7 Most Critical Questions to Ask When Creating a Mobile Strategy

The 7 Most Critical Questions
to Ask When
Creating a Mobile Strategy
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?
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Early this year, Gartner released a report ﬁnding that
mobile technology is the number-two priority for CIOs,
trailing only business intelligence and analytics. Oddly
enough, this recognition of mobile’s impact hasn’t yielded
a lot of strategy development. An enterprise mobility study
by Jack Gold found that fewer than a quarter of respon-
dents have a strategy in place, “leaving the rest with a
hodgepodge of procedures that are often costly and incon-
sistent.”
The reality is that for all the time and money enterprises
are pumping into mobile, a relative few have stepped back
and put into place a high-level strategy. That’s a big risk.
Forging ahead without a strategic framework that cuts
across business units and involves all the relevant stake-
holders means that enterprises are risking delays, redun-
dant costs, poor integration and, perhaps worst of all, bad
mobile experiences for employees and consumers.
To do our part in helping to change this, we’ve created an
eBook that looks at seven questions an enterprise must
ask itself as it creates a mobile strategy. While there could
have easily been 70 questions, or even 700, we’ve avoided
listing those to which the answer is: “It depends.” That
means we haven’t gone deep into big issues like which
platforms you should develop for, which security pro-
cesses and tools you should use or which vendors you
should work with. Instead, we’ve focused on topics like
organizational models, app deployment, and, of course,
BYOD. At the eBook’s conclusion is a list of links to
resources that will provide deeper dives on many of these
topics.
The 7 Most Critical Questions to Ask When Creating a Mobile Strategy
1

Over a year ago Forrester grabbed a lot of headlines when
it suggested that enterprises meet the rising tide of mobile
with a dramatic organizational change: the creation of a
chief mobility officer. This executive would be charged with
coordinating efforts on an enterprise-wide basis. Unfortu-
nately, that role has yet to materialize at scale, leaving
most organizations with a ton of work to do when it comes
to figuring out how to organize for mobile. While responsi-
bility for enterprise mobility typically falls to the CIO (or in
some cases the CTO), there is no one-size-fits-all approach
because mobile touches so many different areas – across
internal IT functions and beyond the department. Many
companies have responded by either putting no structure
in place or simply leaving it to individual business units to
2
Who’s on your mobile team?
CMO
CIO
VP Sales
Legal
1

hash out their own strategies and processes, potentially
resulting in big inconsistencies. A recent study from IDC
found that less than 5% of global enterprises have a dedi-
cated team to marshal the company’s mobile strategy
forward. It’s an almost unbelievably small number. The
widespread lack of dedicated mobile strategy teams is
contributing to a host of inefficiencies, from redundant
costs to wasted time.
It’s been clear for some time that a collaborative approach
is necessary, but if you
think that means enter-
prises have been fast in
creating the cross-
functional teams that can
properly advance mobile,
think again. Yankee
Group’s IT Decision-Maker
March survey shows that
lines of business impact
their company’s mobile
strategy in no more than 30% of companies. “Business
benefits will only come from greater cross-business orga-
nizational collaboration and the development of collective
competencies,” writes Yankee Group analyst Chris Marsh.
What kind of team an organization needs depends on a
number of factors, from its size to how central mobile is to
the business. For some companies, a steering committee
will do. Mobile-first or mobile-mature companies will need
to make a bigger organizational commitment.
“less than 5% of
global enterprises
have a dedicated
team to marshal
the company’s
mobile strategy
forward”
3
Click to tweet

IDC, along with firms like SAP and Forrester, have been
calling for the Center of Excellence Model, which is essen-
tially business-speak for what ReadWrite Mobile Editor
Dan Rowinski calls “a group of knowledgeable people that
have the requisite skills and resources to handle mobile
solutions quickly and efficiently.”
He writes, “These people need to have power to make
decisions, well-defined jobs that give them autonomy they
need get things done. Enabling a group within your IT
infrastructure to handle
[all] mobile problems
could actually create
competitive advantage for
many companies.”
But this team shouldn’t be
composed just of IT folks.
A properly constructed
Center of Excellence
might be anywhere from
a few dozen to a couple hundred person group expert in
everything from project management to design. Creating
and executing a mobility strategy isn’t just about solving
technical issues. There are also business process and
governance issues in play, requiring line of business,
human resources, finance and legal departments to be
included throughout the development process, not just at
the end.
Once established, the center will be responsible for a wide
variety of tasks, from inventorying ongoing mobile projects
“Creating and
executing a
mobility strategy
isn’t just about
solving technical
issues.”
4
Click to tweet

