The Roman Road and Enterprise Mobility

I had the distinct privilege of walking along several different Roman roads this week.  These roads have survived thousands of years worth of history and travel.  They were built using a standard design, engineering and construction methodology that was extraordinarily durable.  The paved roads of ancient Rome represent one of the most significant infrastructure and civil engineering feats in history.  They permitted the Roman Empire to flourish for over 400 years!

The way the Romans used the roads, and the benefits they gained, are very similar to how businesses today can utilize enterprise mobility solutions.  I know this is a stretch, but not a big one.  Let me explain.

The Roman Empire was big and geographically dispersed.  This fact presented challenges for managing, controlling and governing.   The speed in which messages traveled was critical and roads were a key means of transporting them.  Commanders and governors needed to know what was going on hundreds and thousands of miles away.  Distant forts, outposts and cities needed to receive instructions.  This is a similar challenge faced by companies today with a mobile workforce and remote jobsites and plants.

Let’s ponder the benefits of the Roman roads on the Roman economy.  The impact was huge, not unlike what the railways in the 19th century did for the West.  For the first time, products (among them tin, copper and salt) and services could be moved quickly and reliably transported during all seasons and weather conditions.  Today mobile apps and the Internet can help move digital products and services across the globe efficiently, while providing a means of payment, shipment tracking (for physical products) and order visibility.

The Roman roads and bridges enabled merchants to get to places that they had never been before. Places previously just too hard or expensive to get to.  Likewise, mobile apps and the Internet can instantly make products and services available across huge geographic areas that were just too hard to market and sell to before.

Today many companies have remote workers.  This presents a challenge to developing and sustaining the desired company culture.  In the Roman times, the roads they built served to help political and intellectual ideas spread quickly.  Scholars could easily travel, exchange ideas and collaborate.  Mobile apps and collaboration platforms can fill that void today.  By including even the most distant company outposts in discussions and collaboration activities, and involving them in new ideas and concepts, company culture can be developed, enhanced and expanded using mobile apps.

The Roman’s didn't limit the messages sent along their roads to just military messages.  Yes, military messages were important for maintaining control of such a massive territory, but so were letters sent between commanders, the Senate, the Emperor, merchants and cities.  Likewise, businesses will not just develop a single mobile app.  They will find that mobile apps can be used for all kinds of data collection, business intelligence, queries and commerce.

The Romans ultimately had more than 29 great military highways that led away from the capital.   113 provinces were interconnected by 372 great road links.  The whole road system comprised more than 400,000 km of roads, of which over 80,500 km were stone-paved.  This enabled them to flourish as a civilization for over 400 years.  Likewise, I expect businesses to ultimately have every ERP, back-office system and data source of significance connected to mobile apps so they can also flourish.

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Kevin Benedict
Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant
View my profile on LinkedIn
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mobile Expert Interview: Mary Brittain-White

I am excited to share this interview with mobility expert Mary Brittain-White, CEO/Founder of Retriever Communications for several reasons:
  1. Mary is a long time veteran of the enterprise mobility market and she brings a unique perspective.
  2. Mary started her mobility career working with Apple's Newton.
  3. Mary is female.  I really want to include more ladies in my mobile expert interviews!  
  4. Mary's company focuses on "industrial mobility" and brings a view of enterprise mobility that is blue collar and evolved from the trenches.
*When I speak on this interview there is an annoying audio echo.  Sorry!  The good news - I don't speak much.  I hope you can overlook my audio challenges and learn from Mary's insights.

*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict
Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant
View my profile on LinkedIn
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mobile Expert Interview: Glenn Johnson and Kevin Benedict

I had the privilege recently to connect with mobility expert Glenn Johnson, Senior VP of Magic Software Americas, on a Google+ Hangout OnAir.  Glenn turned the tables on me and he asked the questions in this interview.  Enjoy!

