Having a theme is good, but putting that theme into action is much better.  This post offers a simple tool for assessing the degree to which technology amplifies the enterprise.  The tool is a simple matrix, shown below, consisting of four parts.

• The business strategies your organization is pursuing.  These make up the row and column headers of the matrix.
• The technologies your organization will use in executing these strategies.  These make up the diagonal cells, shown in black in the figure below.
• The amplifiers that represent the direction and guidance needed to achieve the strategies.
• The distortions representing decisions, approaches or direction that will detract from the strategy

These are organized into a matrix that provides a quick view on the connections between strategies, technologies, amplifiers and distortions.  This matrix is a little different in that it concentrates on the relationships between strategies rather than between strategy and technologies or projects.  This view is deliberate and helps highlight the interdependences among the various elements rather than trying to isolate one aspect against another.

Creating the matrix involves the following steps:

Start with the business strategies and use them to populate the row and column headings.  Because you are looking for business results, you need a matrix that takes strategies and compares them against other strategies. This is important as amplifying the enterprise involves achieving strategic objectives in combination rather than isolation, particularly in terms of the use of technologies like mobile, cloud, analytics and social.

Next put the key technologies into the diagonal cells to connect technologies with specific strategies. Focus on the technologies that you expect to have the greatest impact on the strategy.  Just the vital few so that it is easy to see why you are investing and paying attention to a particular technology.

Now in the white areas describe the amplifiers or the things you need to do to accelerate achieving both strategies. Remember amplification is strategy in combination, so what are the things you have to get right in order to achieve two strategies, particularly in the context of the technology.  Avoid listing the projects, programs or completion of tasks in these areas.  You already have ways to manage that and besides saying “complete the implementation of mobility solutions,” says nothing about the qualitative aspects of doing that right.

Next, in the red areas list the things you need to avoid, the actions, directions of mindsets that hold back results.  These are the distortions that hold back your strategy.  Focus on the things that inhibit the various strategy combinations.  Do not list ‘doing a poor job’ as a distortion as that is obvious.

Finally, look at the cell values and ask yourself if the amplifiers look right, the distortions capture the things you might get wrong and can you explain how the technologies contribute to the strategies, enhance the amplifiers and will eliminate the distortions.

The figure below provides a worked example of the tool based on the top three business strategies found in the 2012 CIO Survey.

Creating an enterprise amplifier involves more than building the right technology.  It requires executing the combination of strategies and technologies in the right way.  The information in the amplifiers cells seeks to capture that information as well as the distortions to avoid.  Taken together, this single simple matrix provides a way to look at the interaction among strategies, technologies, amplifiers and distortions that represent the interconnected nature and complexity of an operating enterprise.

I would suggest creating this tool as guidance for strategy planning, execution and ongoing management processes to keep everyone focused on the same result – amplifying the enterprise.

Really?

I had the honor of reviewing a transformation program and providing a health check.  The program is ambitious; technology intensive, process demanding, and can truly redefine the rules of the industry.  But there is a catch, the transformation program had progressed to a point where it had raised serious business issues, but the program and its sponsor did not have the authority to answer.

Sitting at this crossroads, the teams did what they could, keeping busy until there was a decision from the executive level.  The health check became necessary as the program sat stalled for more than six months and instead of creating pressure for decisions, it created calls to cancel the transformation.

It was clearly time for the executive team that sponsored the effort to step in and make some hard choices.  In the report recommending that action, among other recommendations, the Executive Team came back with the following reply:

“Why are you not telling us more about IT and where it has failed?  Why are you talking about where they are going wrong?  Why are you saying that we need clearer business direction, your just covering for IT and their failings.”

When I pointed out that there were several highly critical points in the report related to IT, which had little effect.  All the executive team heard was that there needed to be more business direction.  Their reply:

“If you say we haaave to be involved then please know that we are tired of having to make every decision.”

I was not surprised.

I was stunned.

Here was a major multi-multi million-dollar transformation program that had done the work, found the tough issues, gone as far as it could and now needed active executive sponsorship in the form of some hard decisions to go forward.

The executive team commented that their job was to be ‘above all of this’, to think strategically, and to be visionary rather than making operational level decisions.  The only problem was that the open issues were not just operational; they were strategic in the sense that the answers would determine the performance profile of the company in the future.

As I reflected on the meeting a few things became clear.

• The executive team assumed that saying it is should be so is the same as making it so. “We said yes, so we consider it done.”