and vendor relationships, to sharing best practices, to
maintaining a high standard of user experience, to setting
policy on issues like BYOD and BYOA, to entrenching a
business-outcome mindset when it comes to mobile. It will
set guidance for key questions about what apps get devel-
oped, whether they should be developed in-house or by
an outside partner, and how those apps are deployed.
Sometimes it will even be responsible for getting those
apps out the door.
The exact ﬂavor of a Center of Excellence will vary by
organization, but the universal goal is to drive collabora-
tion between business and IT and entrench a business-
outcome-oriented mindset when it comes to mobile. Given
the exponential growth of mobile, going through the drill
of creating a business case for a mobile strategy may seem
completely unnecessary. After all, how else can a company
reach all those people staring at their iPhones and Android
handsets? But the reality is that before getting into specif-
ics you need to do a few things to establish overarching
goals for your particular business. In other words, enter-
prise mobility needs to be about more than “just” improv-
ing productivity and cutting costs. It must also drive
business objectives like time to market, employee and
customer satisfaction levels, as well as sales growth and
margins.
5

The historic rap against IT is that it’s more focused on its
own backlog than on shaping experiences that truly reso-
nate with users, whether consumers or a workforce. In the
mobile age, that’s just not acceptable. As Ovum analyst
Richard Absalom has written, “every employee is first and
foremost a consumer. It makes no sense to have a policy
that doesn’t acknowledge and include the input of the very
people that are necessitating its existence in the first place
– keeping them out of the loop is more likely to end with
people bypassing IT policies to find their own (probably
insecure) way of working; one of the primary drivers of
BYOD in the first place.”
6
Are you employee-centric?
Corp.
The 7 Most Critical Questions to Ask When Creating a Mobile StrategyThe 7 Most Critical Questions to Ask When Creating a Mobile Strategy
2

But being employee-centric isn’t simply about having an
ultraliberal BYOD strategy. It’s keeping your employees top
of mind in the strategy development and knowing how
mobility impacts them. And it’s about cultivating a deep
understanding of how your employees can beneﬁt from
the mobility strategy that you’re putting in place. In short,
an employee-centric mobility strategy isn’t created in a
vacuum but with the input of the people who will live out
that strategy.
It begins with understanding what your employees are
already doing in mobile. You should have data on what
devices and apps they’re
actually using comple-
mented by a sense of
what they want and need.
What does their wish list
look like? How are they
responding to current
company policies or lack
thereof? Are they aware
of the current BYOD
policy, for instance? Field
research here is key in order to understand how employ-
ees interact with their mobile devices in a business setting.
Once the data is in hand, the question becomes: What do
you want them to be able to do? This is a question that
should be answered in very speciﬁc use cases that might
vary by role. For salespeople it might be about better
access to the CRM system. For an executive, it might mean
mobile access to dashboards with performance metrics.
“Being employee-
centric isn’t simply
about having an
ultraliberal BYOD
strategy”
Click to tweet
8

Once the functional requirements are set, careful thought
needs to be given to smart design. The Australian intranet
designer James Robertson has written: “Enterprise soft-
ware applications aren’t designed. At best they’re devel-
oped, but often they’re just built.” His point is that when
the end-user is an employee, form often takes a backseat
to functionality and user experience isn’t even a
consideration.
Happily, mobile enterprise apps have the potential to be
quite diﬀerent, thanks to the high bar set by so many
consumer applications. People now expect intuitive design
whether they’re acting as employees or acting as consum-
ers. It’s up to the enterprise to give it to them. To do so,
enterprise app development teams have to avoid an “it’s
only about the backend” mentality and also think hard
about how to develop simple, elegant and even beautiful
interfaces. Not that it stops with the interface. The user
experience, after all, is broader than that and includes
everything from onboarding to updates - and all of that
has to be incorporated into UX philosophy.
9

