Yesterday was a big day for Research in Motion. First, they did away with that name and will now be known everywhere as BlackBerry. And, unless you live in a cave, you know that they launched the new BlackBerry 10 OS and two new smartphone models to run it.
In the WSJ this week, Barry Libenson, CIO at Land O’Lakes (who let me interview him on how to make the perfect pizza dough a few months ago), said that he is no longer planning on supporting BlackBerrys.
What about you? Does BB10 still have a shot in your enterprise? Why, or why not?
Please share in the Comments section below.
Guest blog by Info-Tech Research Group.
Everything you know about Information Technology (IT) will change in the next five years. Everything. A perfect storm of technology trends (Mobility, Social Media, Cloud, Big Data and Security) is pushing technology beyond the IT department and into the business itself. Did someone in your organization ‘forget’ to tell you about a cloud service they purchased for their department on their credit card? Did they only ‘remember’ you once they needed it to integrate with a core system?
If this has happened to you, you need to change both the value you are delivering and the way you are delivering IT. Your goal should be to get involved in the conversation earlier. To do that you need to be seen as a business enabler, not a business inhibitor. IT used to be asked to “count the beans”. Now your job is to help the business grow more beans.
CIO reality check: If you don’t innovate, you’ll become irrelevant.
Let’s talk about your role in innovation. At one time, you were probably a Firefighter – reacting to problems all day long. In time you established some processes, got your feet under you, and became a Trusted Operator. In a recent study conducted by Info-Tech Research Group, 52% of CIOs still self-identified as Firefighters, 40% as Trusted Operators, and only 8% as Innovators. Imagine the results if you asked their CEOs instead.
If you want to remain relevant you are going to have to cross the Innovation Chasm.
Why does the Innovation Chasm exist? As a CIO, you have been charged with protecting your organization’s valuable assets, and with providing a reliable and stable infrastructure. As a result, you have become the “CI-No”:
- “No, we can’t buy that application you saw in an airplane magazine.”
- “No, we can’t have a new Web site built in two weeks.”
- “No, we can’t do that because it will expose our customer data.”
You could be the CI-No because you were the only game in town: if the business wanted access to technology, they had to come through you. That’s not the case anymore. One of the byproducts of the perfect storm is that the business can now access technology directly from the Cloud without your involvement, and without your knowledge. It happens in companies of all sizes, in every industry, regardless of your IT or security stance. When business has access to that technology, it widens the chasm.
IT has to up its game, and smart CIOs are on a path to help the business use technology to innovate both what they do and how they do it.
Let’s look at this a different way.
Chasms can be daunting, so it’s easier to approach innovation as a series of steps. Traditionally, CIOs have focused on those bottom steps, on helping to get the fundamentals right to provide highly available and highly secure computing platforms that support the business.
But increasingly CIOs efforts have to be focused on the next steps – what we at Info-Tech Research Group call the CIO Sweet Spot. Focus on achieving quick wins in the CIO Sweet Spot to earn a broader innovation mandate. You’ll know you’ve earned your mandate when the CEO, CFO, CMO and other members of the C suite look to you for technology-enabled business innovation that will help them lower costs, increase process efficiency and garner significant revenue gains.
To become an Innovator, you need to challenge your own organizational inertia, stay ahead of trends, and sustain and grow a disciplined process of innovation throughout your company. Info-Tech Research Group’s 3R’s of Innovation were designed to help you meet this challenge.
Reality. A business needs assessment of where you are today, and a mandate of what you need to do to remain relevant tomorrow.
Role. As a CIO, you are lucky enough to have a unique end-to-end view of your business and you should be the driving force behind much of what it takes for your company to innovate.
Results. Innovation does not just happen. It takes focus. It takes discipline. It takes process. We call it institutionalizing innovation. Info-Tech Research Group has a governance model, framework and hands-on tools and advice to help you make this happen in your organization.
By following the 3R’s of Innovation, you will find opportunities to drive innovation within your company, you will position your company for the future, and you personally will be seen as an innovator within your organization, which will reenergize you and give you new opportunities.
