AUTHOR: Arron Lock
I recently presented onstage at the Enterprise Mobility: BYOD event here in London with a couple of respected peers in the industry from Airwatch and Swivel as well as a VMware colleague. After taking questions from the audience around security for BYOD, my main takeaway from the event and in particular this session is that there is still a lot of confusion around mobility in general. In fact, mobility is becoming a catch-all phrase for end-user computing (EUC) transformation.
It’s amazing how quickly the line between BYOD and enterprise mobility (EM) became blurred. A number of people in the audience had deployed some form of BYOD (most for smartphones) to enable employees to get access to email and calendar. But others, typically with a higher level of risk associated with externalising email, were struggling with the business case.
But BYOD is only one aspect of mobility. The main benefit from enabling users to become more mobile is realised when you mobilise the business workflow that they are part of. This started off as email for executives—with their exec toys such as tablets or the latest smartphone—an obvious use case. But when a business is looking holistically at mobility, there are many other opportunities such as enabling field engineers or the sales force to be more productive. So, the important message that I stressed to my audience wasn’t about technology or security, but rather to ensure they establish the business justification for doing this work before jumping in with both feet.
It’s paramount to gather the business requirements first, by engaging the business stakeholders to understand their needs. I recently helped an IT director of a large multinational company interpret the corporate strategy to collaborate with industry partners. I took the IT team and line-of-business stakeholders through a defined process of the steps required to build out a highly agile externalisation platform. Now they have users accessing the platform from any device and any location—24/7—and they manage everything from the centre since the devices are unknown to them. It’s like BYOD to an extent, but tied to a major business initiative and nothing to do with smartphones.
As with this example, the most successful IT projects are those linked to business outcomes. The EUC space has long been at the unfortunate end of the IT spectrum in that it provides the general tools and services that employees expect to use on a day-to-day basis, yet the solutions do not appear to deliver direct value to the business.
So where did I begin with the before-mentioned IT organisation? First, I got my client to stop starting with technology, which in my experience is often the root cause of an IT project’s failure—deploying technology without considering the “why.” Here’s how I approached this project and others like it with my clients:
- Set a clear and simple mission statement with your business stakeholders.
- Kick off with a discovery workshop with the key stakeholders from IT and the business.
- Capture the business requirements in a clear and concise format, under the following headings:
– User Experience
– Security
– Application Delivery
– Performance, Availability and Scalability
– Service Wrapper - Use the MoSCoW model or similar to help set priorities.
- Review your findings regularly with key stakeholders.
Once this series of steps is complete, I find that my clients are in a good place to communicate internally to key stakeholders as well as externally to potential vendors of technology solutions—communication that paves the way to move forward to build out the business case and functional and technical designs for the solution.
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Arron Lock is an EUC business solutions architect with Accelerate Advisory Services and based in the UK. Follow him on Twitter @arron_lock
RELATED: To learn more about the trends in mobile adoption and how IT is adapting, read the Mobile Rebels research report. This VMware-commissioned study provides insight to the pressures European businesses are facing and reveals just how dependent employees have become on their mobile devices.
