If you’re in the Seattle area 10/18, I’ll be moderating the panel discussion on “Are enterprises ready for the mobile tsunami?”
Where: Bellevue city hall, 450, 110 Av NE, Bellevue
When: Thursday, October 18, 2012 | 6 – 9 pm
Event Speakers:
Adrian Smith Partner, Ignition Partners
David Shim, Founder & CEO Placed
Benjamin Robbins, Principal Palador
Shehryar Khan, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
More information and Register for the event here. Hope to see you in person!
Filed under Mobile
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.
On June 20th, 2012 I hosted a very lively tweet chat on BYOD sponsored by Dell and Microsoft. Many thanks to all the partipcants! Click for a recap of question 1 or here for a recap of question 2 or here for a recap of Question 3. The Tweet Chat ended with discusion of BYOD policy, scalability, and Why BYOD.
Link in Tweet:BYOD Required for Retention? Bollocks!
Link in Tweet:Mobility and Employee-Owned Devices
Sponsored by:
Filed under Mobile
There was some light-hearted discussion yesterday on twitter surrounding Brian Katz’s open solicitation for suggestions of mobile ‘crapplications’. For the un-initiated, crapplication is a term to describe the effect scope-creep has upon an application lifecycle. Right about the time when you can start applying the 80/20 rule to an application, it has become a crapplication. Katz wrote a great article on it last fall that you should check out if you haven’t already.
As Katz writes, “a crapplication is really just a term for a bloated desktop application…an application that is bloated with many useless features for the majority of users.” He continues to say, that a crapplication “makes it difficult to figure out how to manipulate your data,” by which he means a bad user interface and user experience.
To build upon Katz’s idea of a crapplication, as well as what’s dogging me at the moment in my mobile-only quest, isn’t so much bloat and bad UI (though there is some of that), it is the lack of functionality in many of the apps I use. From my experience, the current state of mobility isn’t in a state of bloat, but one of anemic proportions. Many mobile apps need some good old-fashion functional protein to put a little meat on their bones. The skeleton is there, but some of the basic features are just missing. I’m not seeing a lot of crap, but rather a lot of lack. These functional weaklings could be considered ‘Lacklications’.
For example, office productivity apps lack word count, track changes, and a table of contents. Blogging apps are missing features such as scheduling, comments, and preview. I have to use the web front end to accomplish this. The native version of apps such as Lync and OneNote are missing painfully basic features. The native Android email client doesn’t let me access notes or tasks in exchange. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
Some of the cause for emaciation is due to market /platform/apps maturity. Some of it is due to the screen real-estate of the device itself – the small size limits and dictates some functionality. Some of it is due to the fact that certain functions are just not possible in a mobile context. Whatever the reason, it is painfully obvious that you can see the rib-cage of many mobile apps.
But here is the good news. Mobile is new! Mobile is exciting! Mobile is acting as one big, fat reset button not only for many enterprises, but app vendors as well. As I have written about recently, they are using mobility as the excuse to re-examine how ‘we’ve always done things’. They are looking at how we can perform functions and processes in a more efficient manner. Hopefully this means there is opportunity for loads of excess functional fat to be left on the chopping block. This will also hopefully translate into clients working with app vendors to assure that the right pieces of functionality are being developed.
Who knows, perhaps one-day in the near future, I’ll be cursing my bloated mobile ‘crapplications’ with specialized functionality intended for just a select few and a bad UI to boot. Hopefully, the mobile context will guide and spur just the right level of development. The question for the future of mobile apps is – are they going to exercise and eat a healthy diet to build functional muscle or are they going right back to the same fatty diet? Typical human behavior says bad habits are hard to break – but what do you think?
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, Mobile, Productivity
Today, Google announced the acquisition of Quickoffice. For those who don’t know, Quickoffice is arguably one of the better office productivity suites currently available for mobile platforms (also check out OfficeSuite 6 by MobiSystems). Quickoffice allows users to view, create, and edit Microsoft Office compatible Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. Quickoffice is available cross-platform on Android, iOS, and Symbian.
In the void created by the absence of a mobile version of Microsoft Office, Quickoffice has taken a strong leadership position. However, until yesterday this was done so (not to detract from the product) by an upstart company that could be competitively explained away; my how the stakes have changed. With the acquisition, it has moved from an interesting gap filling measure to a strategic threat from a competitor who doesn’t lack in cash, competition, or cause. Make no bones about it; Google has its competitive sights on Microsoft Office via the mobile platform. (They also bought DocVerse a few months back ) If there wasn’t already immense pressure in Redmond to get a cross-platform mobile version of their popular Office suite out, it just doubled.
