iPad Carrying Gorillas

If all you have is a mobile strategy you’ve already failed! This was the slide I led off with in my presentation on Tuesday at the Tab Times Tablet Strategy event. Let’s be fair, everywhere you look you can’t miss some article screaming on how you need a mobile strategy, or a BYOD strategy, or a mobile expense strategy. Every vendor these days has something that can help you to get started with your mobile strategy. The problem is that it’s all a load of bollocks. They have a strategy to sell you a product that in the end probably doesn’t really provide the solution what you’re trying to do anyway.

You don’t even have to look in the industry rags anymore. The number of people who have stopped me in the hall to let me know that what our company really needs is a mobile strategy and they read this great article that they would love to forward to me. If I had a dollar for each time I heard that I would be a very rich man. These are the very same people who will come to you a week later with an iPad that they bought out of money that was in their own budget and ask you what they can do with it.

If just one more person tells me how cool a tablet or a smartphone is and how much it could help the business, because it’s, well, it’s…umm…well, it’s cool. It’s amazing how a tablet the size of a sheet of paper can reduce the vocabulary of some very intelligent people to ‘valley speak’. “Like, you know, if we had the latest (insert the newest tablet here). We could you know, like give them out to like everyone, and they would, like, you know, like use them to, you know do like, cool stuff and that would be rad.” Gag me with a spoon.

Too many people are building mobile strategies for the sake of going mobile. It’s the latest buzzword that fits right in there with Big Data and Cloud, and lest we forget, Social. They really are nice words and go very well with the paradigm shift that someone will preach about from a podium sometime in the next few weeks at whatever internal event you happen to be at. The problem is that that’s all they are, words, not solutions.

It’s time we stopped building mobile strategies in a vacuum. The strategy of your company is quite simple, to do whatever it is your company does, better, faster, and more efficiently so you can make more profit this year than last year. This is your business strategy. Everything else is built around it, including your mobile strategy. You see, it’s not really a stand-alone mobile strategy, it’s a part of your overall business strategy. In some cases, your mobile strategy may be not to go mobile at all because it just doesn’t fit with what your company does.

So, you think you need a mobile strategy. Start it off simply. You begin with your business strategy and you see how technology helps you to enable that strategy. Your end goal with any technology is for it to become invisible. You are enabling behaviors. You want your users to integrate with technology in such a way that you enable them to be more flexible and agile while they become more productive and efficient. They do all this while the technology moves to the background and what they are trying to accomplish is in the foreground.

You don’t start handing out mobile devices because they’re cool. You study people’s behaviors and what they are trying to do. You build use cases around these behaviors and then you fit the technology to the use case. You’re trying to make existing processes more efficient or enable the creation of new processes because you now have tools that allow you to do things that you couldn’t before. That’s how you build your mobile strategy; it’s one of the pillars supporting your business strategy. You build it on the foundation you laid with your company strategy and you use it to fortify business’s ability to achieve those goals. Or, you can just hand out iPads to gorillas like they do at the zoo, they may have fun with them but it doesn’t stop them from flinging their poop.