When it comes to setting the pace of innovation, there are
two distinct camps in the mobile world. On one hand you
have the folks who dwell at large enterprises. Having
grown up with SAP, Siebel, Red Hat, and IBM, they are
conservative and security-obsessed, wading slowly into
new and uncomfortable territories, like cloud computing.
On the other, you have the TechCrunch-reading startup
culture that’s all about moving fast and “breaking things,”
denting the universe and all that.
Who’s right? The answer isn’t as straightforward as you
might think.
10
Is your organization moving fast enough?
fast
but
dangerous
safe
but
slow
3

“Sometimes speed is an asset,” said Greg Raiz, founder
and CEO of Raizlabs. “Sometimes it’s a detriment.”
With enterprise mobility, there is risk that goes along with
adopting the new, which can be easier to absorb for a
younger or smaller company. Jumping on every new trend
or flinching at every new announcement from a platform
player can lead an enterprise down the wrong paths.
A wait-and-see approach can act as a filter. “If they jump
on everything that’s new, they risk jumping on the wrong
thing,” said Raiz, adding that he’s seen that with BlackBerry
recently. Its new Black-
Berry 10 phone coupled
with a name change has
made a lot of noise in the
press and stoked the
curiosity of mobile folks at
enterprises.
Said Raiz, “Because they
have some weight with
enterprises, some compa-
nies are saying maybe we should stay with our BlackBerry
infrastructure that’s now crumbling and five years old.”
This isn’t an argument for dragging your feet as the world
around you changes, but rather it is a reminder that a little
bit of conservatism is ok. In other words, if in setting your
mobile strategy you’re going to drink the Silicon Valley
Kool-Aid, it’s ok to water it down a bit.
“If in setting your
mobile strategy
you’re going to
drink the Silicon
Valley Kool-Aid, it’s
ok to water it
down a bit.”
Click to tweet
11

Probably the biggest question facing the mobile enterprise
over the past several years is BYOD. The introduction of
the iPhone, which ﬁnally gave workers better technology
from their personal device than they were getting from
their employer-issued BlackBerrys, opened up a Pandora’s
box for IT managers. BYOD has been on the lips of IT
leaders for years now, though there is a lot of confusion
around the rate of adoption. Depending on the source,
anywhere between one-third and 80% of enterprises
already support BYOD. That’s a huge spread that shows
just how little we really know about the popularity of the
trend.
12
Do you still need to establish a BYOD policy?
BYOD
Employer
Provided
Employer
Provided
?
4

But regardless of where it is now, most forecasts tell us it’s
here to stay. Gartner predicts that by 2017 half of employ-
ers will require employees to bring their own devices. Note
the word “require.” If Gartner is right, that turns BYOD
from optional to mandatory for an awful lot of people.
Strangely enough, the perceived inevitability of BYOD
hasn’t resulted in a lot of policy making. According to a
survey from the Computer Technology Industry Associa-
tion, only 24 percent of companies have a formal policy in
place. The good news is
that more and more
companies are recogniz-
ing the need. The number
of companies planning to
put a policy in place
doubled to 40 percent
over the past year,
according to CTIA.
Is it worth writing a BYOD
policy if you don’t have one by now? It’s important to note
that establishing a policy isn’t the same as supporting
BYOD. For those companies that generally say “no” to
BYOD, it’s still important to lay out in formal terms
whether there are any individual-liable devices that are
approved and, if so, which ones and under what kinds of
constraints.
For the growing number of companies that do support
BYOD, important questions include: What devices are
supported and how is this communicated to employees?
“The [BYOD] policy
also needs to spell
out the user’s
expectations to
privacy”
Click to tweet
13

What security processes need to be put in place? What’s
the reimbursement policy?
The policy also needs to spell out the user’s expectations
to privacy. While it may be tempting to create a policy
that’s more enterprise-friendly, it’s important to balance
the employee’s rights against the company’s. After all, the
spirit of BYOD is about giving employees freedom, not
entangling them in onerous legal agreements.
14