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLnEeUZPDd8&list=UUGizQCw2Zbs3eTLwp7icoqw&feature=share&index=2



The True Cost of Mobility - Companies are under tremendous pressure to develop and deploy mobile apps for their business systems, yet the traditional approach to mobile app development typically costs $250K+ and takes 6+ months for a single app. Today IT professionals are exploring platforms that radically reduce costs and time-to-market for their mobile initiatives, especially around complex applications such as SAP, Oracle, or custom applications.

Download the whitepaper - https://www.capriza.com/resources/whitepapers/?resource=true-cost-of-enterprise-mobility&adgroup=MES

*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict
Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant
View my profile on LinkedIn
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mobile Expert Interview: Yuval Scarlat on Cloud Mobility

I had the privilege of interviewing the CEO of Capriza, Yuval Scarlat, last week.  We discussed a wide range of topics such as cloud mobility, MADPs, MBaaS, mobile strategies and why he thought the market needed another mobile solutions vendor.

On a side note, I think Capriza's website design is very effective.  Enjoy!

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4MQHp21k-w&list=UUGizQCw2Zbs3eTLwp7icoqw&feature=share


*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict
Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant
View my profile on LinkedIn
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mind the Gap - Enterprise Mobility and Digital Transformation

The phrase "Mind the Gap" was first introduced in 1969 in London as a warning for passengers to watch for the gap between the train door and the station platform.  The need to warn passengers is and was the result of some stations being located on curves and at varying heights relative to the tracks.  The warning is intended to prevent injuries.

Mind the gap is also a relevant warning for organizations today.  The gap I am referring to is the one between your customers' expectations and your ability to meet those expectations given your current IT infrastructure and legacy systems.

Today consumers have amazing power and real-time capabilities in their mobile devices.  They have incredible user experiences and powerful apps connected to real-time analytics, transactional services, turn-by-turn navigation, mobile payments and mobile commerce capabilities.  They have instant access to the world's largest knowledge base in the form of Wikipedia, and instant access to massive libraries of health care advice from companies like WebMD and Healthwise.  They have one-click ordering of millions of products with Amazon's apps and instant package tracking and alerts.  They can receive personalized entertainment and media services anywhere.  Most of us have completely integrated instant communications, collaboration, GPS locations, instant information and social media into our everyday lives.  Why would we expect anything less from the companies we are doing business with?

These capabilities were unheard of when most of our ERPs and core business systems were first designed, developed and deployed.  Most of the large companies I personally work with are experiencing an increasing gap between what their customers are experiencing at home and on their personal mobile devices and what they experience and can support at work.  They are concerned.  They see it.  They know they are falling behind.

This expectation gap between what we have and can do on our personal mobile devices and what large enterprises can deliver to their employees and customers is a problem.  For many companies the expectation gap is not narrowing, but increasing every day.  This gap, is an open invitation for competitors to fill the void.  If you don't fill it, others will.... I guarantee it.

It is important to recognize the source of this gap.  For most companies, buying or developing a powerful, user friendly and competitive mobile app is relatively simple.  It just takes a budget and experienced help. The increasing expectation gap is not simply the result of having better mobile apps in the consumer space.  In my experience the problem is most often related to having back-office and legacy systems incapable of supporting real-time mobile apps.  To close this gap, IT organizations must engage in an in-depth analysis and inventory of their IT systems and business processes, and flag for upgrade or replacement those that are preventing real-time support of mobility.

Mobility is a critical component of digital transformation, and a required element of success for nearly every business going forward.  Your IT environment can either be a springboard for success or an anchor that drags you to the bottom.  Which is it?
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The True Cost of Mobility - Companies are under tremendous pressure to develop and deploy mobile apps for their business systems, yet the traditional approach to mobile app development typically costs $250K+ and takes 6+ months for a single app. Today IT professionals are exploring platforms that radically reduce costs and time-to-market for their mobile initiatives, especially around complex applications such as SAP, Oracle, or custom applications.

