If you were not able to attend the webinar this past week on Mobile Trends Through 2014 with Bzur Haun and myself don’t worry – it was recorded for your convenience! We had a great time, turn-out, and content. We even through in a crazy prediction or two.
Watch it here and let me know what you think!
Filed under Future, Mobile, Mobile-Only, Productivity, Strategy
The time between device model upgrades is shrinking. Consumers and businesses are feeling further and further behind in keeping up. For those that do try to keep up it is getting expensive. How should individuals and organizations approach this new reality of near-constant refresh? Check out this weeks Mobile-Only post, The Mobile Refresh Rate, to find out!
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
Filed under Mobile, Mobile-Only, Strategy
Last week I lamented in the The Myth of the Mobile Worker that working mobile-0nly at a mobile conference was akin to being in the freak show at the circus. However, as luck would have it, I got a chance to speak with not one, but two individuals who work almost exclusively mobile this past week. From these conversations I was able to glean some great insight and commonalities between our approaches to working mobile-only. Check out Collective Wisdom - Mobile-Only Strategies on The Enterprise Mobility Forum to see what I learned. Post a comment and let me know how you approach working on your mobile device.
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
Filed under Apps, Ecosystem, Mobile, Mobile-Only, Strategy
Dr. Seuss imagined some fun and zany worlds that kids for generations have enjoyed. This fun filled world provides the backdrop for this weeks mobile-only post. Check out how our real world approach to mobility often mirrors that imagined world of Dr. Seuss in There’s a Data Socket in Your Pocket on the Enterprise Mobility Forum.
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
Filed under Apps, Information Management, Mobile, Mobile-Only, Security, Strategy
On Wednesday September 19th I hosted a really great live webcast in Chicago on Consumerization of IT, BYOD, and Employee Led Innovation. My two panelists, Steve Duncan from Trend Micro and Ron Hyde from Dell, and I had a fun round-table discussion on the issues facing organizations of all sizes. If you didn’t get a chance to watch the live webcast, don’t fret, you can watch the recorded version here.
You can also still participate in a Tweet Chat happening tomorrow Wednesday September 26th at 26, 2012 at 12PM CDT (1PM ET, 10AM PT) with host Ramon Ray (@RamonRay). The topic will be “Debunking 4 myths in consumerization of IT. More details can be found here.
I fielded several questions from the twitter and blogasphere before the live webcast. To close the loop on Q & A here are the questions and the responses. Thanks to all who participated!
1. How should companies think beyond the app (or the device) when developing Employee Led Innovation (ELI?) What is the role of the employee in ELI beyond the insatiable appetite for cool devices?
Steve Duncan: Companies have to take a holistic approach to ELI and not just create policies and technology frameworks for devices. It starts with creating a structured and continuous method for collecting ideas/initiatives and reacting to them. Every initiative needs to be answered by management such that employees remain motivated to participate. Some times that means identifying the right people to evaluate the merits of every idea or initiative. Once employees know that Management and IT are really listening and reacting, the initiatives will flow.
2. How do you establish and maintain a collaborative attitude between IT and the rest of the company?
Steve Duncan: It’s the job of IT to create the environment that allows employees to innovate. That starts with developing and publishing boundaries for how technology can be used inside and outside of the company. It has to be backed up by providing a technology environment that lets employees to choose their applications and devices without risking loss of company data or breeching security. By providing security and provisioning support for employee initiatives, an environment of collaboration would be established.
Ron Hyde responds to both questions:
One way to ensure success would be to establish an ELI committee, made up of both end-users and IT staff. Ideally, this committee would be the ‘voice of the company’. This purpose of this group would be to jointly collaborate on key corporate initiatives around mobility. The committee will consist of IT savvy end-users who are familiar with the mobile devices and software applications of the ELI. The IT department would provide folks that are focused on delivering and managing these mobile devices and apps. Together the end-users would outline objectives and the IT department could prepare for them. By working together, both sides can craft timelines, develop a budget, and muster resources. This would help set expectations on both sides. Ultimately the committee would introduce solutions that provide value to the corporate end-user and be effectively managed by IT.
