Thinking Out Loud..

One more thing? #Facebook #iphone5

A really interesting article in The Australian IT section earlier this week about Suncorp’s decision to allow thousands of staff to bring their own computer or tablet to work.

Suncorp will effectively role their corporate firewall back into the datacentre and enable full self provisoning and access to corporate applications via a secured virtual desktop environment. They're not the first organisation to do this, but they are the first major financial services organisation in Australia that I am aware of is going down this track. 

I think with this approach we are seeing a window into the future of how enterprise IT consumption and asset provisioning is changing and how the IT department of tomorrow will need to adapt to enable this style of end user choice.

Choice, and a potential lower cost of ownership, is really what this is all about. In today’s global fight for talent organisations are increasingly trying to differentiate their employee value proposition by providing options like this.

This approach enables the employee to personalise a small part of their workspace. It enables them to work with similar infrastructure to what they use everyday at home and lowers the barriers around training and adoption in the enterprise.

By providing this sort of personal choice the organisation is saying to their employees, and potential recruits that not only are they flexible, but they understand that the wave of consumerisation of the mobile smart phone market and its encroach into the workplace that has occurred.

The humble desktop - until recently the frontline of enterprise information security management - is next. IT departments must be ready to embrace to enable this choice. 

One of the best things about working in the information technology industry is… yes, the technology. I speak with the nagging sense of personal guilt which comes from being an IT professional who has succumbed to non-rational buying decisions – leading to simultaneous ownership of both a BlackBerry and an iPhone, and a laptop bag which just got a little bit heavier with the addition of an iPad.

I am not alone. Mobility is the buzzword of the day. The proliferation of appealing mobile devices, faster broadband, and cloud-based applications all conspire to add appeal and glamour to the ability to use technology any time, anywhere, free of the physical constraints of conventional networks.

Industry growth forecasts add fuel to the fire. Last year Cisco announced – with understandable enthusiasm – that based on its Visual Networking Index (VNI) Mobile forecast for 2006-2013 – global mobile data traffic will increase 66-fold by 2013 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 131 per cent over that period.

Gartner’s most recent forecast on global IT spending saw a reduction in year-on-year growth across the entire industry from 5.3 per cent to a forecast year-on-year growth of just 3.9 per cent. The reduced forecast is linked to the current Euro debt crisis. But at the same time, Gartner is forecasting 9.1 per cent growth in hardware fuelled by growing demand for mobile devices and PC upgrades linked to Windows 7. 

Everyone wants to be mobile and many of us have been guilty of buying the latest mobile gadget without really thinking through just what the business benefits will be.

This is harmless enough on a personal level, but buying decisions at an organisational level must be underpinned by a hard-nosed understanding of the business benefits and a solid business case. The mobile device should come last in the decision sequence – post the establishment of the use case for the role and the actual applications to be mobilised, not first as is often the case. Deploying the right device to meet the use and business case requirements will often make or break the actual business case. Clear use cases, by role, need to be defined prior to embarking on enterprise mobile applications. Not every role has the same requirements for mobile application access.

I suggest a six-step plan to ensure that the horse is placed firmly in front of the cart when it comes to advising on and managing the implementation of organisation-wide mobility solutions.

1. Understand the business requirements and the context of those requirements – go out on the road with the end-users to understand and ‘sanity check’ perceived requirements against real requirements.
2. Identify the application which most closely fits the business requirement.
3. Resolve the deployment, security and architecture issues.
4. Match the business requirement to the role and then establish what type of device meets the requirements.
5. Start with a small pilot to assess effectiveness and productivity or improvement results.
6. Finally, plan and manage large scale deployment based on a business case understanding of the costs relative to benefits.

The hype around mobility has been fuelled by the relatively uncontrolled nature of early deployments of mobile email – along with the proliferation of appealing devices – which have created the misperception within organisations that this creates a
foundation for mobile access to enterprise applications.

The reality is that mobile deployments need to be highly structured and carefully managed. As with all technology deployments, the business requirements have to be paramount and the cost benefits of mobile deployments need to be fully understood upfront. Mobility has strong business advantages but it also has the potential to pose serious risks if security and architecture issues are not identified and managed to a robust standard.

The bottom line is that mobility decisions have to be made without any emotional attachment to cool devices. Follow good process. A reality check after the fact will likely be one you won’t want to cash.

This post originally appeared in my column on http://www.insidesap.com.au