it. The phone environment became commonplace and I quickly found my way around the apps, keyboard shortcuts, and menus.

Arriving at this point of comfort on my mobile device is not unlike learning a foreign language. You struggle for a long time to say the simplest of things. But over time the synapses are formed in the brain and you find you can communicate more quickly. Eventually, you wake up one day, have complete conversations, and can’t remember if you had them in your native tongue or the ‘foreign’ one. You stop thinking and start doing. To put it another way, it reminds me of that point in time when a new place you’ve moved into finally feels like home rather than a new place. The newness disappears and all you are left with is the feeling that this is the place where you belong.

So mobile is where I live now, it is the language I speak, it is the skin I’m in. This by no means implies there isn’t a ton more to explore, learn, and figure out – just that the container it takes place in is no longer  a strange and foreign place that impedes work. I am amazed at the number of mobile-equivalent or PC functions I am actually able to accomplish natively on the phone. For example, I’ve recently discovered Autotask’s Sketchbook Mobile which has really been effective for image editing – a content creation task that I believed only possible in a PC context. When it comes to mobile-capabilities there is lots of room for improvement, but we seem to make leaps and bounds on a daily basis.

Not that there aren’t snags. For as much as I am comfortable in my mobile skin and have moved on from the operating systems of the past, there are those few tasks I need to do for which there is no good mobile equivalent. Specifically in my case, that capability is Microsoft Visio. Part of my professional work involves documenting strategy and design.  Microsoft Visio is a great tool for visually representing a wide array of ideas and concepts. I have yet to find anything that covers this functionality in a mobile context. I am not alone. From an enterprise perspective there are a great many apps, both off the shelf and custom that will need to continue to be used well into the future.

For those times when one needs to still operate within the boundaries of the PC  from a mobile device, RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) can fill in the gaps. On Android I have found that Xtralogic’s RDP Client is the best app for RDP. One of the biggest complaints about VDI is that it isn’t optimized for a mobile experience. While this is true, is does offer the chance to bridge the gap between the advantages of mobility and the necessity of legacy applications. Using a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse also greatly improve the VDI experience.

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is another option to bridge the gap and/or extend the life of legacy applications. One such DaaS provider, Desktone offers virtual desktops in the cloud. This gives you all the benefits of VDI without any of the infrastructure overhead. You could also leverage the service of a cloud app host, like LiveCirrus, to mobile-enable non-native apps and content.

As we all begin to immerse ourselves in mobility there will be necessary holdover applications and services that will require a viable mobile use-case. Knowing your options to do so allows you to fully embrace mobility but leverage your investments. What tasks would you not be able to do in a mobile – only setup? Got any ideas for me on how to replace Microsoft Visio with a mobile-equivalent? Post a comment and let me know!

Benjamin Robbins is currently a Principal at Palador, a firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobility, apps, and data. Mr. Robbins resides in Seattle and blogs regularly at http://www.remotelymobileblog.com