On September 19th at noon CT (1PM ET, 10AM PT) I’ll be hosting a live webcast in Chicago entitled Understanding the value of employee-led innovation & BYOD (see event description below). This Trend Micro Sponsored event will feature a great panel with Steve Duncan, Ron Hyde , and myself.
You can join in!
1. I am seeking your questions and input ahead of time in order to incorporate them into the event. If you have questions that you want to see addressed during the event post a comment below or send me a tweet at @paladorbenjamin. I’ll add the questions and comments to this blog post as I get them.
2. Watch the live event here!
3. During the event tweet your questions and comments with the hash tag #DellWebcast – I look forward to your input!
You can win a sweet prize!
For participating in the event you could win a Dell™ Latitude™ E6230 laptop with Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security (24 months). The Approximate Retail Value of this prize is $1,679.00. Details on rules and how to win are here.
What’s this event all about?
As the technology landscape evolves, companies are changing the way they operate and providing new opportunities for employees. Consumer preference is increasingly driving the adoption of technology and policies within the workplace.
The implementation of BYOD provides greater flexibility and personal choice for individual workers. It has also been proven to increase productivity and revenues. In addition, employee-led innovation (ELI) offers an alternative to the traditional top-down approach to innovation by involving staff – including the end user – in all areas of developing IT solutions.
Join our live, one-hour webcast, “Understanding the value of employee-led innovation & BYOD”, and learn from industry experts as they discuss:
• Why companies are embracing these trends
• Considerations for your company before implementing employee-led innovation
• Measuring the value of ELI and BYOD
• How ELI can help to resolve organizational issues
QUESTIONS From The TWITTERSPHERE
1. How does IT integrate with employee led innovation while still serving the business needs and being proactive not reactive?
-Submitted by @bmkatz
I have been involved in many discussions lately about enabling employees/end-users with data. The thought is if we can get the right data in the right hands of the right people at the right time, then we’ll see interactions, efficiencies, and opportunities like we never have before. Mobile devices are going to buoy this experience as they represent an always accessible data delivery mechanism. I couldn’t agree more! There is, however, one small catch. Much of the data that business want to use/share is not stored in the same way that data needs to be consumed.
While there are tools and platforms, such as Hadoop, that work well with unstructured data, many of the data stores that exist today store data in a relational way. For those of you who are not Database Administrators, here’s a simple example of what that means. Let’s take a customer. For any given business, the idea of a customer is someone who has bought a product from the company. If the employee needed to gather information about a customer he or she would probably want information such as number of customers per products. However, in the database there is likely no such thing as a customer. Customer is a concept that could be represented in the data by the following tables:
Each table has its associative fields such as name, date, etc that would be tied to other tables by an ID (which is usually not readable just by looking at IDs). If the employee was given access to the raw data it wouldn’t make much sense to them. A customer is a business concept, not a way of storing data. Much of the data that exists today is stored in this format. If an employee wants to look up all the customers who ordered product X in the last 90 days, there is work that needs to be done to prep the data in a business consumable fashion.
This problem is multiplied when a business desires to tie together multiple systems and their associative data. The way a customer is stored in one system is probably not how it is stored in another. Each application has slight differences and has slightly different data fields. If you need to merge the data sets together from various applications it will take some tweaking on the data side.
This isn’t by any means a deal breaker, but organizations need to begin to include the effort required in conversations, planning, implementation, and support. The problem isn’t that data can’t be tied back to business concepts in a consumable state, but that data transformation is time-consuming and expensive. It takes not only application knowledge, but business knowledge with the ability to merge the two (not the natural modis operandi of Application and Database Developers). This is also an on-going process that needs to be updated with each change to the database schema.
The way that data is stored in an application is why the notion of an “information Worker’ that Microsoft touted for years never panned out. Microsoft advocated the use of many of their data consuming products by this ‘information worker’ – a quasi-technical individual capable of mining and manipulating data on their own. The trouble is, even if you have a great tool, like Microsoft’s Report Builder, which allows you to drag and drop data sets into a WYSIWYG editor, you still need data in a ready-to-use business state.
