One of the more unusual things that’s been happening in IT departments across the world is a shift in the emphasis on mobility. As more and more CxOs out there are realising the potential of mobility to not just enable employees to be more productive in more places more of the time, but they are also realised that the reach mobility has into new demographics and new customers that once might have been inaccessible to them is one that they can’t ignore.
“Mobility Centre of Excellence”
With this, there has been 2 major shifts in the way IT handles mobility. The 1st, is the development of “Mobile Centres of Excellence”. Traditionally, your mobile IT was managed by a single person whos main day job was probably looking after the email servers or possible your desktop support people as they were in a position to actually handle a persons Blackberry. Now any more! There are now specialist IT teams popping up all over the place in all kinds of businesses, dedicated to with enabling internal IT systems to work with mobile devices, or developing applications to boots the company profile online. Either way, we’re seeing mobile strategy becoming a large part of the modern enterprise technology landscape.
“I Have a Budget!”
One of the interesting things that I’ve seen changing over the more recent past, is who actually hold budget for a mobility program. Again, in the past, the IT team has always been left wanting when it comes to the yearly budget allocation. Seen as a service that is a begrudging necessity, only the minimal funds are presented ever 5 years or so for that “desktop estate” upgrade that you so desperately need. What we’re seeing more of today, is the marketing team (who always seem to have budget!!) being the trail blazers in mobile enablement. They’re the ones looking to engage application developers and analysts on how to best get your brand out there, and they know that mobile is at the forefront of that today.
“Marketing Rules the Roost!”
With that comes one of other more interesting things that’s changing, and that’s who it is that heads up these mobile teams. More and more, we’re seeing teams of specialist mobility technical employees (application developers and infrastructure/architecture specialists) being lead by a head thats have a more traditional background in marketing! It’s very odd to think that as little as 3 years ago that person in charge of mobility at a company could very well have been that same person who is in charge of facilities, or your vehicle fleet, and for that to be moving up the corporate ladder to dedicated teams of people with dedicated mobility knowledge and developing strategy with MobileFirst at the front is a quantum leap in this space.