Info-Tech Research Group is a practical and tactical research and advisory firm that works with over 28,000 IT professionals to help deliver measurable results. If you would like to know more information about Info-Tech, please contact Jason Esler at jesler@infotech.com
Guest blog by MGI Research, excerpted from their State of Enterprise Mobile Apps Report, 2012
It’s not an understatement to say that developing enterprise mobile apps is a challenge. Setting a strategy, determining the right level of investment, creating appropriate metrics, and prioritizing mobile efforts in the next twelve months – this is a tall order to manage successfully. Given the youth of mobile apps, there are few reliable recipes for success, especially for companies looking to deploy on a large scale.
To address this gap, MGI Research conducted a focused study on mobile strategies, best practices, and metrics – The State of Mobile Apps 2012. The results should give every IT executive reason to pause.
With responses from over 250 companies across a range of industries and company sizes, the survey underscores the key drivers of mobile apps. The impetus for investing in mobile apps is quickly shifting from an initial focus on brand building and customer engagement to leveraging mobile apps for revenue generation. In fact, while in general most respondents indicated brand building and customer engagement as being critical or very important, over 70% of respondents from companies that have had a high degree of success in mobile apps rated revenue generation as the primary driver for their mobile investments.
| Over 70% of respondents from companies that have had a high degree of success in mobile apps rated revenue generation as the primary driver for their mobile investments. |
The technical priorities are an indicator of where organizations should be focusing their human capital resources and development attention. 88% of study respondents see creating a better mobile app user experience as either Critical or Very Important. For all the hype, creating a corporate app store received the lowest percentage of Critical responses.
The top three budget priorities were:
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Multi-platform app development tools,
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Building B2C apps vs. B2E and B2B apps, and
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Mobile security and privacy.
Looking at annual mobile budgets, those companies who claimed “Huge Success” with their mobile apps initiatives spent far more than the average – they spend $100,000 to $250,000. Ten percent of respondents overall spend over $250,000 annually on mobile apps. The level of spend contrasts with the widely held view that mobile apps are inexpensive, particularly when considering that they are relatively quick to develop – almost 95% of mobile apps are developed in 12 months or less, and nearly 40% are delivered within 3-6 months.
Business units are the dominant financial sponsors of mobile apps (45%), with corporate IT underwriting over 28% of apps development projects. Not surprisingly, there is a connection between successful apps and financial sponsorship – those with the most success engage the business units as the primary sponsor. Even though few companies have a clearly established line-item for mobile apps development and maintenance, especially within IT budgets, clearly this is coming.
Again, it’s interesting to note the relationship between which department is responsible for development and the level of success achieved. When Business Units are the primary developer, there is almost a two to one increase in the level of success. Maintenance of apps is falling on corporate IT – 63% of companies rely on the IT department for mobile apps maintenance.
In summary, the State of Mobile Apps 2012 dispelled a number of mobile apps myths.
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Myth #1 – Mobile apps are cheap to develop. While the data indicate this is true in absolute terms, for companies that report having the greatest success, they spend considerably more – up to ten times more in some cases.
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Myth #2 – Mobile apps are quick to develop. Yes, apps can be developed very fast, however the most successful companies report taking up to 50% more time than average developing a mobile app with impact.
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Myth #3 – Mobile apps are driven and controlled by Marketing. In fact, marketing’s involvement versus the contribution from Business Units and Corporate IT is modest at best. A critical success factor for mobile apps development appears to be the significant involvement of the lines of business (business units), with corporate IT involved as well.
2013 is poised to be a break-out year for enterprise mobile apps. Companies looking for topline revenue growth and new customer acquisition view mobile apps as a key part of their plans. Hiring talent around apps development, especially in the areas of interface development and user engagement, is becoming an IT imperative. And as every seasoned CIO knows, having a strategy for managing the life-cycle of mobile apps – i.e., maintenance and retirement, is essential. In the ever-changing world of mobile apps, it appears that by taking a measured view and having a willingness to invest incrementally more time and money yields the greatest success.
MGI Research serves technology decision makers with independent benchmarking, research, and advisory services. By using proprietary quantitative and qualitative methods, MGI Research helps clients apply data-driven analysis to key strategic, investment, and operational decisions. For more information, www.mgiresearch.com.