Over the course of my time running this blog, as well as my time as a research analyst covering the space of enterprise mobility, I have had the pleasure of meeting scores of companies and hundreds of people who are as passionate as I am about what mobility can do for the enterprise. One of those organizations is a Canadian company called Analystik.
The team over at Analystik reached out to me to see if we could start a little debate around productivity gains from enterprise mobility. A ping pong match if you will. Now sure, they might speak a funny kind of French over there (sorry, being born in Paris, I just couldn't help myself), but I'm always game to debate the merits of enterprise mobility. So here it goes...
Last week, Analystik posted this blog entry en Francais. Parlez-vous Francais? Non? Well, here's a Google translation for you.
The folks at Analystik make some interesting points, but (obviously) I need to challenge many of them. They start off by talking about the role of the CIO. So first of all, only a small portion of all the organizations in this world actually have a CIO. Sure, a CIO per se will exist primarily in large enterprises, but let's even think about the concept of the CIO. Heads of IT still predominantly run the tech side of the company, and are NOT involved anywhere near as much as they should in the BUSINESS side of life. This whole concept has been well document in the ITIL framework, as well as the concept of IT Service Management (ITSM). That said, it doesn't happen anywhere near as frequently as it should. Also, there's a difference between IT supporting the business decision making process and IT making business decisions (don't get me started on that front).
Analystik is correct though to point out that mobility tools are not yet well integrated into IT. Part of the blame is due to the fact that so many people bring their own devices into the enterprise - call it the consumerization of enterprise mobility. This is a HUGE problem as far as I am concerned. I'm one of those who believe that organizations should be providing their employees the devices that have been approved for corporate use. This is part of Wireless Expense Management 101 (and Enterprise Mobility Management for that matter). If companies aren't willing to create these white lists, then at the very least, they should have a black list of what can and can not connect to data behind the firewall.
So this brings me to my major qualm in their piece. Why is IT still developing the metrics that are used to gauge the success of a mobility deployment? If these devices are billed as providing productivity gains for corporations, there is (typically) way more non-IT staff than folks in the IT department. The line of business people should be the ones determining what the appropriate business metrics are....hell, they're the ones who most likely are asking for the mobile devices and applications (beyond just email and calendaring) in the first place!
If you believe in the business benefits that mobility solutions can provide an enterprise (or even a small business for that matter), then you should have the business people figure that out IN CONJUNCTION WITH the IT department. This is IT Service Management....where the IT department, as Wikipedia puts it, is "philosophically centered on the customer's perspective of IT's contribution to the business." The faster organizations can look at how mobility is more about the business value than the technology impact (which I am not neglecting), the faster will mobility help deliver on those promises.
Think about it...