First, from a competition perspective, all mobile enterprise office productivity discussions will be framed through the lens of a Google/Microsoft battle. The temptation to turn this into a clash of the titans is just too great for tech writers to avoid doing so. Second, the functionality Microsoft offers will have to be, at a minimum, at least what Quickoffice offers. Based on Microsoft’s ability to deliver mobile capabilities of other Microsoft products I have some real reservations. OneNote for Android is barebones, as is the Lync client. Microsoft doesn’t yet have the track record to deliver fantasist mobile apps outside of the Windows Phone platform. Microsoft seems to be perpetually behind on the mobile front.
However, the biggest challenge Microsoft faces isn’t Google, but rather the consumer. Consumers have come to expect in the mobile arena that they call the shots. I would even go so far as to say they feel entitled to call the shots (not that it is always a good thing). This is expressed in the enterprise as the Consumerization of IT. The Consumerization of IT denotes the idea that technology shouldn’t be overly complex. It should be something that the average consumer can understand. When you combine the sense of entitlement with the Consumerization of IT, the end result is often manifested with end users doing an end-run around the IT department to use the apps and devices they like best. My good friend, Philippe Winthrop, Managing Director of the Enterprise Mobility Foundation, calls it the IT-ization of the Consumer. This attitude, coupled with a product from a viable competitor, should set off major alarm bells in Redmond.
Microsoft is in danger of having consumers do an end-run around Office – call it the Consumerization of Office. With a solid enterprise office suite alternative (provided Quickoffice can deliver the Track Changes functionality) Microsoft will quickly lose one of their greatest strongholds in the enterprise. Without a similar product offering by Microsoft, the acquisition of Quickoffice by Google only hastens this loosening of the grip of Microsoft Office dominance in the enterprise. While Microsoft continues to develop their offering on the sidelines, Google has a staggering advantage to secure market share.
Mobile consumers have demonstrated time and again they will abandon the dominant paradigm en masse in favor of functionally that is available now rather than wait for the old guard to catch up. Users want/need/must perform office productivity tasks on their mobile devices and they are finding workarounds wherever they can. The greater the proliferation of mobile devices in the enterprise, the more of a requirement it will be to consume office documents from those devices. Savvy consumers are not going to sit around and wait for Microsoft to provide the solution when an alternative is in front of them. The question that remains is – How will Microsoft respond and will it be substantial enough and in-time to satiate the empowered consumer?
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, Mobile, Productivity
MaaS360 is an exception in the enterprise mobility management space. They have a long history of securing mobile devices from a cloud-based infrastructure way before the advent of the iPhone or iPad. Over that time they have supported millions of devices. From their initial beginnings of secure laptop dial-up access, they have skillfully transformed themselves into one of the vanguards of enterprise mobility management.
The key to their success, as Jim Sheward, CEO of Fiberlink (makers of MaaS360) explained during our recent conversation, was witnessing the consumerizatoin of IT unfold. “As it became easier for individual users to enable those [secure] connections on their own through improvements in the OS, primarily Windows, we recognized that it was the management of that device and the underlying applications was becoming increasingly difficult from an on-premise based environment. Today there is a very different heterogeneous world that is driven by the consumerization of devices.” For Sheward, management of the network can no longer happen from behind the supposed comfort of the corporate firewall.
To illustrate his point, Sheward explained how MaaS360 fills a much needed gap. “There is a term we use called the ‘mobile-blindspot’.If I have a premise based server managing my devices and I have end-users that don’t tunnel back in to my network very frequently, then I’m less able to gain visibly and control around that device.” Sheward mentioned how this was becoming more the case as applications and their capabilities shifted to be internet-based. “As the ‘mobile-blindspot’ grew bigger, our opportunity continued to evolve.” The vision was solidified as the proliferation of iOS devices burst into existence. “With the invention of the iPhone and the explosion of mobile devices, it became more apparent to us the opportunity to evolve our strategy to more mobile devices than just laptops made sense.”
Sheward continued that their history and infrastructure gives MaaS360 a distinct advantage. “We have a single instance of our platform that is represented in multiple NOCs around the world that we update on a bi-weekly basis.” These changes instantly become available to their clients and their end-users. In a rapidly changing environment, according to Sheward, that architecture is quickly proving to be the preferred approach. “Over time, we think it will become the default approach and eventually you won’t be able to do it from on-premise.”
