Smart Ideas and Enterprise Mobility

The late Colonel John Boyd (a leading 20th century military strategist) taught that a successful campaign or mission requires three distinct things:

1. Smart people
2. Smart ideas/strategies
3. Smart things (technologies)

Boyd also taught that the order of the items in the list was important.  Smart things (technologies) was last.

For the purpose of this article let's assume we have smart people and discuss point #2 - smart ideas and strategies.  To get started, let's explore some numbers from my recent survey:

• 41.6% of survey respondents plan to deploy more than 6 enterprise mobility applications in the next year.
• 78.6% of survey respondents will be integrating with multiple back end systems.
• 51.3% have no mobility policy in place.
• 39.8% of companies have a strategic enterprise mobility plan in place, the rest do not.

We can see from these survey results that there are going to be many enterprise mobility applications, integrated with many back end systems, and there is a great need for policies and strategic planning around enterprise mobility.

In order to make smart choices about things (mobile frameworks, mobile infrastructures, mobile architectures and mobile applications), it is first necessary to have smart people and smart ideas/strategies.  Companies need an enterprise mobility strategy in place in order to know what is the required "smart things" or smart technology choices to make.

I spent several days working with a utility client recently on mobile strategies.  We explored what the company was wanting to accomplish, and how they wanted to accomplish their goals.  Once their strategy was understood and documented, finding the right mobile technologies to support it was not difficult.

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst, SAP Mentor Volunteer

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Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.