Remember Internet time? You’re now living on mobile time.

Transformation in the Enterprise: The Post-PC Era
Grant Shirk, Senior Enterprise Product Marketing Manager, Box

Always On. Always Connected.

“Given that mobility—like the Internet before it—is equally confusing and compelling, it only remains for IT to craft a strategy for conquering it. Creating such a strategy means first acknowledging the shift from applications containing data, logic, and presentation tiers to one in which services exchange information.

In essence, CIOs must embark on a three-step process to hone their strategy.

Step one: Discovery. Identify current projects as well as future goals; keep in mind that business units may be tackling applications on their own.

Step two: Acceleration. Having identified the projects you want to pursue and the underlying technologies, promote acceleration by standardizing your efforts as much as possible. Use common code – aka an “application factory” – for basic elements spanning people, process, and tools. These help reduce overlap and increase developer efficiency. Establishing common interface elements for employees will also help reduce training time and increase productivity.

Step three: Innovation. Once you’ve created a strong foundation for internal progress, you can start looking at other capabilities to help make your mobile applications even more of a competitive advantage. How can you target those key areas and create even better tools for helping to reduce sales cycles or gathering customer insights at the moment they’re making purchase decisions? Those kinds of insights are closer to reality than ever before, but only if you understand your strategic goals.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that you’re still aiming at a moving target. Remember Internet time? You’re now living on mobile time. Devices continue to evolve, as do application development tools. Just as you had to do in Internet time, you must focus on what aspects of mobility serve your business requirements most, and recalibrate them periodically. While you can easily refresh some strategies every year or two, for the time being, you must reconsider your mobile strategy as often as every six to 12 months to verify that you’re still placing your bets on the right trends”.

The New Digital Mobile Consumer:

How Large Companies are Responding

“The Digital Mobile Consumer: Key Findings

1. Many businesses are making fundamental changes to their products/services and processes to win over the digital mobile consumer.
2. The average company in the four regions of the world will spend between $13 million and $22 million this year on technologies, business process changes, and other expenses to respond to digital mobile consumers.
3. Marketing, sales and service functions are taking the lead in shaping their organization’s overall strategy for serving the digital mobile consumer – but the IT function is integrally involved.
4. Companies with some of the best opportunities are in sectors that haven’t changed as much as others in responding to the digital mobile consumer.
5. Designing mobile applications and websites just for tablet devices is becoming a new battleground.
6. Consumers in Asia-Pacific and Latin America conduct more business through mobile devices than consumers in Europe and North America”.

IBM’s Mobile Enterprise Services

Working securely anywhere, anytime from any device

“IBM Mobile Enterprise Services provides an integrated suite of capabilities for smartphones, tablets and rugged wireless devices—including Apple iPhone and iPad, Google Android, RIM BlackBerry and PlayBook, and Windows Mobile devices.

With a robust set of standard and customized services that help align your business strategies with your mobile requirements, our mobile portfolio includes strategy assessment and infrastructure design services, lifecycle management, mobile messaging and mobile enterprise application management. We help you optimize cost and efficiency with flexible services (including managed and subscription-based offerings), and enhance mobile-user productivity with best-practices processes and advanced technologies”.

So Grant Shark talked about the Post PC Era at the Consumerization in IT tn the Enterprise Forum in New York on Wednesday.

As Accenture say we are now living on mobile time with a tremendous boost to personal productivity.

Managing Mobility is a high priority for Enterprise IT.

Managed Mobility Services must provide a safe secure offering for information workers on the go.

One Device Control Service is offered by Apperian with the launch of a Remote Control solution for IOS [iDevices] – LINK

Apperian pitch “Mobile devices go anywhere and everywhere – so there’s no need to be on the same local network or use a VPN to use Remote Control. An administrator can remotely control a device that is behind a home router, firewall or captive network with no additional configuration. It even works over cellular network, so you can provide support to a user no matter where they are”.

Now that you effectively have a personal network device with access to more information than a small mainframe in the 80’s, be careful that you do not mis-place your mobile device or download any malware.