Do You Need A Mobile Ecosystem?

No matter what you read these days when it comes to mobility in the enterprise there always seems to be a section on building your mobile ecosystem. Usually your reading something about bringing mobile devices into an enterprise/corporation and this leads to a discussion on creating a mobile strategy. Part of this mobile strategy that you are told you have to build requires that you create a mobile ecosystem for your devices to play in. You start off small and gradually build your mobile ecosystem until you are creating applications for your devices and then you slowly expand the ecosystem to handle a heterogeneous mix of devices.

Let’s just cut the bullshit and get straight to the point. People who are trying to sell you on building a mobile ecosystem are doing just that; they’re selling you on something. Now, unless you have been out back smoking something you shouldn’t have, you already realized by the third slide of marketecture that whatever they’re selling is probably something you don’t want (the first slide of marketecture is the obligatory one with a minimum of 20 corporate logos of companies they are already working with – gives them legitimacy, not).

The problem with these folks who have at least one product, or possibly a whole system, that will make building your mobile ecosystem easier, faster, and less costly is basically it’s just a shortcut to whatever they think you are trying to achieve. You know what happens when you take shortcuts don’t you?

So, why am I calling a mobile ecosystem a big pile of cow patties? It’s really very simple, the goal when you introduce mobile into your enterprise is not to create a mobile ecosystem around your devices and apps. The goal is to get your mobile devices to play in the enterprise ecosystem that has been there the whole time. There is no need to reinvent the wheel that your organization has been building for the last 5, 10, 50 or 100 years. When you bring mobile into the enterprise you don’t go and find a new expense system. You find a way to build/buy an app that integrates with your expense system without being a crapplication. You figure out ways that you can integrate with your enterprise portals, your document repositories and your data so that you enable your users to be able to do their job the best way possible. You are extending your enterprise ecosystem to allow your employees to be more productive.

I had a conversation at work today about a bunch of different products that create a corporate Dropbox experience. They would replicate the same style of file sharing as Dropbox or any of its competitors like Box or SugarSync but in a secured corporate environment. This is a great idea and one I even subscribed to not to long ago. The issue though is that by creating a new experience for sharing files, you have moved outside of your existing corporate ecosystem and now need to spend a lot of time and money architecting a new system, buying hardware (or going with a cloud), tuning that system, creating a new permissioning infrastructure and lest we forget, crafting new rules about what data can go there, how you access it and the legal ramifications behind it. The better way to do this is to create a way to access the already existing Sharepoint systems, shared folders and personal folders that your users are comfortable with. You have already built/purchased the infrastructure to do this and spent time creating the rules, putting the ACLs out there and generally creating a system that has served you well up to this point. Why create a new system that will sit beside your original one and bring its own set of headaches. Let’s be clear, when I say create a way to access a system this also means you can purchase it as well.

I have already talked about in some of my recent posts how you should go about creating apps for your enterprise. It’s as simple as knowing your business objective, what data you want to access, figuring out how you’re going to access it (API), and who needs to access it (identity). The important part here is understanding that you are using your own data and through the process of creating your apps you are delivering information to your users. You are opening your enterprise ecosystem to your mobile workforce; you aren’t creating a brand new mobile ecosystem.

In the end, you are simply extending your enterprise ecosystem to encompass mobile devices, which eventually leads to transforming the enterprise ecosystem into the next stage of its evolution. Some people refer to this as mobile first or mobile 2.0, but it is just a strategy to moving forward with IT that may end up being the subject of my next blog post.