Mobile : The double edge sword

 The best thing that even happened to the Indian civilization is the mobile phone. The mobile revolution has taken in its fold multiple cross sections of the society, both in economic and the cultural bracket. What we have seen unfold in the 5 to 8 years is both revolutionary and unprecedented. The CEO – to – Cab driver – to- panwallah – to – migrant labourer who carries bricks on his head – to – village farmer with one goat.  The entire diaspora: metropolis – to – city- to- town-to-village. If there is any entity that you could count with the cumulative being more than the total number of cell phones in India, it’s the population of India itself; for now!

The speed of cell phone proliferation has beaten the speed with which technology evolution around mobile apps, mobile app eco-system has happened and the speed of enterprise embracement of mobile as an effective business tool. This has led to employees bringing in, their own cell phones with data cards on them into the enterprise.  BYOT is not a choice that enterprises can exercise these days especially when it comes to cell phones, it’s the default you cannot avoid. These cell phones are mini power house of processing power and storage capacity. Employees have started making productive use of these capabilities and have been getting around the governance strictures of controls and data security imposed by enterprise IT teams. A few simple examples:

1. Bluetooth transfer the MIS report/client list from laptop to cell phone and email it out using your Gmail app on cell phone.
2.  Bluetooth transfer excel sheet with customer name and address. Use third part free apps that enable you to mark pins on Google map based on address on excel sheet and share the map data with another thru online sharing.
3. Receive corporate data on enterprise email system on your smartphone and Bluetooth it out / store it on data storage card and pass on the card.

Today all enterprises have at least one out of every 10 employees who do this. BYOT has happened not by choice but by default. There are lessons to be learnt here. The more one resists embracing new technology that is personal, easy to use and available with no/low entry barrier of learning; the more it proliferates as a challenge to enterprise governance and control structures. CIOs that embrace the same and provide apps that serve this purpose would end up facilitating the proliferation with adequate thought and planning put behind data security and process controls.

The challenge gets bigger and more profound as Akash tablet launch has been announced. Right from the peon to the CEO can now self-equip with processing power, an app eco system and storage capacity. With the launch of Akash, challenge to enterprise governance and control structure has achieved a completely new dimension.  Akash is pegged at the same value as the lowest priced android smart phone from Samsung! Direct Selling Agents, corner store shopkeeper, panwallah, everyone will soon acquire one. They will connect to free apps, storage on the cloud and social networking sites. Knowing the Indian affiliation for aggression and anger, the moment the POS at the corner store malfunctions, the shopkeeper will tweet or post on Facebook. The sentence will start with WTF. To highlight the extent of problems that enterprises will face, I will, without naming the involved, narrate a true life incident.

A large enterprise has about 42 dropbox subscribers on corporate desktops, laptops, personal cell phones and tablets. This was done to leverage storage on cloud and enable sharing of documents to collaborate on projects. Collaboration extends to ad-agencies, BPO partner and sales partner of the enterprise. The ad-agency guy is a party animal and orders alcohol in bulk every Friday. He decides to leverage the convenience of dropbox. The corner liquor store cashier now has a dropbox subscription activated on his blackberry. My friend from ad-agency has a text file with the list of booze needed for the week. He drops it in his dropbox that syncs with the corner wine shop owners dropbox on his cell phone. The ad-agency guy has not taken care to create a separate folder for him. The enterprise employee has not taken care to create separate folders for advertisement, sales and operations. All access a single folder. There are excel sheets with client data , address and cell phone numbers of clients in the sheet.  The way dropbox works, once you put a file in there it syncs automatically into end devices of all subscribers. Enterprise customer data is now available spayed all across the cloud for all and sundry to access at will. As a liquor store owner I would like to look at the data and make calls to people who live in the same neighbourhood with bundled offers. The state of enterprise data is similar to the state of IPO forms in the fort area of Mumbai, where every bhelpuri wallah uses it to serve and wrap chaat in. I was amazed when I saw this. I could see sweat trickle down, when I explained the consequence of his act to my friend who works in this enterprise. Looking at this glass half full will reveal to you that the age old issue of giving easy access to data anytime , anywhere, on any device and enabling collaboration, has been solved without you the CIO spending millions on the solution. Lets leverage this to our advantage.

There are a few recommendations I would like to make. Before doing so, I want to set the context on the background against which these recommendations make sense.

As against an inertia fuelled structured org-chart characteristic and people-process-system caged world of large business enterprises; the mobile device, mobile app eco system and the associated players in the form of developers, innovators and manufacturers is an highly energetic, vibrant, and effervescent creed. This vibrant eco-system will continually feed the end consumer with some fantastic simple to use apps. Some of these consumers would be employees of large corporates. They will now be armed with alternatives that can get the work done by beating the system that forms the essence of enterprise governance and controls frameworks. Corporate engines cannot match the speed and the depth of innovation that can happens outside the corporate arena. Employees will all the more now compare these innovations with the CIO teams capabilities. “Why cant you guys think of something like this” is a phrase many IT folks have heard inside the enterprise corridors as business teams continue to marvel at small effective cool apps on their smart phones and tablets. Soon these app vendors will be talking on deals directly with business function heads by-passing IT , exactly the same way SaaS vendors did some time ago. Don’t fight it, embrace it. Facilitate and encourage proliferation on your turf, on your terms. Leverage the vibrancy of the mobile eco-system to your advantage.

My suggestions on how to achieve this is as follows:

1. Create an app store for your enterprise
2. categorize the app store into following sections:
• B2C: Apps aimed at your enterprise's customers
• B2B: Apps aimed at business partners (direct selling agents, processing partners, distributors, warehouse partners, etc). Align visibility and usage of these apps to your enterprise security policies, and enable authentication and role based access control features on these apps
• B2E: Apps aimed at employees.  Align visibility and usage of these apps to your enterprise security policies, and enable authentication and role based access control features on these apps. 
• Marketplace: Crowd-source your apps here. App vendors can freely submit apps they feel that makes sense for your business. You could prototype these apps. Once accepted, one could run a reverse auction in the Marketplace to drive a fair price for the app. The Marketplace should have a bulletin board with interface to linkedin and developer forums on web portals and twitter.  Enterprise can post the following on bulletin boards:
• Enterprise security mandates that apps should adhere to
• RFPs for Mobile apps.
• Enterprise business operations and business dynamics manual that can serve as a guideline for app vendors and entrepreneurs wishing to enter this space, in their effort to realize their out of box ideas into mobile apps that would find relevance with the enterprise
3. Support the mobile apps with cloud storage capabilities. Distribute cloud storage thru your app store to employees and partners to deliver collaboration on documents and data. This gives you control.
4. Use mobile apps to drive collaboration in social network space through a controlled window.

The app store infrastructure needs to drive governance and ensure manageability. It makes sense for CIOs to group together and approach device manufacturers for creating this eco-system for corporates. This will deliver two positive outcomes:

1. This will drive standardization which will benefit app manufacturers and give them an environment of repeat ability of sales without need for customization.
2. Devices will now be bundled with an white label app store and app store framework that reduces corporates effort to only branding the app store

Its time CIOs start defining the new normal in the application landscape. Tablets, mobiles, surfaces,3D,…life only gets interesting  from here…well depends …interesting if you embrace it and facilitate proliferation on your turf , on your terms; a nightmare to deal with if you fight it!