Learn Internally and Scale Externally
Don’t wait until Prom Night to learn how to dance. Transform your enterprise dev teams to extend their love of web-based apps into mobile-web. Enable them to prototype internally focused mobile productivity apps to delight their business counterparts as well as decision making executives. Show your CFO that in-house mobile web capabilities prevents vendor lock-in and lowers overall product delivery timelines.
Modus Perspective
We continue to see a huge client demand for “Man-in-the-field” apps as well as enterprise collaboration platforms that leverage mobile web and hybrid apps to increase employee productivity. Additionally, we see lots of executive interest in tablet friendly data visualization and reporting apps to deliver real-time enterprise monitoring.
Borrow Strength: Study The ‘First Wave CIOs & CTOs’
If you’ve been in wait-and-see mode because your core business was not immediately disrupted by mobile apps and/or devices, learn from those who’s business was. Product R&D from 2007-2012 teaches many lessons.
- Build platforms, not just products – APIs pay dividends internally (standardizing product development) and externally (enabling partnerships)
- Build device appropriate experiences – If you still think you’re going to shrink your web app to fit on mobile, STOP READING and go turn in your badge now.
Modus Perspective
Also recognize that some of the best insights are to be found right under your nose. Consider yourself out of touch with mobile? Take that recent college hire out to lunch and chat about what companies and apps they think are in your corporate blindspot.
Know When to Pull the Trigger
If you are competing with other ‘second wave’ CIOs then know they are coming online quickly in 2013. Second wave CIOs could afford to be more cautious and learn from others’ successes and mistakes. Implicitly or explicitly, they are increasingly deciding that market conditions are mature enough to engage mobile as the core IT portfolio strategy.
Macro trends indicate the Enterprise Mobile ‘Sophistication Index’ is Rising:
Business Models are Transforming – Budgets are realigning from a maintainance cycle to an innovation cycle. Similar to Cloud adoption, Mobile has evolved from scary to revenue multiplier.
Organizational Redesigns are Happening – while head count and budgets may have been cut or are migrating internally, the reality is smaller teams are more productive than ever via agile management, better software frameworks, and more engaged business peers.
Lean Product Development has Arrived – the old model for software product development is quickly dying and being replaced by quicker release cycles and tighter feedback loops.
Modus Perspective
Identify and understand what is driving the pace of your product teams. To make the pivot, do you need to first slow down and retrain or are market forces demanding you accelerate go-to-market delivery?
