Your Motivations for Going Mobile Better be Business Focused

By Dan Keldsen (@dankeldsen) Apr 19, 2011

I am going to examine what the motivations are for “going mobile” to make sure that any of your efforts are targeted at the richest and most directly business-impacting areas.

This is the third article in a series — at this point, we’ve covered:

Mobile Content & Collaboration: Let's Face It, You Aren't Ready — discussing the legacy issues that most companies struggle with from the perspective of IT, users, security, web developer, cultural and manager perspectives. Bottom line: You can’t just “go mobile” at the flick of your fingers.
Mobile Readiness: Begin With the End in Mind — discussing where to get started - fix everything you have now to be “fully mobile,” leave the mess and just move forward with new content in mobile world, or some hybrid? Bottom line: “Going Mobile” isn’t the goal (or shouldn’t be) - doing your work more effectively, more efficiently… with mobile, should be the goal.

Now let's look at motivations:

Rewind

A few folks have weighed in via Twitter that it seemed I was proposing “putting lipstick on a pig” (or attempting to get pigs to fly) with the approach I’ve been describing.

The assumption was that I seem to be promoting continuing to use legacy systems and slapping/hacking on (or more politically correct, “integrating”) a mobile interface to an old clunker.

How best to put this…

NO!

There is never just one way to solve a problem, and I’m not proposing keeping clunkers around due to any special fondness for “the good ‘ol boys of content.” (See recent news that Box.net hired long-term EMC executive, Whitney Tidmarsh for a sign of the changing times)

What I do believe, based on having swum in the waters of content management for 15 years or so, is that people put far more faith than is warranted in the latest and greatest technology.

Even as a long-time Apple fan, sadly, “magic devices” still don’t make you smarter, better looking, faster, more efficient, etc..

Mobile capabilities are revolutionizing what’s possible, but the question is… are you really ready for this? Yes, I know that’s how I kicked off this series, but it bears repeating.

Multiple Paths to Mobile-Ready

In the last article, we’d discussed completely overhauling systems/content collections, only addressing “day forward” new content and a hybrid approach.

Just to be clear, if you have a good reason for shutting down or migrating from an old system to a new system, completely and thoroughly, please do so.

However, putting a different, newer or “more modern” solution in place is unlikely to really solve your mobile pains.

What Does “Go Mobile” Mean to You?

Regardless of what you do, what I’m proposing is that you should only do what is necessary to tackle REAL BUSINESS PROBLEMS.

As Content Management professionals, it is easy to forget something that is incredibly important, and that I have to constantly remind myself of on a weekly basis.