Right-Time Experiences: Driving Revenue with Mobile and Big Data

Chapter 8Understanding the Components of the Technical Plan: Mobility

What's Part of the Plan?

Business leaders have long focused on operating metrics, such as margin improvement, marketing campaign effectiveness, and time to close. Technology has become a critical component of improving these metrics. It's no longer like electricity, which simply keeps the business operational. It's the foundation for executing new and creative strategies. As I noted in the last chapter, IT and business managers should define a methodology for selecting the appropriate processes and applications to enable mobile. These teams must also define what old and new data sources these processes can access and where that data lives.

To support this, IT should craft a technical plan that supports securing, managing, and developing applications for the new computing landscape that is cloud- and mobile-enabled. It starts with supporting smartphones, tablets, PCs, and the new convertible 2-in-1 computers. However, the Internet of Things will require us to expand our current thinking to include a wide range of connected devices with sensors, such as machinery, medical equipment, and building climate control systems. While there are numerous technical challenges a company must address, a technical enablement strategy should include at least the following three areas:

1. Enterprise mobility management solutions. Security and management tools are commonplace for PCs, and we need a similar set of solutions for ...