What does this mean for mobile? Many of the advantages that we were going to see with the “information work” are now being used as reasoned advantages for consuming data on the phone. For example, users will be able to perform their own analytics or users will be able to build their own apps. I’m not saying this isn’t possible, just that we need to make sure we include in our dialog the amount of effort that will be required to prep the data so that is it readily consumable by an average user. Our discussion around builing a meaningful mobile ecosystem can’t just be to say create we need to create an API and all will be copasetic. Yes, API’s will create the gateway to the data, but the data needs to be transformed into a business consumable state. Delivering a meaningful experience to the end-user will take bridging the gap between the business and structure of the data.
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
I had the privilege today of hosting a webinar on Right Time Experiences – The Future of Big Data, Analytics, and Mobile with Maribel Lopez. If you missed the webinar you can watch the recorded version here. You can also download the pdf version of the deck.
If you missed Maribel’s original post on Right Time Experiences on Forbes.com you can read it here.
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
Last week I participated in a really great podcast regarding enterprise mobility. Entitled BYOD SMACKDOWN it featured:
The discussion was moderated by Pete Erickson, Founder of MoDev and Disruptathon
My good friend, Brian Katz, posted a spirited piece yesterday regarding the redundancy of the idea of a mobile ecosystem. Katz writes that the goal isn’t to build a mobile ecosystem, “The goal is to get your mobile devices to play in the enterprise ecosystem that has been there the whole time.” Katz’s point is that you shouldn’t be bamboozled into spending lots of money on building something new, when perhaps you already have the infrastructure and functionality in place to accomplish your desired task. I think Katz’s reasoning is sound; however, I think it only considers one perspective in the value proposition of mobility.
Mobile enablement holds different value for different organizations. With each organization you have to ask, what value does mobility provide? If mobility represents the opportunity to extend existing services, infrastructure, and functionality then I think, as Katz suggests, there shouldn’t really be a distinction between the traditional enterprise ecosystem and a mobile ecosystem. For those instances, you just simply add to what’s already there. Mobility is taken as an add-on to business as usual; how do I access existing services and functionality through a mobile device. Again, this is a legitimate perspective, but only one of many possibilities.
If, however, the value of mobility for an organization is looking at new ways to conduct business, then the mobile ecosystem will break through the current notions of people, process, and collaboration. In this regard, enterprises are looking at mobility as a chance to diverge from business as usual; to re-envision how work can happen beyond the boundaries of the traditional network. To me, this is where the real power of an ecosystem comes in. This is where you put the pieces to work for you.
A mobile ecosystem represents the collection of services that a business can assemble for a tactical approach to functional gaps. Sometimes this may be simple additions to existing functionality, while other times it may be radical departure. You can’t assume a one-size-fits-all value proposition as you look at mobility from organization to organization. A mobile ecosystem will reflect the value-proposition of mobility for a given enterprise.
I also diverge with Katz’s conclusion that when it comes to decide if you should use a cloud service, such as Box or Dropbox, that “The better way to do this is to create a way to access the already existing Sharepoint systems, shared folders and personal folders that your users are comfortable with.” This may be true for some organizations, but I know of others that are looking to extricate themselves from the weight of this kind of network operation. They see leveraging Box as part of their mobile ecosystem as the path to do this.
The thought process behind this is that, for many enterprises, a data center is not part of their core-competency. Mobility creates the opportunity (excuse almost) to allow enterprise IT to hit the reset button and get out of the data center business. A mobile ecosystem of cloud services enables organizations the ability to ditch the private datacenter altogether and select just the functionality required to suit their needs. They don’t want to have to worry about updates, patches, and hardware. They want to concentrate on what makes money.
For other organizations mobility creates the opportunity to engage with non-traditional staff, such as client, volunteers, enthusiasts, etc. If current functionality can’t provide this then leveraging mobile apps and services is an excellent way to accomplish this. As well, many organizations take a non-functional view towards mobility. They see it as an avenue to being hip and relevant. They are not looking to build a mobile ecosystem that enables the existing but rather the latest and greatest.
In the long run I think Katz, as well as others, are correct in saying that the differentiation between mobile and enterprise ecosystems will disappear and the two will become synonymous. In creating ecosystems, some organizations will want to enable existing services, while other will look to mobility as a chance to pick and choose their way to a different operating paradigm. But on the road to singularity, mobility will hold a different value proposition for every organization. They will each have unique rational as to which pieces they want to leverage for their mobile ecosystem. Hopefully the pieces they assemble will allow them reach their vision.
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
