WHITEPAPER
The Changing Role of IT
in the Mobile-First Era
As Consumerisation of IT and Mobile First trends
collide, IT teams have the unique opportunity
to champion a new generation of enterprise
applications and lead their companies on a
mobile-first journey. This paper examines the
characteristics of mobile-first organisations,
exposes the roadblocks along the way and how
IT must change from gatekeeper to enabler.
Finally it demonstrates mobile-first in action
The Changing Role of IT in the
Mobile-First Era
As the Consumerisation of IT and Mobile First trends collide,
IT teams have the unique opportunity to transform their role
from gatekeepers to mobile champions
59% of employees now use
smartphones in the course
of their work, 65 percent
use laptops and 25 percent
use a tablet.
Take a snapshot of a typical business today and here’s what you’re likely to see: employees checking messages and information on their smartphones, field workers accessing schedules and customer data remotely from ruggedised and tablet devices, and managers viewing performance dashboards on the go from tablets or smartphones. The common denominator? Mobile devices. You might be hard pressed to find a wired device anywhere. Smartphones, tablets and mobile applications are transforming the way information is now being consumed. With mobile devices almost ubiquitous in enterprises, business leaders are looking for ways to leverage mobile applications to drive business success. Accustomed to having “an app for that” in their personal lives, leaders now want to bring the benefits of mobile applications to their employees and customers, in order to increase productivity, improve customer satisfaction, and accelerate time-to-market for new products. Employees are helping drive this demand, with innovative ideas for mobile apps that help improve productivity, accuracy and safety whilst setting the expectation that business technology will be as simple to use as consumer technology.
In order to meet this demand, IT teams have the unique opportunity to champion a new generation of enterprise applications, and lead their companies on a mobile-first journey.
What characterizes a mobile-first organisation?
Mobile first is a mindset embraced by organisations that want to leverage mobile in all ways possible to run, grow and ultimately transform their business. Simply put, when mobile-first organisations look to design new applications, they always consider the mobile user experience first. This helps developers prioritise what’s most essential to include and also ensures that mobile users (who will soon comprise the majority of total users) will have a great experience. Further, mobile-first organisations are not afraid to let end-users conceive of new ideas and apps that will leverage mobile for greater efficiency or customer satisfaction.
In a mobile-first organisation, new mobile initiatives are not centralised within the IT department as in the old days of ERP and CRM implementations. Rather, a salesforce.com or Workdaytype model takes hold, where different areas of the business take more control in deciding what their requirements are, possibly even specifying or prototyping the front-end functionality of the application, while the IT department acts as an enabler, providing the infrastructure, tools, security checkpoints, and analytics that will support future-proofing, storage, scaling, user access and management of the organization’s complete family of mobile application assets.
With this model, all areas of the business are free to generate ideas for the mobile apps that they need to impact business processes, decide what devices these applications need to run on, and who their target audience will be. Then the business relies on the IT department to support them by providing the tools, guidelines and infrastructure, ensuring that applications and users are managed across the whole organization and that sensitive corporate data is protected.
A mobile-first company focuses resources on optimizing the front-end user experience to create consumer-like experiences that drive adoption, and uses next generation cloud-based mobile technology to simplify access to backend data in a secure and compliant manner. The challenge for IT departments is to shift the balance of resources from infrastructure management to delivering easy to access front-end applications that bring measureable business results.
Overcoming roadblocks on the
mobile-first journey
Many organisations still work within the confines of a corporate IT structure, which dictates the software toolkits, methods, preferred vendors and technology platforms available for use. This can make it challenging to fully embrace the mobile-first mindset. And even businesses without those constraints can’t forget the need for security and compliance as well as back-end system and legacy application integration.
The collision of consumerisation of IT and mobile-first trends has led to a radical change for IT departments. Mobile application development tools are cheap, plentiful and accessible to all, making it easier for business to bypass the IT department and outsource their app projects, especially when IT may not have the necessary app development skills in house. In this case, IT can lose control over what apps have been deployed and what tools, platforms and vendors have been used to create them. This is a radical shift for IT - from controlling seven-figure, multi-year enterprise application projects to no longer fully determining how software is developed or consumed within the business. In this new age of mobile agility and availability, the challenge for IT teams is how to evolve from being traditional gatekeepers to being enablers and champions of mobile enterprise applications.