The rather simple assumption has been that if employees
are bringing their own devices, then companies aren’t
paying for those devices – yeilding instant savings. Over
several years of BYOD, however, reality has proven to be
more complex.
In an interview last year with the MIT Technology Review,
IBM’s CIO Jeanette Horan said that BYOD hasn’t saved the
company any money and has caused a number of security
challenges. Employee phones need to be reconﬁgured so
memory can be erased remotely and so iCloud and other
public ﬁle-transfer programs are disabled. “IBM even turns
15
Are BYOD-driven cost savings
and security guaranteed?
BYOD
$
!
5

off Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant, on employ-
ees’ iPhones,” the article noted. “The company worries that
the spoken queries, which are uploaded to Apple servers,
could ultimately reveal sensitive information.”
Moreover, there are many hidden costs of BYOD that you
will find if you, well, simply Google “hidden costs of BYOD.”
To sum up, though, Aberdeen Group has found that an
enterprise with more than one thousand BYOD mobile
devices will spend an average of $170,000 more per year
than a company with corporate-procured, corporate liable
devices. Why? There are a
lot of additional costs,
from the vagaries of
carrier billing, to an
increase in the processing
of expense reports for
reimbursement, to secu-
rity.
This doesn’t necessarily
amount to an argument
against BYOD. After all, embracing consumerization brings
other benefits besides cost-saving — productivity,
employee satisfaction and the like. Just a little research,
however, does throw a bucket of cold water on the over-
simplified argument that adopting BYOD is all about
pushing the costs of mobility on to your employee.
“Embracing
consumerization
brings other
benefits besides
cost-saving”
Click to tweet
16

In the past year or so, a new acronym has started to rival
BYOD as the buzzword du jour: COPE. It stands for Corpo-
rate Owned Personally Enabled, and is meant to be a
compromise between the security beneﬁts of command-
and-control IT and the freedom that many employees
yearn for.
Here’s how it works: The company provides the employee
with the mobile device of his or her choice. Then, it ﬂips
the script on the security issues we’re accustomed to with
BYOD. Instead of worrying about securing company data
on personal devices, a crucial challenge of BYOD, COPE
allows employees to have their own personal apps and
data on their work device. Wrote Philippe Winthrop,
17
Should you COPE?
Corp
6
X

VP-corporate strategy at Veliq, in a 2012 article: “The
device (and the corporate data that resides on it) is fully
managed and controlled, but also allows for employees to
install the apps they like for their personal use. We
already see this in many organizations where employees
are installing their favorite media players and their music
or personal photos on their laptops … so why not extend
that to the other mobile devices?”
Even while it gives employees more freedom to personal-
ize their mobile devices, COPE yields advantages in the
security department that are reminiscent of pre-BYOD
days. Because it owns the device, the company can wipe it
or disallow access to the network.
In his article, Winthrop anticipated the objection that COPE
doesn’t give you the cost-cutting benefits that BYOD does,
arguing that BYOD’s cost savings only really kick in when
the employee pays for the device and the plan. But, Win-
throp argues, “Too often I see companies fully reimburse
the price of the device, or the service plans or make
employees fill out a reimbursement form to get their
monthly stipend. There are zero economies of scale in
these scenarios that truly provide long term cost savings to
the organization. On the flip side, through savvy Wireless
Expense Management, organizations leveraging the COPE
model could negotiate great contracts with the wireless
carriers to get steep discounts on devices, upgrades, as
well as voice, data and messaging plans.”
Since this article was published, COPE has caught the
attention of many analysts and journalists and has
18

certainly stirred up debate. It’s less clear how viable it is as
an applicable policy. Hamstringing the adoption of COPE is
the widespread belief that the growth of BYOD is inevi-
table, not to mention the lack of publicly-available data
detailing the cost and eﬃcacy of COPE strategies. At this
point, it’s probably one more tool for the toolbox, perhaps
worth testing with a subset of employees, and a question
worth asking as part of a comprehensive mobile strategy.
19

