Mobility Is Coming: Are You Ready?
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

In three short years, we've seen organisations make a leap from "not interested" in getting content onto mobile devices for users to "I need to figure this out NOW". But how ready is your organisation to begin deploying mobile content? Robin Neidorf offers some guidelines to help think about what readiness might look like in your organisation.

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One of the rewarding aspects of researching a specific industry over several years is the opportunity to observe and reflect on change. As Director of Research for FreePint, I've enjoyed expanding our portfolio of ongoing projects over the past five years. We now offer FreePint Subscribers insight on such critical topics as news needs and preferences, copyright and governance, and buying patterns.

But year-over-year change in strategies and priorities for information managers in one area outpaces every other topic we study:

Mobile readiness.

In three short years, we've seen organisations make a leap from "not interested" to "I need to figure this out now" in considering how to get content onto mobile devices for users. 

Revolution in Progress

We began researching the enterprise market for mobile readiness not long after Apple released the first iPad... way back in 2010. While vendors were urging FreePint to review their newly developed mobile apps, our corporate subscribers were distinctly disinterested in examining mobile content. Despite the excitement in the consumer space for mobile apps, corporate buyers had more pressing issues, and limited interest in putting content on mobile devices.

The first FreePint Report on the topic, published in October 2010, documented the results of in-depth interviews with information managers. Among the key barriers to mobile content deployment were:

• Security and authentication
• Lack of user demand
• Uncertainty about the real business value of supplying content on mobile devices

We repeated the interview process in 2011, speaking again with many of the same information managers to gain an understanding of what had changed in their organisations, and expanding the pool of interviewees to include different industries. Year 2 results, published in February 2012, already demonstrated a vastly different environment than the one our research described only a year previously.

In the span of a year, information managers were reporting that more pilot projects were underway. More users, particularly in the C-suite, were asking for content on mobile devices. Some organisations were already experimenting with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies.

Perhaps most significantly from FreePint's perspective, however, was the fact that information managers were actively investigating what it would take to become "mobile ready". One interviewee commented:

“There’s going to come a day when [the company] is going to distribute iPads to all workers. When that day comes, I’m going to need to have been preparing for 10 months.” 

Urgency Today

That report was published just under 10 months ago. Has that day already arrived? Perhaps not, but in many organisations -- far more than I would have predicted even a year ago -- that day is very close at hand.

Blame the C-suite, now addicted to their iPads. Blame the device manufacturers, who have succeeded in moving tablet devices from "nice to have" to ubiquitous. Blame the creative users, who have demonstrated how much more efficient and productive they can be with the right content in their hands when and where they want it.

All of these factors and more are contributing to the urgency for information managers and strategists to contribute to their organisational readiness for mobile content deployment.

The difficulty is that, as an industry, we have yet to truly define what mobile "readiness" looks like. There are are dozens of variables in this equation, and very few real-world experiences of success to guide us.

What Is Readiness?

Through what I've learned through ongoing study, I can offer up some guidelines to help you think about what readiness might look like in your organisation. I've developed the following guidelines through reflecting on the results of our formal research, as well as considering additional conversations with customers, questions and feedback during numerous presentations on the topic for communities of practice and individual customer organisations, and a review of FreePint Articles in the "mobile" category.

Areas of Engagement

Mobile readiness involves having the right individuals in an organisation engaged in working on the problem. Engagement requires a cross-departmental approach. If a single department "owns" mobile deployment, it is unlikely that all the key issues and challenges of the project are being addressed adequately.

Key stakeholders who should be engaged include, at minimum:

Implementation

The final main guideline for mobile readiness addresses implementation. Success in mobile content deployment is achieved through proper implementation, starting at the pilot level and then scaling up. 

Effective implementation requires:

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