• The executive team did not see making hard decisions as an expression of their leadership.  They wanted to remain ‘above it all’ and not create winners and losers on an issue.  They believed that you demonstrated leadership by guiding without getting their hands dirty.

• The executive team was ready to criticize the decisions or direction others had taken but they did not have the time, energy or political will to lead in creating that future.  “I can tell you what your did wrong, but its not my job to help you make it right.”

• The executive team did not welcome evidence to the contrary nor recommendations on how to move forward that required their active participation.  I will listen if you confirm my suspicion, your motives are suspicous if you do not say what I expect to hear.

These reflections give the impression of an incapable executive team.  But that is not the case, this team runs one of the most successful, global, industry leading companies in their market.

So what gives?

These executives were giving the level and type of sponsorship that had worked in the past.  Their responses, comments and attitude was appropriate for the type of relatively incremental, back office, administrative changes that have dominated the executive agenda for the past 10 years or so.

The level of sponsorship that worked when we talked about IT.

While the quality of that sponsorship was fine for then, it is totally in appropriate for the types of changes we are doing now.

The level of sponsorship required when technology becomes greater than IT.

Executive sponsorship needs a significant upgrade as the demands for transformation have outstripped current sponsorship models.  Enterprises are going through real and deep change, like this one, requires direct executive action, decisions and direction.  Not delegation.

If figuring out how your business needs to operate to create value is not part of the executive team’s job, then I do not know what is.

What are the changes, if any, you are seeing in the type, nature or level of executive sponsorship?  Not just for technology, but for any transformation.

Re-imagining the idea is powerful, but it begs the question –  Re-imagine into what?

This year’s CIO survey provides an answer – re-imagine it into an amplifier of the business.  This led to this years CIO agenda report entitled “Amplifying the Enterprise” which was announced in a press release today.

Amplification, which involves taking a signal adding energy to it and sending it externally, provides an apt metaphor for the role of technologies like mobility and cloud.  These technologies create new channels and platforms for reaching new customers, engaging existing customers and supporting revenue growth.

Amplification also involves handling feedback.  Improperly handled feedback creates that stretching noise that you here when someone uses a podium microphone while they are wearing a lapel microphone.  Feedback related technologies include analytics and social media, which provide better ways to understand and capture what, is happening inside and outside your organization.

Taken together, the signal and feedback constitute a new view on “the experience”.  For most that experience is the customer experience which is essential to driving both growth and removing unnecessary cost, for more details follow this link.

The quality of amplification rests in large part with how the amplifier eliminates distortion.  Its true that distortion can be a form of music, but there was only one Jimi Hendrix so distortion for most of us is a source of cost, complexity, poor service and things that just make it harder to get things done.  For CIOs and their business peers, technology can eliminate distortions caused by duplicative processes, applications, inefficiencies etc.

CIOs in many industries will focus exclusively on eliminating distortions in 2012 as they face severe economic, financial and other challenges.  This is the year to emphasize eliminating distortion rather than reducing the cost of distortion.

All of these points lead to the model below that positions key technologies and their role in amplifying the enterprise.

Is this model perfect, no.  But it does provide a way to think about Technology and its various roles in the enterprise.  We need a new way of thinking because the nature of Technology has become greater than the nature of traditional IT. CIOs, IT leaders and others may want to consider how their IT strategy, plans and actions support amplifying performance – turning up the value of technology without creating distortion or negative feedback.

I believe this is important because when you talk about IT most business leaders think of IT as automating back office business and management processes.  That is true, but that way of thinking leads to a view of commodity-based services or a cost-based zero-sum game.  It is not that this game is wrong, but playing a game of ‘how low can you go’ or ‘doing the same with less’ is one we have been playing.  It is one that limits an organization’s future.

Thinking about Technology as an amplifier reflects the innate capabilities of things like mobility, cloud, analytics and social media.  These technologies are  externally focused.  Without changing the way we think, we will bend externally oriented technologies back internally to fit our existing model.

Force fitting technology into old management and strategy models is a little like buying a sports car only to drive down to the grocery store.  Sure you will look cool doing it, but you could have done so much more – you could have amplified the enterprise, you could have re-imagined Technology.

Distortion refers to the internal complexities; costs, duplication and redundancies that make it harder to get work done. Think about the things that get in the way, make it difficult for customers to understand or transact business with you, provide inaccurate information, basically anything that consumes effort without creating results.

