Why BYOD doesn’t really matter or how I learned to embrace a mobile strategy Part 1

In the last four weeks I have participated in three different twitter chats sponsored by the CITE Conference which I am currently winging my way towards. While all three chats were on different topics they invariably became chats about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and how it is all the rage. If you were an organization you must be doing BYOD (have you seen all the statistics – everyone’s doing it!) and how successful you must be since you were doing it.

Invariably this led me to getting pretty annoyed and replying to any and all that would listen that what they were really talking about was the Consumerization of IT (CoIT) and that while BYOD could be a subset of CoIT it wasn’t necessary. In the all important scheme of things, BYOD is not required or even important for an organization to be successful. What is required is a mobile strategy. When this mobile strategy is done correctly, BYOD is already covered should an organization choose to follow that route.

So, what do you need to have as part of you mobile strategy to be successful. The first thing you should acknowledge is that your end users have become technology consumers and know how to use devices to get tasks done. Their knowledge makes it impossible to treat them as if they are dumb end-users and therefore they need to become part of the process. You can no longer just dictate what technology a user gets and how it can be used or as most IT departments have done in the past how it can’t be used. You need to understand that they have the same if not better technology at home and they are already doing things that you aren’t doing in your organization yet. They’ve learned in many cases to become their own brand through the use of Twitter and Facebook. They already have a smartphone that is connected all the time that allows them to do mobile shopping or price comparisons in the store. They can get their home email wherever they happen to be and they are probably doing some sort of VOIP or teleconferencing although they call it Skype or FaceTime. Once you acknowledge and make it part of your mobile strategy to embrace their abilities you are half way there. The other piece is remembering what you are trying to accomplish.

The truth is, the basic tenet of any successful mobile strategy, regardless of your business, is to give your users/consumers the information that they need, whenever they need it and no matter where they are, and this is the most important piece, the ability to manipulate that information in order to get their task/job done. The rest of your strategy just spells out how you are going to do this.

Notice that what we are really talking about here is the data that an organization owns, for the pharmaceutical sales rep it may be information and presentations on the latest drugs that their company is selling. It might include a digital signature app to capture what samples the doctor is taking. For the car salesman it might be the latest brochures on all the new cars with the technical specs and the ability to look at the current inventory on a lot. For the construction foreperson it may be an app that shows all the current blue prints, supplies on site and deliveries incoming. For the medical laboratory technician it may be the data on the samples they are processing and when each test will finish. In all these cases we are talking data that the user needs as well as the ability to use it. At no point are we talking about the device that the person is using, only what they need to do.

A proper mobile strategy doesn’t care about devices because it will enable all of them from smartphone to tablet to laptop and then eventually desktop. It is a rethinking of the legacy strategies in many companies where it is important to own the device and control  what the user is allowed to access and instead turning the model on its head. It’s looking to enable the user to get their job done easily and efficiently by managing the what, how, and why.