The Daunting Challenge Of Mobilizing Your Enterprise

Around the globe, IT strategists are starting to grapple with the rapidly emerging challenge of mobilizing their enterprises.

Call it the end of the PC era, call it what you will -- but the trends are undeniable. People prefer a tailored mobile experience.

EMC's own IT group is no exception.

We need to quickly create broad capabilities to mobilize our workforce, our partners -- and, eventually -- our customers directly.

When EMC IT was investing in transforming to an ITaaS model, I enjoyed sharing with you the many rich experiences and learnings from our journey.

Well, we have the opportunity to do it again -- just on a different topic. I think there will be much that we can share with all of you as we begin to tackle our own requirements.

Because, sooner or later, I think just about every enterprise IT team will have to face a similar challenge.

Big Picture

Mobile devices are all about convenience and ultimately productivity.

We saw it first with cell phones, then smart phones, and now tablets.

If you're thinking "cost savings", you're missing the point: within most enterprises, it starts with dramatically juicing the capabilities of your workforce.

Many business models are increasingly built around a strong cadre of knowledge workers who are frequently mobile -- sometimes predominantly so.

Make them more productive, and they deliver more value -- to customers, partners and their co-workers.

At a high level, it's sort of that simple.

But there's a consumer angle to this as well. If you're doing business with a company, you're starting to demand a slick mobile experience for all your interactions with them. It makes them easy to do business with. And we all want to be easy to do business with :)

While there are plenty of B2C companies investing heavily in slick mobile experiences, in many cases there's the opportunity for convergence: one strategic approach for addressing both the needs of the enterprise worker, as well as the need to reach customers and partners in new ways.

I think the opportunity for many IT strategists will be to frame this "bigger picture" vs. creating dozens of standalone capabilities for each and every mobile use case that comes along.

Or that's the hope, anyway ...

What You Need To Know About EMC

You can't really evaluate our internal approach to enterprise mobilization unless you have some context around EMC as a company. The strategy fits the need, or should.

First, let's start with the obvious: we compete successfully in a very fast-moving business. Yes, we invest in great processes, but they're no substitute for really bright people -- as many of them as we can find. Whether it's engineers, sales rep, customer service, business analyst, marketeer, partner rep, etc. -- we invest heavily in expertise and talent.

It's a fundamental part of our business model.

An important part of our organization spends a majority of their time outside the office: meeting directly with customers and partners. As a company, we value face-to-face interaction -- and we do an awful lot of it across the organization. We're global as well, with thriving and growing operations in many corners of the world.

Because we're an IT company, we tend to "get" what technology can do for our business. We have no shortage of bright technologists and consultants either working for EMC, or in our extended ecosystem.

And we have plenty of great technology products at our disposal, with more coming every day.

We've recently completed a mind-wrenching IT transformation to an IT-as-a-service model, basically patterning our internal IT operations and processes around what a competitive service provider might do. Because of this, we feel we have a distinct advantage in tackling enterprise mobilization as compared to if we were running a more traditional IT shop.

Our customers and partners tend to be a lot like us: fast-moving, technologically adept, and very comfortable with mobile experiences.

And, of course, we take security and compliance very seriously. Very, very seriously.

The Vision Thing

I guess it all starts with some sort of vision statement, and here is ours.

The elements are pretty clear.

First, there's the notion of a "rich user experience". We want to go far beyond simply using the web to get to apps, or presenting traditional desktops on mobile devices.

The user experience should ideally be *better* on a mobile device than elsewhere. That implies a long list of things, which we'll get to later.

Security is there, but also the notion of "reliable". Good network connectivity is not as pervasive as we'd all like, and probably won't be for the medium term. So we need to consider user experiences that are productive and functional even if the connectivity isn't so great, or -- perhaps -- nonexistent.

The "anywhere, anytime" is rather self explanatory. And, with a few caveats, so is the "user's choice of computing device". While we want some flexibility in device choice, this also means that I can get similar great user experiences on my choice of laptop, for example.

Sounds easy, yes?

Use Cases And Scope

The team spent some productive time envisioning use cases across the enterprise, just to help everyone involved get the right frame of reference.

This particular slide struck me as particularly effective in communicating -- in narrative form -- just how powerful mobilization could be across our business.

The team also came up with two important "expansion axes" that we wanted to achieve over time.

The first vector was the expanding user base. We'll of course start with our own employees, then move to our partners, and -- over time -- directly to our customers. Thus, whatever strategic framework we come up with has to be able to be easily expanded outwards from the more traditional employee use cases.

The second vector is perhaps ultimately more important -- and that's the degree of organizational impact.

Along these lines, the first phase is simply about extending the enterprise: making exisiting enterprise IT service and apps available on mobile devices -- with VDI and web apps being the classic example.

The second phase iss around empowerment: allowing people to do new kinds of work on mobile devices that -- perhaps -- they weren't able to do on more traditional devices.

And, finally, transforming the enterprise. We're all sort of signed up to the big notion that mobilization -- in its full instantiation -- is one of those transformative technologies that can change the very nature of your business.

What I really appreciate is the larger frame of reference. Sure, we can't do everything at the outset, but the decisions we make along the way will be tested against this expanded vision and critically evaluated as to whether they support it, or not, as the case may be.

Guiding Principles

The team also hammered out a short set of guiding principles to help keep various workstreams on track. Here are the ones we came up with -- perhaps you'll find them useful as well.

The user experience should be obvious -- anyone who's used an iPad app will instantly recognize this thought.