Download the whitepaper - https://www.capriza.com/resources/whitepapers/?resource=true-cost-of-enterprise-mobility&adgroup=MES
*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict
Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant
View my profile on LinkedIn
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mobile Expert Interviews: Vaidy Iyer on Cloud Mobility and PaaS

I had the privilege of interviewing mobility expert Vaidy Iyer today.  He is the founder and CEO of AppsFreedom a company focused on providing enterprise mobility solutions in the form of Multi-Channel, Multi-Device Platform as a Service solutions to the SAP community.  I asked if they could compete with SAP's mobile solutions - you should hear his answer!  Enjoy!

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vj35zoQ7bE&feature=share


The True Cost of Mobility - Companies are under tremendous pressure to develop and deploy mobile apps for their business systems, yet the traditional approach to mobile app development typically costs $250K+ and takes 6+ months for a single app. Today IT professionals are exploring platforms that radically reduce costs and time-to-market for their mobile initiatives, especially around complex applications such as SAP, Oracle, or custom applications.

Download the whitepaper - https://www.capriza.com/resources/whitepapers/?resource=true-cost-of-enterprise-mobility&adgroup=MES
*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict
Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant
View my profile on LinkedIn
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

GEOINT, Google Field Trip, GIS and the Digital World

I have been blessed with the opportunity to conduct digital and mobile strategy workshops and speak in many places around the world.  Because of the frequency of these trips, I often don't have time to research in advance the locations I will be visiting.  That can be both good and bad.  I am often pleasantly surprised to stumble upon a famous historical landmark with little or no knowledge that I was in its vicinity.  Surprises are fun.  The downside is stumbling upon a recognizable landmark or building, but having little knowledge as to why it is recognizable, and having no time to look it up.  There is now a useful app for that!

Google Field Trip is a mobile app I downloaded recently that uses many different data sources, tied to GPS coordinates, to inform you about your location and environment.  Here in Boise, Idaho, it popped up messages about historic events that happened at locations near me.  I love it!  It informed me as to where the original trolley line was located, when the old granite penitentiary was built, and where geothermal springs are used to heat public swimming pools.  This information augmented my reality.  My knowledge about a location was augmented by over 170 different data sources that Google has aggregated and associated with geospatial data.  As the number of data sources continues to grows, it will become increasingly useful and valuable.

Yesterday I read the NGA's (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) 5 year plan.  Their motto is "Know the Earth, Show the Way, Understand the World."  Awesome!  Sounds like a super-secret, hyper-ambitious, massively powerful version of Google Field Trip.  Their job is to design, develop and support a geospatial intelligence platform that can be used by many different agencies to collect, analyze, share and collaborate around geospatial data for the purpose of national security and to help respond to natural and human-made disasters.

The NGA has a big job.  Their mission is to provide ubiquitous access to GEOINT (geospatial intelligence) by creating an intuitive online environment that facilitates effortless and seamless access to geospatial content--data and intelligence-- anytime, anywhere.  They want to help the "good-guys" spend more time analyzing data and doing "good", and less time trying to collect or discover geospatial data that is already available in another system or database.  They want to make it much faster and easier to find and use. Again, kind of like Google Field Trip, except instead of a historical marker popping up, it may pop up information about all known bad guy activities in an area as a convoy or patrol is moving through a region.

It is important to understand that GPS coordinates can be associated with all kinds of different information including physical features of the land, assets, natural and human resources, activities, cultures, religions and past events, etc.  Here is more on NGAs mission, "Our purpose is to provide deeper, contextual analysis of places, informed not only by the Earth's physical features and imagery intelligence, but also by human geography."  Human geography is the study of how humans, communities and cultures interact with and are impacted by the locations and physical features of the land where they are located.  Wow! That includes a lot of areas of study!

Let's stop for a minute and consider again the convergence of the physical world with the digital.  The physical world is being digitized through all kinds of collected and stored digital information about it.  This enables organizations, either government or commercial, to associate all kinds of information to a physical location and visualize it on a computer or print it on a 3D printer so you can run your fingers over it.  Once this information is analyzed, algorithms can be designed that make judgements and predictions about a location based on collected data and big data analysis.  The NGA calls this discipline, anticipatory GEOINT analysis.  The ability to predict different things based upon analysis of geospatial intelligence.