Knowing that many in IT approach the cloud as an insecure out of their control, I inquired if they get the clamor of IT departments asking for an on-premise version. “We do, but we see it rapidly changing. We have several large wins over the last two quarters of Fortune 500 companies that had on-premise solutions that completely failed.” He explained that this was primarily due to the fact that IT departments couldn’t meet the requirements to block cloud functionality that posed a security risk. They also needed a solution that would scale for a larger numbers of employees. Another contributing factor was that IT couldn’t keep up with the need for constant upgrades to an on-premise mobility management platform. These companies made the decision to replace their on-premise solution and move to a cloud-based solution. “We have big banks, big pharma, agencies in government, etc. who have recognized that they can’t and shouldn’t solve this problem from a premise based solution. We think the wind is behind us on this front.”
Sheward’s vision of a pure cloud solution is paying off. “When we first delivered our solution, there was a majority of folks evaluating us that said they need an on-premise solution that looks like a BES.” However, this has begun to turn a corner. Sheward continued on to say, “in the middle of last year that shifted to a 50-50 perspective and now 9 out of 10 companies will consider a cloud solution. Very few say they are on-prem only. While there are still ‘server-huggers’ out there, that is becoming a smaller and smaller subset.”
Sheward stated that a cloud approach to enterprise mobility management is supported at the highest levels of the enterprise. “The higher up in an organization you go, the more credibility you get with our [cloud] approach. CIO’s recognize that data centers aren’t core to 99% of the businesses that they are involved in. Data centers are just an asset.” Sheward thinks that if that asset can be deployed and managed more efficiently, thus allowing organization to focus on core capabilities, it is all the better. He doesn’t see the win as a cost savings, but one that brings increased reliability, scale, and efficiency. “We make the proposition that says, ‘Why in the world would you want to dedicate a team to take a mission critical system down every two weeks in a BYOD world – simply so you can have the equipment behind your firewall?’ You can use those resources a lot better than that.”
Next up – see how MaaS360 has transformed this vision into a cloud-based reality.
Fiberlink is the recognized leader in software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for secure enterprise mobile device and application management. Its cloud-based MaaS360 platform provides IT organizations with mobility intelligence and control over mobile devices, applications and content to enhance the mobile user experience and keep corporate data secure across smartphones, tablets and laptops. For more information, please visit http://www.maas360.com.
Filed under Management, Mobile, Security, Uncategorized
I got a chance to catch up with Chris Fleck, VP of Mobility Solutions at Citirx, at the CITE Conference and Expo in San Fransisco. I had been looking forward to getting to chat with him ever since reading his piece on the NirvanaPhone. Fleck and Citrix are helping to bring about the reality of what they call ‘workshifting’, the ability to work anywhere, anytime. Workshifting is the idea that companies can be more productive and responsive through providing employees the flexibility to work at the most convenient times and locations using the devices they want. This is a notion that resonates strongly with me. According to Fleck, “workshifting his is a much more inclusive idea and experience than what was once called telecommuting.” Fleck relayed that the employees who are able and expect to work anytime, anywhere “is rapidly changing from the exception of a few sales road-warriors and executives, to the new norm for entire organizations.” As Fleck stated, “the new standard is mobile and wireless.” Fleck noted that workshifting is important for organizations “to improve not only productivity but also help with employee retention, improve customer service, and make their job easier.” He went on to further expound the benefits for enterprises by saying “when employees operate in the model of work from anywhere, with the device they want, companies will get more out of them and allow the whole business cycle to move faster.”
Citrix is even tracking this change in the enterprise, called The Citrix Global Workshifting Index. According to the study, it was found that by the end of 2013 93% of organizations will have implemented workshifting policies; up from 37% of organization that currently offer workshifting for part, or all, of their workforce. This is a big change and Fleck thinks that Citrix has the enterprise products to play a central role. This was recently validated by Citrix’s Xen Receiver winning the Best Mobile App for Enterprise at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Fleck offered some excellent advice for IT departments being charged with responsibility of implementing this new norm. Though it is not simple to place an ROI on productivity he thinks that IT departments can approach the problem by looking at the lack of incremental costs. Fleck states that once the infrastructure is in place for a few “from an incremental cost perspective it isn’t going to cost me [IT departments] any more to support the scenario of everyone.” Companies will, regardless of scale, need to have the infrastructure and management capabilities for sales and executives, so it will have little cost impact to add additional employees. Fleck doesn’t see any end in sight for new hardware devices being introduced into the market and believes IT departments need to be ready for this continued trend in workshifting. He sees Citrix as well positioned to help bring about this new norm of workshifting for all. Stay tuned for more to come!