By 2015, tablets will
out-ship not just laptops, but
all PCs.
IDC May 2013
37% of companies see
mobile access to their
corporate database as a
strategic importance to
their organisation and 23%
regard mobile CRM likewise.
Yankee Group’s IT Decision-Maker Survey - March 2013
Fortunately, a new class of mobile application platform has emerged that’s helping business leaders and IT through this evolution. These new solutions, enabled by the cloud, provide everything needed to drive a mobile-first strategy. The business areas gain the freedom to decide what apps they need, whether native, hybrid, or pure web, and can outsource this front-end development if necessary. The IT department then ensures that the connectivity of these apps to backend systems is at all times secured and that the apps are distributed, authorised and managed across the organisation to the appropriate users. IT can also manage the deployment of backend code to the cloud infrastructure of their choice, allowing app developers to focus on creating engaging front-end experiences that drive user engagement.
Best of all, the resulting applications can be developed and deployed in weeks instead of months, with some auto-generated apps, such as form capture, being deployed within days.
- Does your company embrace a device- and OS- agnostic approach
supporting BYOD where it makes sense, and is the IT team open to
the best app approach for the job, be it native, HTML5, hybrid or
web apps?
- Does it encourage business managers and employees to conceive apps
that transform or re-invent business processes rather than relying on
IT to dictate app initiatives?
- Does it foster experimentation and learning, to better understand
what works and what doesn’t with devices and apps?
- Does it involve IT as an enabler and not a controller of mobile app
development, deployment and management?
- Do business managers collaborate with IT to determine the tools and
guidelines for secure connectivity to backend systems so that sensitive
corporate data is not breached?
- Does it offer the flexibility for IT to deploy code and services to their
cloud of choice, not confining the organization to a specific cloud
configuration or vendor?
Do you work in a mobile-first organisation?
Ask yourself these key questions.
Cloud + mobile = yin + yang
Next generation enterprise-grade mobile application platforms share some common characteristics:
• Heavy reliance on the cloud as the engine that drives storage, scaling, and management of the data that is ultimately consumed on the user devices.
• Backend services that offer the APIs, security and tools that enable easy access to backend data, including legacy systems that weren’t originally designed to be mobilized.
• Enterprise-grade security that spans the complete lifecycle of the app development, distribution and management lifecycle.
The newest offerings live at the intersection of two important enterprise IT trends: mobile and cloud. Both were once considered unreliable for enterprise use, but over the past two years have become mainstays in the IT enterprise toolkit.
Although some industries have been slower to adopt cloud computing, it is now a fait accompli. Even the most conservative enterprises are embracing the cloud model, which over time has proven, with a properly architected solution, as secure and stable as on-premise systems.
In the world of enterprise mobility, the cloud has become a key enabler. The cloud model shrinks deployment time and cost and supports the increasing need to connect the apps to multiple backend systems and services such as storage, data syncing, management, and other SaaS-based services such as CRM, ERP, social and more.
As mobile and cloud become inseparable, mobile application platforms have evolved to where the cloud stores, secures and manages business-critical information while the smart device acts as the consumer of this information – a perfect yin and yang.
Mobile-First in action with the FeedHenry
Mobile Application Platform
A large European rail infrastructure operator employing 35,000, including 22,000 maintenance and operations staff, took a mobile-first approach to infrastructure and asset management, with a vision to engage frontline staff and use mobile devices in a “predict and prevent” strategy.
With the safety and reliability of its infrastructure being paramount, the company issued smartphones to frontline staff first, even before issuing these devices to management. Managers then asked these frontline workers to generate as many ideas as possible to leverage the power of mobile and apps to drive innovation and transformation in
50% of companies will be
increasing their budgets this
year for mobile apps, and
34% plan to develop 10 or
more apps.
Yankee Group’s IT Decision-Maker Survey - March 2013
that consumers have become used to. For example, the power of being able to use a camera to get a photo back to an engineer somewhere else in the field is critical in making more effective decisions.