Look for distortions by applying a few ideas:

• Identify areas where headcount has increased at a rate faster than revenues or business activities.  Chances are the people are being put in place to manage distortion, particularly in customer sales and service areas.  As one CIO put it, ‘we use people as middleware for poor process, system and product decisions.

• Evaluate support areas that should be creating scalability through productivity enhancements.  Measure actual transaction volumes against average costs as expense may increase due to transaction growth rather than expenses increasing because we are creating more work.  Transaction growth may require productivity improvements, things that create more work are distortions.

• Look at manager to staff ratios, the span of control should be stable or growing.  Pay particular attention to ‘professional’ jobs in your organization as often people are promoted to management roles to address compensation issues rather than being part of an organizational strategy.   If the need for managers has increased over the last five years, this is a sign of distortion.

• Think about how much multi-tasking you ask your people to handle.  Multi-tasking are a sign of distortion as incremental and accumulating change requires people to take inconsistent responsibilities.

Here are a few thoughts on things that may be driving these and other types of distortion in your enterprise:

• Incomplete or unfinished post merger integration plans. You were going to fix that but it was postponed.
• Multiple product codes, processes, systems that perform similar functions but can be consolidated.
• Remnant organization structures, for example country management activities that remain even after you have moved to a regional structure.  Or teams that have persisted because of personality rather than responsibility.
• Similar systems that work with the same data, these can most likely be consolidated as they may have different pasts but the data tells you they have a shared future.
• Old business rules implemented over the last 5 or 10 years that are no longer required, but remain in effect.
• Sources of waste, or muda, which exist both in the business organization – apply lean principles to everything.

Eliminating distortion requires focus and resource, which can be difficult to obtain.  Consider establishing a ‘sinking fund’ to support the first wave of elimination and refresh this fund with achieved savings.  This allows savings to accumulate in the organization while managing distortion elimination efforts.

Gartner’s Andy Kyte says everything in your organization had parents at their beginning.  Those parents own the solution and who wants to see their child removed.  You have to ask if the solution is creating more value than the complexity it creates.  It may be time to create a new family, as in the Brady Bunch, with processes, groups and activities.  Its not that something is going away, it is going to a better place.

Considering the sources of distortion represents an important strategy for CIOs and IT, particularly as those that have gone through multiple waves of cost cutting, contract negotiation and sourcing.  Repeating those same tactics results in diminishing returns, rather than getting to the causes and sustainable solution to distortion.

Distortion drives cost, reduces customer service, decreases agility and ties up resources that are needed for change.   You can lower the cost of distortion by outsourcing, renegotiating contracts, etc.  But amplification requires eliminating distortion to sustain results.

Cutting IT is not the same as cutting other functions.  IT spending is peculiar because it’s indirect.  Properly managed, IT spending changes performance disproportionality more than it costs. IT is particular to your firm resisting ‘best practice’ or ‘across the board cuts’.  This is not to say that IT budgets cannot be cut, but that blindly cutting IT saves pennies but locks in a legacy of inefficiencies sealed in silicon.

Maximizing the value of IT requires changing attitudes from administering an IT budget to applying IT to amplify business performance.  Leaders amplify their organization by concentrating on IT productivity’s numerator – value created rather than just denominator cost.  This helps them avoid the fantasy of ‘more for less’ by doing the following:

• Focusing on few projects.  Nothing focuses managers like a crisis and focusing IT on fewer, more important things creates results now rather than dissipating them by spreading resources like peanut butter.

• Shortening planning, project and governance cycle times to keep IT’s limited resources concentrated on the most important things and management agile to respond to change.

• Changing IT’s cost structure rather than the budgeted spend by adopting cloud and other light weight technologies, dropping underused systems, software and hardware to reduce the per unit cost of IT.

• Measuring IT value based on changes in business performance rather than costs.  IT has no value and no place in the budget if it does not raise performance.

• Managing IT productivity not projects.  Changing the way IT works to be more productive rather than choking off IT resources and expecting IT to muddle through.

• Stopping demand management and starting benefits realization.  Do not deny yourself the ability to improve, rather concentrate your attention on realizing improvements.

These steps lead to technology that amplifies business performance.  Sure it is easier to administer an IT budget but all that gets you is fewer activities with even less results.  It is better to think small about IT, in terms of how it can have short, sharp and focused impact rather simply lightening the weight of an already blunt IT organization.

