We question the real meaning of enterprise mobility and ask why the much-heralded business revolution by mobile technology hasn't really arrived...
These days it seems that every piece of IT that wasn’t already moving is going mobile. You can now install a complete SAP financials system on your BlackBerry; implement a data warehouse on your Nokia; and model global climate changes on your Palm. Maybe.
'Enterprise mobility' – everybody's talking about it, but what is it?
‘Enterprise mobility’ is a heavily overloaded term. At one end of the spectrum it can mean enabling the basics of office automation (such as email or your calendar) on mobile devices like PDAs and phones. At the other end, it could refer to a sophisticated, business-critical mobile application that enables complete transformation of a business process. So my first bugbear is that all too often the term ‘enterprise mobility’ is bandied around with no clear qualification. Mobile access to intranet and email should be a given these days – if you think you need it but haven’t already got it, then your IT department is probably wondering why their punched cards don’t fit into the DVD slot. Basic mobile email and calendar (à la BlackBerry/Windows Mobile) is a start but is far removed from the real prize: genuine revolution of core business processes – doing things on the move that were simply impossible before the enabling mobile technology came along.
So are all these enterprise software vendors a help or a hindrance?
On real enterprise mobility – genuine re-engineering of business processes enabled by mobile technology – my second bugbear concerns the lack of focus on common mobile infrastructure. The enterprise software vendors have been keen to jump on the mobile bandwagon through portable additions to their existing tools. So, for example, SAP has SAP Mobile, Siebel has Siebel Field Service/Sales, Oracle has Oracle Mobile Field Service, Windows has Windows Mobile, BlackBerry has its proprietary infrastructure… and so on. It’s great that each vendor is recognising the opportunities of mobility and making their separate advances, but typically an end-to-end business process that involves a mobile workforce will touch systems from more than one vendor.
“It’s the infrastructure, stupid!”
In essence, my assertion is that all mobile business applications should share a great deal of common ground – to misquote political strategist James Carville, “It’s the infrastructure, stupid!” For example, most enterprise-quality mobile applications need features to handle intermittent connectivity (to cater for patchy mobile network coverage), data synchronisation and wireless security. Applications also need features to manage their support on mobile devices. In an ideal world, all these ‘common ground’ problems would be solved by a consistent, standards-based, robust enterprise mobile infrastructure. At the moment, each mobile application re-invents the wheel (or the ‘push messaging architecture’, to be more precise). It was the same situation 20 years ago, before desktops converged on Windows or networks converged on IP. In train-spotting terms, Oracle is running on diesel, SAP has a live third rail, Microsoft is using overhead lines – and most businesses are still running on steam…
Is there salvation in standardisation?
In time, standardised mobile infrastructure is likely to be something we just take for granted. Whether this is achieved through collaborative effort or Microsoft-style market domination, only time will tell. Meanwhile, the benefits on offer mean that organisations will – quite rightly – forge ahead anyway, despite the risks of higher integration effort or inadvertently investing in whatever turns out to be the Betamax of mobile technology. Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox now and get back to my day job – delivering a $30m global business transformation project. On my pager.