If BYOD has meant a loss of control for IT departments,
then the BYOA phenomenon may oﬀer an opportunity to
take some control. Bring-your-own-apps raises many of
the same issues that bring-your-own-device does, espe-
cially around security. The diﬀerence when it comes to
apps is that the horse isn’t yet out of the barn. While
employees are pretty much already using whatever device
suits them, CIOs can still get their hands around the app
challenges. As a result, expect more enterprises to develop
their own corporate app stores that allow them to manage
and distribute approved applications to their employees.
By 2017, about one-quarter of enterprises will have their
own corporate app stores, according to a recent forecast
by Gartner.
Do you need a corporate “app store”?
corp
app
store
7
20

Why not just allow employees to get their business apps
from stores run by Apple, Google, Microsoft or BlackBerry?
There are a few key benefits that come from tending your
own store. Assuming that proper vetting processes are in
place, there’s little chance of employees downloading
applications that put the enterprise in jeopardy. The
second benefit goes to procurement practices. In an
owned app store, the number of software licenses in use
can be limited, potentially saving a lot of money. It’s also
possible to exercise granular control over who has access
to what version of what app, ensuring that employees
have access only to the programs they need. Finally,
enterprise app stores can open up access to smaller devel-
opment shops and, thanks to all the feedback available,
prompt more competition among development teams to
deliver the most popular or effective apps.
An enterprise app store won’t be for everyone. Indeed,
Gartner’s prediction of 25% is relatively modest given the
overall growth of enterprise mobility. Building one can be
costly and the group of vendors who offer them is small
but growing. Gartner pointed out that mobile device man-
agement (or MDM) vendors are increasingly offering app
store support.
Among the key challenges in managing an enterprise app
store are ensuring that it’s just as user-friendly as the
public stores employees are used to and making sure that
it’s chock-full of choice. While control is important, it’s also
crucial for IT departments not to go overboard on limiting
22

the software choices that are available. An enterprise app
store puts the company in the role of curator, not dictator.
“Without a dynamic selection of apps to choose from,
users will eventually have little reason to continue to visit
an enterprise app store,” wrote Gartner. “A dramatic
increase in the app options available to internal stakehold-
ers is a precondition of any successful enterprise app
store.”
Intel, which has a very liberal BYOD policy, oﬀers more
than 80 apps and allows employees to download from
public stores as well. SAP oﬀers apps developed both
in-house and from outside. It will link to apps that are
popular among employees but aren’t stocked in the store.
23

24
CIO magazine’s Strategic Guide to BYOD offers a very
comprehensive look at how to shape up your device
policy.
http://www.cio.com/documents/pdfs/ebook4-BYOD-final.pdf
And its interview with attorney Matt Karlyn is also
informative, as he narrates the pitfalls of BYOD poli-
cies.
http://www.cio.com/article/732665/How_to_Craft_the_Best_BYOD_
Policy
For those in the market for a mobility service pro-
vider, Forrester’s recent Wave report surveys the
playing field.
http://www.forrester.com/pimages/rws/reprints/document/87581/
oid/1-LTEQDU
SAP has published a useful paper on best practices
for setting up a Mobility Center of Excellence:
http://blogs.sap.com/wp-
-content/blogs.dir/15/files/2012/02/MobileSense_Mobility_COE_whi
tepaper.pd
As has Forrester:
http://www.xtopoly.com/blog/pdf/Forrester_Your_Company_Needs
_A_Mobile_Organization_Courtesy.pdf
Here are some resources that will
help you create your mobile
strategy

About the Author
Matt Creamer is a writer and editor based in New York
City. He has written for Ad Age, where he is editor at large,
The Awl, The Atlantic, the New York Daily News, The New
York Observer and other publications. Matt wrote a previ-
ous Kinvey eBook titled, “CIO vs. CMO in the War for
Mobile”. He tweets at @matt_creamer.
What is Kinvey? Kinvey makes a fully-featured Backend as a
Service solution, oﬀering 3rd party data integrations, multi-
platform support, push notiﬁcations, and custom business logic on
a platform where it's free to get started and you only pay when
your app is successful.
Build your backend todayBuild your backend today
Project Manager
Kelly Rice - @kellyrice88
Designer
Jake McKibben - @ez_Jake_oven

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