Here is a test of whether you are managing IT budgets or managing business results.  The average IT organization spends 70% of its budget on running the business and 30% on changing the business.  Your CIO is able to cut the ‘run’ component by 10%, moving from 70% to 63%, what would you do with that money?  Do you save it? Or do you re-invest it in change by increasing change spending by 23% moving it from 30% to 37% of the budget?

It is not a test of IT.  Rather it is a test of your confidence in management and their ability to realize business benefits.  You take the 7% savings if you have no confidence in your management otherwise you know that the 23% increase makes sense because you can manage the business benefits.

It is natural to reduce budgeted cost in the face of a downturn.  That approach works best when costs are directly tied to business activity – sell less and you need to make less.  IT is connected to the cost structure of your operations.  Treat it as another administrative expense and you degrade performance across the board.  Combine limited IT resources with strong benefits realization and you amplify business performance and organization wide results.  The choice is yours.

Note this post appeared as an interview in the Financial Times.

Customer Experience brings a different perspective to issues of revenue and cost. This is one of the issues discussed in this post and a topic at the upcoming Gartner CIO Leadership Forums being held in March in London U.K. and Phoenix Arizona in the USA.

Executives and strategists assume a mutual exclusivity between customer intimacy (growth), operational excellence (cost) and product leadership (innovation).  You can do one or another but not both and certainly not all three. But now each is in service of the other and your strategy is one of emphasizing one or another rather than subjugating two to the others.

In 2012 doing both is more important than ever.  Revenue growth and cost cutting are top ranked strategic priorities in the 2012 CIO survey. But how is this possible? How do you connect strategies calling for revenue growth with plans for continued cost cutting?

You connect revenue and cost through the customer experience.

Gartner defines customer experience as: “The customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products.”

Think of the customer experience, as CRM on steroids and the problem is one of tradeoffs.  It costs money to create an experience.  You are back to an either/or choice:  spend more on the experience or spend less and live with that experience.

Leaders see the customer experience as a focal point to grow revenue and cut cost. The customer experience is the focal point where customer intent meets company complexity and that bridges revenue and cost, see figure below.

Create a superior, a simple, an engaging and powerful experience and you will grow revenue. Deliver that experience requires cutting the internal clutter that makes it hard to do business.  This view creates a focal point for both rather than a forcing function requiring a choice between revenue growth and cost cutting.

Externally, its logical that in a world of increasing choice customers will chose the best value proportion AND the easiest way to do business – the experience.  Marketing knows this and is investing in technologies outside of IT all in the name of revenue, brand and the experience.

Internally, we know that time and accretive leadership have created unnecessary complexity.  The case for eliminating any one of part of that complexity is weak as they all had a reason to be there in the first place. Concentrating on enhancing the customer experience challenges gives you new reasons to reconsider internal complexity and a different case for their consolidation.

Managers face tough choices everyday.  They trade between options to achieve their objectives.   Leaders see things differently and create new connections that find new answers beyond simple choice.   Leaders see customer experience as an opportunity for technology to amplify their ability to generate revenue through attracting and retaining customers while cutting costs by eliminating duplications in the business that detract from the experience.

Combining revenue growth, cost cutting and customers is not easy.  It requires leadership which is why it one of the topics we will focus on at this year’s CIO Leadership Forum.

Executives reading these articles could understandably equate social media with unrest, a lack of control, instability and mob rule.  Is that a wrong way to look at what has happened in 2011?

Yes, the legitimacy of a technology cannot be determined only by its applications or the behavior of users is wrong.  Social media may have lowered the barriers to organizing legitimate demonstrations or illegal activity, but social media is not the source of either.

People have always and will always find ways to use technology to meet their needs, whatever those needs happen to be.  The printing press, radio, the telephone, cassette tape recorder, fax machine each been applied to challenge authority and create revolution in the past.

Rather than associating social media technology with social unrest, executives should consider the power and potential inherent in capturing the attention of thousands, engaging their interest, coordinating their activities and creating a collaborative experience based on their interests and passions.   What could your organization accomplish if people did more than just come to work, turn in their eight hours and then go home?

Mass collaboration is the term we use to describe what happens when large groups of people come together to accomplish a mutual purpose that creates value.  Social media provides the technical means for mass collaboration and in the case of protest movements in 2011 the ability of thousands to communicate, share, build upon each other’s ideas and take coordinated action.