Ever been out and about and suddenly realize you need a file on your Mac or PC. Pocket Cloud Explore from Wyse can help you out. I got a chance to speak with Rick Cook and Evren Bingol, some of the lead engineers of the product, in the Google booth (I’m not sure you can call it just a ‘booth’ with its slide and smoothie bar) at Mobile World Congress. Pocket Cloud Explore allow users to interact with the file system between their SmartPhone (iPhone and Android) and their desktop or servers (PC or Mac). You install an agent on the machine(s) and and download the app and you are off and running. You can also send a link to share files with others. There is also a Cloud Bin feature that allows you to store and access files in the cloud. A very cool feature that will be available in an upcoming release is the ability to stream audio and video directly from the PC or Mac to your Phone. There is no release date yet on that feature but in the meantime download the free version and give it a try. Thanks Rick and Evren for the tour!
Filed under Apps, Mobile, MWC12, Productivity
I caught up with the folks from TouchPal at Mobile World Congress. This free keyboard app for iPhone and Android has a pretty slick predictive engine that improves upon standard typing and Swype style typing. For example with Swype you have to complete the entire pattern for the word to show up. This is a pain for long words. With TouchPal it will predict the word a few characters in. Another example of improved speed is TouchPal also predicts the most common words that follow the one you just typed. Give it a try and let me know if you see productivity gains.
Filed under Uncategorized
Forget about devices for the moment. I want you to first imagine you just moved to New York City. It’s big, it’s bustling, it’s happening. Yet, as one of the pricier places to live in the United States, space is at a premium. Finding a place to live is a challenge and when you do it is never cheap. People learn to make do with less space. So it will come as no surprise that New York has some of the smallest apartments in the US. The smallest one happens to be 78 square feet. Yes – you read that right, 78 square feet (at $800 a month for the curious). That’s about the size of a walk-in closet. Luke Clark Tyler lives and works out of his tiny abode. From an efficiency standpoint the apartment is on another level, the couch becomes a bed, the printer sitting atop the microwave sits in the cupboard, and he even has the ubiquitous “junk drawer” (Is there anyone you know who doesn’t?). This kind of living isn’t for everyone but you can’t help but be impressed with his use of space. There is a fantastic take-away from Luke’s approach to his midtown mansion. As he states:
“The smaller the space you have the more critical it is to be efficient how you use it…an inch can make a difference.”
Luke has learned to maximize the space, create suitable structures, and retain only retain essential stuff. On a similar note there is a popular movement called the 100 Thing Challenge. The idea is that you identify and keep only 100 items in your life and get rid of the rest. This forces people to identify that which it truly important and needed versus that which is unnecessary and just taking up space.
So what does this have to do with mobility in the enterprise? In my day-time gig as a consultant I have the opportunity to intimately come to know the technology in different enterprises. I frequently come across ‘techno- glut’, the excessive use of technology. This comes is the form of data, applications, processes, hardware, etc. Usually this is the result of the misappropriation of technology as the savior of bad practices. The idea being that by throwing technology at broken processes the problem will be magically resolved. As a result it usually just compounds the problem.
Then, all of a sudden, in comes a large influx of employees wanting to connect their tablets, smartphones, etc to the corporate network. This presents many challenges. But, here is what I love about BYOD. The devices, because of their form factor, create the opportunity to re-imagine how we work. We get to throw the PC-mindset out the window and start fresh with all that we now know. The best part is that, though there are larger devices such as tablets, this re-imagining has to incorporate the perspective of a tiny little window, our consumer turned enterprise telephony devices. In order to make it all work from this tiny glass window applications and processes will have to think in terms of the 78 square foot apartment and the 100 item challenge. These devices just don’t have the space to allow for it all. We’ll ask, how can screen space best be utilized? What data elements do we really need? Is this a nice to have or does it really get used? As a result, enterprises will find that non-essentials are cut away out of necessity. This might not even be an intentional aspect of the enterprise mobile strategy. But it will happen. Employees want to use their devices in the enterprise and in doing so organizations will move into the digital equivalent of a 78 square foot apartment. Take a BI dashboard for example. If you want to display the elements BI dashboard on a smartphone, the loss of screen real-estate forces companies to focus on selecting which data points are the most important. Therefore, if organizations want to capitalize on the influx of consumer devices in the enterprise they will have to get rid of the non-essential bits as the platform just doesn’t have the space. As Luke says, “An inch can make a difference”.
Do you agree – do you think device form factor will force a more efficient solution? How do you see enterprises benefiting from this spatial consolidation? Post a comment and let me know!
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, Mobile, Productivity
