The Rules of Enterprise Mobility

During many mobile meetings, presentations, and discussions I've come across a collection of "Rules For Enterprise Mobility". These rules cover topics like selecting mobility tools, types of users and applications, mobility needs and a lot more. Let's start with three rules of three:

Rule of Three
Gartner coined the phrase "the rule of three" to help convey when it best makes sense to use a MEAP (Mobile Enterprise Application Platform). The idea is that you should consider a MEAP if you have any of the following needs:

• 3 x mobile applications
• 3 x device types
• 3 x back end systems

Of course a platform helps with these by providing security, integration, and write-once deploy-many tools that you may have to develop yourself if you go it alone. So that's a rule number 1.

Three Mobile Groups
Coincidentally there are three user groups that we typically identify as the target of mobile applications:

• B2E (Business to Employee/Enterprise)
• B2B (Business to Business)
• B2C (Business to Consumer)

Business to Employee/Enterprise applications are those which are used by employees of ones own company. Business to Business are used by partners or subcontractors and Business to Consumer are used by the general masses. Ok this is not really a rule per say but it's still mobility and involves the number 3.

Three Application Types
Thirdly there are 3 commonly recognised mobile application types:

• Web
• Native
• Hybrid

Each of these application types have their place and various pros and cons (for example portability, performance, learning curve, cost) which I've discussed in my previous blogs. I don't know if that's now 9 or 27 rules or if it makes sense to try to or correlate them further. It would be great if there was one rule to bind them all but Tolkien didn't write enterprise mobility.

Four C's 
In the blog by Christopher Koch the concept of the four C's is discussed to explain the scope of a mobility platform:

• Create
• Consume
• Connect
• Control

As Christopher explains a mobility platform for enterprise that covers each of these areas will add value to business and IT. Suggest you have a look at the Gartner quadrants for some good information on the various mobile platforms.

Seven Steps
The 7 Steps for an Enterprise Mobility Strategy are covered nicely in Spider 21's Weblog these are:

• Mobility Roadmap
• User Workflow Analysis
• Mobile Platform Selection
• Device/OS Selection
• Back-end integration
• Mobile app development
• Change Management.

Well worth a read to understand more about each of these important topics.

More Numbers?
I hope this selection of rules serves as a good reference for Enterprise Mobility and would love to hear some suggestions for more rules to include/update the article. If you are looking for detailed information on topics like Mobile Device Selection, Benefits of Mobility, or Mobile Testing then please follow the links or read through all the articles on this blog.