The stakeholder concept should be obvious, but sometimes gets lost in translation :) The idea is to build what people want to use -- favor fast iteration and prototypes vs. classic waterfall approaches. If there isn't a specific and articulate user in the discussion, don't proceed :)

The notion of mashable data services shouldn't be all that foreign. And not all data will come from internal sources, either.

The team felt it important to call out exploitation of native device capabilities: touch screens, cameras, etc. No lowest-common-denominator approaches, please. I agree.

The tools discussion is fairly striaghtforward.

And, finally, there's no getting around that these devices will need to be managed and secured -- preferrably without getting in the way of the rich user experience that's the original motivation for all of this.

The Notion Of "Mobility-As-A-Service"

Yes, I'm sure there will be the need to support pre-packaged mobile versions of enterprise applications. Plenty of that out there, with more coming. And as we look across the organization, there are obvious places where being able to support shrink-wrap enterprise mobile apps will be required. But that won't be enough.

We continue to do a significant amount application development across the EMC organization for our internal purposes.

IT does it, marketing does it, our services organization does it, finance and HR does it, manufacturing groups do it, our products groups are starting to do it, and so on.

As a result, we need the ability for application developers across the enterprise to build on a set of standard mobility services that speed their time to market yet give us a managed environment.

Finally -- and perhaps most importantly -- we need to teach our many formal and informal application developers a new skill set around creating useful mobile applications. Just because we have a set of great mobile services and frameworks doesn't mean that everyone will know how to use them effectively at the outset.

The notion of "intelligent consumption" comes in to play very quickly.

Initial Workstreams

With vision, strategy, guiding principles in hand, the next step for the IT team was to break the work into workstreams, and to get busy investigating the pieces. Divide and conquer -- or, at least, attempt to :)

Here are the workstreams that were started in 2011.

One team started to investigate various use cases. They looked at collaborative vs. transactional. They looked a view-only content vs. revisable and reusable content. They went across different parts of the organization, simply in an attempt to get a "feel" for all the potential use cases that were out there.

Another team broke off and started to think about the application development platform that could support all the different models we were envisioning.

The security team started to dive into authentication and DLP issues, and come up with some workable approaches.

A separate team went and started to investigate not only all the different potential devices, but the ones we'd be likely to see in the marketplace before too long.

One more team dug into various options around device and application management, and found some workable solutions.

Based on our experiences in ITaaS, we realized we had to have another team take a hard look at the operational model -- how would work get done behind the scenes?

The infrastructure team had to consider what impacts might be involved against EMC's private cloud capabilities.

And then, finally, we needed a team that could take all these inputs and come up with "the plan": a roadmap, phased delivery, budget, governance, and so forth.

I know, it sounds like a lot -- and that's the point.

When you're doing enterprise mobilization at scale -- and are expecting dramatic results -- these are the major components that have to be thought through prior to actually standing anything up.

Did we get it 100% right? Time will tell -- but it's certainly a thorough and thoughtful approach.

Where To Start?

I think we internally realized that -- well -- we hadn't done anything like this before.

We weren't familiar with many of the newer technology components we'd selected, and we certainly weren't comfortable with the new operational processes we'd be using.

So the decision was made to pick a handful of low-risk, low-profile mobile use cases as an experience-gaining exercise.

For example, we tried our hand at rolling out a few home-grown applications -- such as a conference room finder. Don't laugh -- figuring out what conference rooms are available and where they're located can be a frustrating experience at a large company like EMC.

Useful, but certainly not mission-critical. Unless you're late to an important meeting, and don't know where the heck the conference room is :)

We implemented a pre-packaged mobile enterprise app that does travel and expense management (Concur). And a few others along those lines.

We wanted to exercise the plumbing: prove we could provision, prove we could manage, prove we could publish apps with an internal app store, cprove we could secure information -- and so on -- without either major investments or major risks.

Not everything went 100% perfect, but I guess that's the point.

Interesting Preliminary Observations

In our environment, many of the high-value applications involve associated content: maybe it's a training application, or videos, or perhaps a document repository, or something similar. If you could get the content to the device *ahead* of time, the user experience was dramatically better. Especially if network connectivity was poor :)

We quickly realized that we'd need some interesting and flexible mechanisms to (a) stage content into and out of mobile devices, (b) allow users to manage aggregate usage, as mobile storage tends to be rather finite, and (c) protect and secure sensitive information in containers on the device. More on this later.

Another interesting observation was -- when we got it right -- there was no real issues around migration, training, compatiblity, etc. People found the apps, people consumed the apps, people liked the apps and that was that. The lack of drama was notable.

A third interesting observation is that we found a lot of people throughout the organization that wanted to build their own personal apps, which were essentially mashups of the data they tended to use in their day-to-day environment.

At the time, we didn't really think of that requirement -- a set of self-service app building tools for power users -- but it's an interesting development.

The Road Ahead

Yes, we've just begun on our journey towards mobilizing our enterprise. Good progress, but the real work lies ahead.

But I feel good that (a) we recognized the need, (b) did the necessary up-front strategy work, and (c) are now starting to make serious progress.

Personally, I think we can add a lot of value by packaging up our early experiences and learning, and making them freely available to our customers and partners who face similar challenges.

Maybe what we're doing can work for you. Maybe not. Either way, it's worth studying.

And -- trust me -- this won't be the last post on this subject :)

Comments

Hi Chuck,

Thanks for the nudge. It's really about time to mobilize our enterprise. I believe the surging use of mobile devices tells us that people today want to do business and exchange data wherever and whenever they want to. The biggest challenge however is for IT professionals to control and protect the information on mobile devices more tightly since losing a phone would already mean security risk for an organization.

Thanks for the knowledge,

Nadine

Posted by: Nadine Stevens | January 24, 2012 at 12:39 AM