One of the biggest problems that NGA is trying to solve is data and organizational silos.  They want to find all of the data and content, and release it for discovery and use by all relevant and approved agencies and security levels.  The events of 9/11 taught us the disastrous results of not sharing data across agencies.

There are many lessons to learn from the technological, management and strategy advancements being made in and around geospatial intelligence that can translate into positive value in the commercial sector.  Companies like Amazon, Netflix, Zillows and many others understand the reality of the convergence between the physical and digital worlds and are embracing geospatial intelligence to their benefit.  They are winning with these strategies!
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The True Cost of Mobility - a new whitepaper - Enterprise corporations are under tremendous pressure to develop and deploy mobile apps for their business systems, yet the traditional approach to mobile app development typically costs $250K+ and takes 6+ months for a single app.  IT professionals are exploring platforms that radically reduce costs and time-to-market for their mobile initiatives, especially around complex applications such as SAP, Oracle, or custom applications.

Whitepaper download link - https://www.capriza.com/resources/whitepapers/?resource=true-cost-of-enterprise-mobility&adgroup=MES
*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict
Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant
View my profile on LinkedIn
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

A New Perspective on Enterprise Mobility and 2014 Requirements, Part 2

If the changes rapidly occurring in the enterprise mobility market were mostly hidden from view in 2013, they will be center stage with a spotlight on them in 2014.  The Yankee Group predicts these changes will be so huge that entire categories of enterprise mobility like the MADP (mobile application development platforms) may transform into something new and different.  They believe mobile platforms in 2014 will emphasize features like:
  • open architectures
  • scalability
  • extensibility
  • flexibility
  • embedded API management
  • data orchestration capabilities
  • integrated analytics
  • agnosticism to tools, infrastructures and standards
The traditional vision enterprise mobility platform vendors have chased for so long now seems to be fading away.  The business plans they embraced depended upon a customer buying the mobile platform, staying on it and maximizing the numbers of users.  The cost per user, while expensive upfront, would over time become reasonable with economies of scale.  Once customers rolled out large numbers of users the barriers-to-migration would become so high that customers would in effect be locked-in, not necessarily by technology but by the cost of changing.  This is where the mobile platform vendor would theoretically achieve profitability.  In reality, however, not enough customers bought mobile platforms and rolled out large numbers of users at the rate required to deliver on the business plans of many mobile platform players.

In addition, the research and development costs of trying to be all things to all people were so high that only a mass market could sustain it.  This mass market has been slow to mature and unpredictable, which has led many vendors to invest large amounts of money in the wrong things.

There are so many inexpensive and powerful tools for developing mobile apps today, that the competitive advantages of having one as a core component of your MADP is minimal.  The cross-platform app development capability of many MADPs remains valuable, but the efforts of keeping one updated and relevant is cost prohibitive.

I continue to believe there is a huge market, and many opportunities for vendors to make money as a result of companies embracing enterprise mobility, but perhaps not in the areas first imagined.  The investments may be directed more toward updating and replacing existing infrastructures and systems to be mobile-centric and capable of supporting real-time data exchanges.  The actual investment in the development and integration of mobile apps may be relatively small compared to these infrastructure investments.

As I described in Part 1 of this article series, http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-new-perspective-on-enterprise.html, IT organizations in 2013 realized that the major challenges with implementing enterprise mobility were managing the TCO (total cost of ownership) of mobile apps and upgrading legacy IT systems to support a real-time and mobile-centric landscape.  As a result, IT organizations are rethinking their requirements and taking a more strategic view of enterprise mobility and the role it will play.  In large enterprises, the word "strategic" is synonymous with slow.  It also means taking a deeper look at what needs to change overall in their IT ecosystem to support digital transformation.  This kind of in-depth research and analysis often leads CIOs back to their ERP and core system vendors for answers and solutions.