It takes more than technology to create a mass movement or mass collaboration.  In our study of more than 400 applications of social media for the book The Social Organization, we found that successful firms applying mass collaboration leverage collaborative communities, purpose, technology and new styles of management to tap into the energy and experience of their people.   They need all of this to create meaningful business results including:

• Engaging customers, prospects and associates to learn more about their needs, desires, interests in order and build a shared context for new products, services, processes and offerings.
• Connecting consumers from shelf to seed with farmers to dialogue on food and food safety issues.
• Facilitating customers helping each other to get more value from your products and services
• Coordinating and sharing advice about critical decisions within your organization, increasing your ability to act based on facts and actively enlist people in change processes
• Improving the adoption of health and safety practices to reduce the potential for injury in the workplace.

It is convenient to equate the value and legitimacy of technology on its application.  Based on social media’s recent press coverage, it would seem that no executive in their right mind would welcome much less sponsor these technologies in their company.

Step back and think about what the technology enables in order to understand the potential of social media based mass collaboration.  Mass collaboration, via social media is a technology that creates and sustains meaningful results in your organization where the only unrest is that of your competitors,

Related Posts:

Why social media is not enough to become a ‘social organization.’

Every organization is social, but few are social organizations

Welcome to the Social Organization

The 2012 planning cycle will be my ninth with Gartner and working with CIOs in Executive Programs.  During that time, I have observed that change in IT happens not in annual cycles but in three-year waves.   The 2003 planning cycle was my first with Gartner, but I believe as I go back through my notes that there have been three cycles since the turn of the millennium.

• 2000 – 2003 focused on demonstrating IT’s business relevance as executives scrutinized the business value of IT following the dot.com bust and related recession.  CIOs during this period faced the need to prove that IT matters and face of increasing commoditization of technology products and services.  Financial requirements drove the first wave of outsourcing, typified by blockbuster long-term single source providers who would take over and deliver ‘our mess for less’ IT.

• 2003 – 2006 can be described as the ‘business-ification’ of IT.  This was the period when IT was supposed to run more like a business by defining its business in terms of IT services, service levels and new forms of finance and costing models.  Functions and services that could be provided better, faster and cheaper externally drove the growth of the multi-sourcing marketplace. This was the heyday of models like ISCO and IS Lite both sought to run IT like a business and eventually generating revenues on its own.

• 2007 – 2011 cycle, the one we are completing now, could be described by the consolidation of IT cost, as economic, technical and operational realities required CIOs and organizations to cut costs in the face of economic and financial realities.

While we can debate the exact dates, themes and timings the broad trends are reflected in the major books of the time, themes of Gartner’s symposia, etc.

2012 is a pivotal year for CIOs and IT because we are completing a wave of consolidation and cost cutting that raises the question what comes next?

A few thoughts on the pieces that are floating around that will play a role in shaping IT over the next three years.

• Technology becomes important than IT.  Technology is inherently externally facing and that will displace the current crop of IT centric internally facing transaction systems.  Mobility, social media, analytics, new interfaces are all part of an arc of technology that is much broader than IT.

• Consumer and personal tastes are driving technology and resetting expectations for IT in terms of time to market, complexity and customer experience.  IT has been used to running on its own time and it will have to change to run at the customer’s clock speed.

• Competition will center around an expanding view of the customer experience touching on channels, ease of doing business, internal complexity, cost, marketing and provisioning.  Organizations that see a next version of the customer experience as CRM on steroids will experience increasing investment and decreasing returns.

• Increasing IT workforce productivity and throughput will become a requirement with CIOs having to commit, monitor and manage year over year productivity improvements.  This will be critical to the future as right now most firms manage ‘productivity’ from the denominator of cost, they will need to raise the numerator (output) in the future.

Individually none of these issues is a ‘show stopper’ leading some to think that they can be addressed through incremental improvements and responses.  Taken together and considering implementing them in less than three years, it becomes apparent that incremental responses will not be sufficient to enable IT’s role to expand at the same rate as the expanding role of technology in the enterprise.

That is why I believe that we are leaving the world of the consolidation of IT cost and moving into a phase where technology amplifies the enterprise and the position of IT can no longer be assumed.  Why three years? It takes time to re-imagine and re-orient an organization.

Are these pivotal years for IT?  If not then why not?

With six shopping days left until Christmas here are six things I can think of talking with CIOs over the past few months. These are things that they cannot give themselves, like a new organization or new metrics, but rather things that others can give to them.  They are in no particular order.

