Something gets in your way, Turn!

I sat down to write a blog post tonight and wasn’t sure what to write about so I ended up putting on a movie I hadn’t seen in a while, the 1985 Savage Steve Holland masterpiece with John Cusack, ‘Better Off Dead’. If “I want my two dollars!” doesn’t bring back memories, flip it to the top of your queue and have some fun. Now, while I could write an entire blog post about the movie I figured I would use it to talk a little bit about strategy, not just mobile strategy but really just basic strategy.

I’ve mentioned many times that you can’t have just a mobile strategy. You need to have a mobile strategy that is part of your business strategy; it really is just a component, part of the journey, not the destination. Lots of businesses right now are trying to figure out how to go mobile. They currently are in a situation where they may have some blackberries, a few executives may have iPhone or Androids, but they have no clear-cut idea where they’re going. It certainly doesn’t help that everywhere they look, all they see are headlines saying that they have to go mobile or risk failure or worse. (What is worse than failure?). You can’t look at the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Business Week or any other periodical without running into quotes from Gartner, Forrester or the like on how critical mobile is to the success of today’s businesses. It doesn’t help them that every consultancy on the planet is calling them to help them figure out mobile (let’s not leave out cloud and big data too.)

What do you do if you’re a company and you don’t have any idea what to do about mobile? You can start asking around or read the reports and white papers that are out there intertubes. Buzz words start flying at you (and mobile seems to have more buzz words than anyone at the moment) MDM, MAM, MIM, EMM, BYOD, COPE, RTE, MEAP, MDAP, HTML5, Native, Hybrid APPS and of course my favorite Crapplications. Everyone has advice and you have no idea how to even dip your toe into the water.

Let’s make it easy. First you figure out what the business is trying to accomplish. What are their needs? You then try and figure out how you are going to meet those needs. Too many people start with an IT problem as opposed to a business problem. Once you figure out what business you’re in, and unless you are in that minority, your business isn’t IT, you then figure out how you are going to meet those needs. Not just from a mobile perspective but taking in your whole ecosystem, how do you do it. Chances are you are going to need to access data that you already have collected, and you’re going to have to deliver it to your businesses user in a manner that they can act on it. It could be sitting at a desk or it could be out in the field somewhere. There may be a PC solution and a mobile solution. The end strategy though, is to enable the business to get their job done in the most efficient and productive manner that allows the entire enterprise to grow and profit.

So how does this all relate to ‘Better Off Dead’? When you get started on your mobile journey, and start building the pathways that allow you to execute your strategy, you need to pick a direction. It doesn’t really matter how you do it (some will disagree here) but make a decision on the direction and started heading that way. If you find yourself hitting an obstacle, then make a decision and change direction. In the immortal words of Charles Del Mar and Monique Junot in reply to Lane Meyer’s question of “How am I suppose to live through this?” “All you have to do is go that way really fast and if something gets in your way turn?”