Although the apps are still being rolled out, the company has already realized significant benefits. Among these are the ability to inspect and verify equipment and infrastructure and feed that information back to a central database This is not a trivial task but one that has been drastically simplified with modern mobile and cloud technology that supports the security, storage, data syncing and app management that make this possible. While it’s not feasible for a service engineer’s smartphone to directly access the company’s database, the cloud middleware makes this all happen seamlessly and securely. This is where an enterprise-grade, yet agile, mobile back-end-as-a service (mBaaS) comes into its own – connecting to legacy or other backend systems and combining this with the power of the mobile device features to make the impossible now possible.
Another major difference that these apps have made in the months since rollout is in how engineers can locate themselves out on the track. While this may seem trivial, in such a vast and dispersed infrastructure, the ability to know exactly where you are and where you need to get to is critical. A smartphone’s GPS provides this information, not only to the frontline engineer but also to internal databases that can then help better track, monitor and update maintenance information. And just like the example of the camera, access to this real-time information from the field was not possible before and has had an incredible impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of frontline workers while also making their job easier and safer.
This is an example of a mobile-first mindset. The company set out to make mobile part and parcel of how people work. They did not constrain themselves to management- or IT-led decisions, but put the devices in the hands of those that could re-think their jobs in terms of the capability that is now available to them through mobile apps and devices. This level of engagement empowers workers and has a positive impact on employee acceptance. At the same time, the company knows that this is a journey and one that impacts the whole organization, from that lone maintenance employee right up to the CEO. Mobile first doesn’t happen overnight – it is a journey, and on a fast track at this particular organization.
“The first phase has been phenomenal in terms of the change and acceptance of using these devices,” said the director of asset management at the rail operator. “We set out a really ambitious program to get 13,000 devices out to all frontline staff that need them to do their jobs more effectively. We brought about massive amount of change – change that people like; showing them the art of the possible, not just digitizing what they do today.”
88% of companies believe
cloud computing will play
a significant role in their IT
infrastructure, and 58%
strongly believe that SaaS
will become the preferred
approach for deploying
applications in their
organization in the future.
Yankee Group’s IT Decision-Maker Survey - March 2013
Taking the Mobile-First Journey
Gone are the days of the fortressed domain of on-premise servers and on-premise applications protected in their legacy shells. As the above example demonstrates, todays information is stored and managed in the cloud, connecting to different systems and services to deliver the right information, on-the-go, to smart devices in a more open, flexible and responsive way.
Enterprise IT teams taking the long-term view know that IT needs to regain control over the new mobile environment but do so in a way that doesn’t stunt the innovation that mobile devices, applications and the cloud can deliver. IT can play a critical role in giving organisations the flexibility to create and outsource whatever apps they need for success, but at the same time manage app access and protect business critical data. Mobile application platforms are bridging that gap, ensuring that organizations can meet the demand for mobile application innovation without having to sacrifice security, scalability or time to market.
This model is helping transform IT departments from being gatekeepers to business enablers. It’s a 360 degree shift for the traditional IT organisation and seems like a lot to ask. However, the new opportunities that cloud, SaaS, smart devices and consumerization offer help accelerate this transformation and elevate IT to a position of mobile champion and a key driver of mobile strategy. Those organizations that can adopt the mobile-first mindset and approach will undoubtedly become the business leaders of the future.
“What is certain is that 2013 will only see the pace of change quicken. The worst thing enterprises can do is to set out with a mindset focused solely on control. The sooner they prioritize determining how best to leverage mobile technologies for impactful business gain, the less consumerization will be a force for confusion—and more one for transformation” Yankee, April 2013
About FeedHenry
FeedHenry provides next generation, cloud-based mobile enterprise application solutions that simplify the development, deployment and management of mobile apps for enterprise. The FeedHenry platform enables development of native, hybrid and HTML5 apps that securely connect to multiple backend systems and supports deployment of server-side code to private, public or hybrid cloud environments. The solution offers IT departments the ability to create, control, measure, adapt and future-proof their mobile business strategies for employees, partners and customers in one place, increasing productivity, connectivity and engagement.