• A business relationship focused on benefits realization rather than budget expenditure.  Business and IT relationships are a perennial issue in IT and one where we have tried specialized people (BRM’s), specialized processes (IT strategy) and specialized power (governance) with limited results.  Putting everyone on a management path around benefits realization appears to be a way to bring people together into a positive relationship.
• Contractual service levels from cloud providers.  Many CIOs are interested in adopting cloud technologies but they run up against the barrier that often cloud providers will not, or cannot provide service guarantees and service levels with contractual recourse.
• Security in just about every sense.  Security in information, access, technology etc., but also security in terms of the knowledge that high performing IT organizations will get the recognition that they have earned and that resources flow with recognition – they do in other parts of the business so they should in IT.
• An executive team that understands the economics of technology and how it’s funding and pricing actually work.  Technology, predominantly the infrastructure, is a source of speed, scale and choice for an enterprise.  Speed in terms of executing change, scale in terms of unit cost efficiencies that are saving money even though they appear to cost more, and choice in creating future options for the enterprise, products and services.  There is more to technology economics than Moore’s Law, matching supply and demand and cost accounting.  Executives do not need to be ‘technoconomists’ but they should recognize the connection between technology, price, operational budget and service level.
• A hunting permit for legacy applications would enable the CIO to weed the applications garden to reduce complexity, cost, and resources consumed on long tail – low use legacy apps.  Economic reality and legacy realities are colliding in new ways that require some radical approaches.  Consolidation, simplification and elimination are some of the hardest and least glamorous work, but the most important in staying responsive and responsible.  If you could not see the floor through the stuff in your teenager’s room you would eventually force them to clean up.  Well I doubt many of us have seen the floor of the data center in years.
• Last, and most importantly – good people on their team.  It cannot be stressed enough that great people make for great technology, business value, agility and the like. If there is one thing a CIO needs year round it’s good people on their team, a stream of good people stepping up and a team of good people challenging each other in a positive way.

You will notice that budget is not on the list for two reasons. First its obvious that the CIO needs resources to be successful and that many have had significant cuts in the past few years.  I am unsure that simply restoring those cuts is more important than the things on the list above.  Second, resources often mask real issues inside an enterprise and the challenges CIOs face are real and cannot be solved and their solutions sustained by just papering them over with money.

What is on your CIO gift list?  With only six days there is still a chance to make a start this holiday season.  It is better to start now rather than wind up next Friday lunchtime standing in line at the convenience store looking to buy that that last minute gift.

Welcome your thoughts and ideas.

Happy Holidays.

Separating the ‘glam’ from the genuine need for mobile applications and you can easily see real need for applications and functionality delivered at the point, place, and time of need.

Working with CIO’s and IT Application developers recently indicates that few have a strategy, skills or practices in place to meet this demand.  At best, the IT organization has a few mobile developers who build out these solutions.  They will need more.

Here are a few things that are becoming important at incorporating mobility and ‘apps’ into your operations.  They are expressed in terms of how ‘apps’ require a different approach to ‘applications’, which is the dominant metaphor and way of thinking in IT.

• Mobile applications are experience based more than functionality based.  They exist in the ‘moment’ and context when they are used more than their position in the process.   In traditional applications, the context is pre-determined by assumptions regarding the business process, the role/job, and location – your office.  In a mobile app, all of this comes after the task as you cannot assume nor control where people will be when they need the functionality.

• Mobility is not a technology platform like the web, client/server, or mainframe. Creating value at the platform level often comes from porting applications from one to the other.  Simply porting web applications to the mobile device represents a particularly weak set of value – that is likely to elicit the comment ‘Is that all you can do?”

• Mobility is not about pushing corporate systems out to the edge.  That model is so m-Commerce, 1990’s and early 2000’s.  The success of the various ‘App’ stores tells that while it may be technically possible to deliver your ERP on a smart phone, that is not what people want.

• Mobility is not about ‘management’ of transactions and tasks.  When IT responds to a request for ‘providing dynamic price’ as a project called “Dynamic Price Management (DPM)” it is a sign that IT its time to get IT focused on the task not the process.  The management moniker is associated with administrative systems, the ones that IT has already built and would benefit little from being made mobile.  Look at the apps on your phone – I venture that NONE of them have the word ‘management’ in their description, for a good reason.

Mobile solutions present a special challenge to CIOs and IT organizations as they extensively leverage public substructure and corporate infrastructure but represent something different from traditional applications.

They are calls ‘Apps’ for a reason.  They are similar to applications, but they are different in key ways – beyond just being smaller.    These differences are something that IT should embrace as adopting new ways of thinking will help them re-imagine IT and not lose out on the opportunity to demonstrate their technical and business expertise.