This is not good news for traditional and independent mobile platform vendors.  They prefer a market where there is a clean abstraction layer between back-office systems and mobile apps and platforms.  If the biggest challenges with enterprise mobility are actually with data integration, orchestration and security, then that opens up a much broader set of competitors and requirements.  To compete in that market requires a very different set of skills and plenty of funding.

So where does this lead us?  I believe it will lead to large investments in upgrading and replacing legacy systems and infrastructures that are unable to support a real-time, mobile-centric world.  This means big money for system integrators, infrastructure players and security solution vendors.  It means businesses are going to be hesitant to make big bets on specific mobile platform vendors and on-premise solutions as the technology is moving too fast to be confident in a selection.  It means businesses will favor open architectures that permit a vendor agnostic approach to mobility.  It means a keen interest in cloud-based mobile solutions and platforms that offer flexibility, minimal commitment, low costs and lightning fast innovation.

2014 looks to be a pivotal and interesting year for enterprise mobility.  Stay tuned for the latest.

For more opinions on the direction of enterprise mobility read this article from my colleague Peter Rogers, http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2013/12/enterprise-mobility-2014-is-going-to.html.

*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict
Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant
View my profile on LinkedIn
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

A New Perspective on Enterprise Mobility and 2014 Requirements, Part 1

Many of us have spent years (some of us decades) working on enterprise mobility designs, development and implementations.  These projects, for the most part, started as tactical implementations for specific LOBs (lines of business).  They involved usually one app, connected to a specific back end system and database.  Over the years these projects evolved to include multiple data sources and business processes.  Today, CIOs and IT departments are being tasked with mobilizing the entire enterprise IT environment.  This task, I propose, requires a new way of looking at enterprise mobility.

Earlier this month (December 2013) I spoke on a panel with Forrester Research's John McCarthy in London.  We were discussing the current and future state of enterprise mobility.  McCarthy stated that 2014 would be the year of "complex mobility" and would cause "Y2K-like" events in many enterprises.  He added that ERP like investments may be required in many enterprises in order to prepare them for a mobile first world.  Herein lies the challenge.

Complex and mission critical IT systems often include legacy systems.  In many cases these legacy systems were not developed to be real-time, or designed to support the speed or operational tempo of emerging business models and mobile environments.  These are where both the complexities and the Y2K-like events will be found.  Legacy systems will either need to be updated to support real-time and mobile environments or replaced. Given these challenges, business analysts will need to understand what parts of their IT systems and infrastructures are problematic.

In order to better understand their IT system capabilities, it seems there is a need for tools and dashboards designed to help the IT department understand which systems are mobilized, which are not.  I can envision a tool/app that provides:
  • a strategic view of enterprise mobility in a dashboard format that provides visibility into which systems are mobilized and which are not within the IT environment
  • a view that shows mobile app security levels, security configurations and data access rights
  • a view that demonstrates the speed in which data can be collected, analyzed and reported for all business processes (i.e. will this process takes 3 weeks, 3 days, 3 minutes or 3 seconds, etc.)
  • a view that shows the time required for all queries and reports to be produced and distributed
  • a view into which systems are capable of supporting a real-time environment and which are not
  • a view that shows all IT systems connected to sensors in the IoT (Internet of Things)
  • a view that shows the budget, plan and priority level for upgrading or replacing each problem IT system that is preventing real-time and mobile support
If market forces and the digital transformation of your industry are driving you to a more online and real-time operational tempo, then what IT systems are or will prevent that migration?  The systems that are preventing that migration must be flagged for an upgrade and/or replacement.

While you are engaged in this process, why not identify blind spots that are forcing you to manage with "conjecture" rather than based upon real and accurate data?  Often mobile apps and sensors connected to the IoT (Internet of Things) can help fill in the blind spots.  These blind spots can be caused because the data is not collected, or not used, or is analyzed so slowly that the usable shelf-life has passed by the time you get it.

Don't worry...we won't run out of things to do in 2014.

Read Part 2 of this article series here - http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-new-perspective-on-enterprise.html.


*************************************************************
Kevin Benedict
Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant
View my profile on LinkedIn
Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

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