Michael Fauscette

The Mobile Enterprise

The smartphone market continues to see explosive growth, there are new tablets released monthly (or maybe that's weekly) and more and more companies are trying to support at least the two largest operating systems as employees continue to bring their own devices into the workplace and insist on using them for work. I suppose I could have written that statement last year or even the year before and it would be exactly the same. So if tablets have been in the workplace for 2 years and smartphones a few more, why does it seem like we're struggling to get everything out of the devices we so love to use?

Moving to a truly mobile enterprise work paradigm is not easy and frankly enterprise software vendors haven't necessarily been that much help either. Employees regularly tell me what they want from mobile devices, and it's really not that complicated to understand, they just want to be able to do most or all of what they can do at work from any connected device.  It's "any device, any time", but there's more to it than that. Employees need the real time connectivity that these devices offer, but they also need intelligent filtering and they need to have apps that are context aware (I could say this about all apps, but it's even more important on a mobile device).

Employees use of mobile devices is expanding as more functionality becomes available. From a base capability though, mobile is essential for collaboration and communication. Email still tops the list of mobile applications, but enterprise social networks (ESNs), IM, SMS, and collaborative file sharing are growing in use rapidly. There are also several categories of apps that are essential for mobile work like travel, expense management, project management / time reporting, sales force automation, etc. Workers are clambering  to move beyond these apps though, as mobile work extends to many other functions / roles. As the line betweek work and personal gets mroe and more blurry it will be even more important to provide access to enterprise systems and support an any device strategy.

In the enterprise there are two relevant scenarios for applications, one scenario is making the mobile device a "window" into existing enterprise apps and the other is adding mobile specific capabilities like mobile productivity tools. To get to existing apps vendors are using two approaches, either providing a native apps or building a web app using HTML5 that will work on any device with a browser. The web app approach is more cost effective for the vendor and is device agnostic, but from an experience standpoint can be somewhat lacking. Employees also regularly indicate that they prefer native apps to the browser approach. There is an alternate method to get access to corporate assets that many companies are using, mobile virtualization solutions like Citrix Receiver and VMWare Horizon. The virtualized approach provides secure and controlled access and supports any device. The only real limitation is the enterprise apps themselves, the presentation is not optimized for each device so sometime usability is a challenge.

For mobile specific apps the approach is most often to use native apps although there are a few services that use web apps or offer both native and web access. There are hundreds of thousands of apps available and many provide great benefit to the mobile worker. In some cases the apps are enterprise apps that provide unique capabilities in addition to the regular functions of the asset. For example providing an app that uses data from an existing enterprise app but allows analysis that takes advantage of a tablets format and UI.

From a monetization perspective mobile enterprise apps are a unique situation. For mobile apps that simply provide access to current enterprise software functionality there is really little opportunity to charge the customer for the app. It would be like charging for the client software on a notebook or desktop, just not realistic. For mobile specific apps there's a chance to change for value, either for the app itself or for the subscription service that the app supports. This also applies to mobile apps that provide additional functionality on top of current enterprise apps.

As a company how do you support the use of mobile devices in a world where employees want the newest, most advanced device regardless of OS or corporate support? The diversity of devices and the bring your own attitude is challenging IT in many organizations. In many companies the infrastructure that is deployed supports only a single OS, and an OS that is losing popularity and share rapidly. Many companies are (or have) replacing single OS focused mobile platforms with MEAPs that support multi-OS device deployments. In other companies the IT organization is supporting the new devices with one of the mobile virtualization solutions. It's easy to think of a mobile device as "just another client" that attach to your network, but in truth the architecture is not the same at all, it's mobile specific. 

In the future vendors will need to stop building for a device, and build for devices, or any device at any time. From a security and access perspective managing to a specific device is probably not the right answer. In fact if you could manage to the individual, not the device, it would be much easier to get to the any device, any time paradigm, and to secure the enterprise more effectively.

Tags: mobile, enterprise, MEAP, software, applications, socbiz, OS, virtualization, Citrix, VMWare

Email is Dead, Long Live Email!

Email isn't dead or on life support, it's alive and well in the business world. Email use is changing, I'll give you that, but I find myself reading and listening to people talk about how social is replacing email in the enterprise a lot lately. Trust me, it's not true (how about you, is your inbox significantly smaller than it was 2 years ago?), nor does it make any sense really. I've written about this before, this sponsored white paper for IBM, and a couple of posts here and here. The problem with email is not that it's not the proper tool for certain types of business communications, it's that email is used for many activities for which it was not designed, and in general it is overused to the point that most people feel inundated and overwhelmed by the volume. There are two threads to look at here, the business use of email and the private use of email and each thread is changing but in different ways.

Let's start with personal use of email. Personal email use is, at least based on all of the recent survey data I've seen, slowly declining. This shouldn't really be a surprise though, as social network use has increased the messaging systems, particularly on Facebook, have replaced the need for many types of personal email. Add to that the increased use of SMS, IM like Skype and Google Chat and it's easy to see that for many types of personal online interaction, email is actually a step out of the online environments where most of us spend the greatest part of our online time. In particular younger "digital natives" tend to shun email as old fashion. For my two teenage daughters if I need to email them something I would always send a txt message or a message on Facebook to check email, otherwise they check it erratically if at all. They also don't really have the same boundary "breaks" that I see in adults when it comes to online conversations. I've observed them carry on conversations with friends for hours, seamlessly changing "channels" of communication without missing a single part of the thread. What starts on Instagram could move to Facebook in real time, to SMS, to other IM, etc. and for them, it's all one continuous conversation.

Business use of email on the other hand, is not declining and is in fact growing at a steady single digit pace. As I've written before, there are just some things that email does better than IM, enterprise social networks (ESNs) with activity streams, file sharing (like Box and Sharepoint) or any other online tool. When it comes to interoperability outside the firewall, nothing beats email. For one to one or one to few secure communications, email is the best online tool again. What I am seeing in many companies that effectively implement an ESN, is freeing up of email from broadcasts / announcements, conversations, collaborative file sharing, collaborative work, etc. Use of email in an absolute seat basis is increasing but in some companies we've talked to, volume is declining. This is important to the overall goal of making email more manageable and off loading tasks to tools that are more suitable for the job.

For this off loading of tasks to more appropriate systems to continue / accelerate there are several areas where the other systems must continue to improve. I'd say the biggest challenge for any business communication tool is intelligent filtering, improved search, highly configurable notifications and context awareness. This is particularly true of ESNs, where the social tool for communication is mostly an activity stream. The word stream is appropriate and if the "current" is to strong it would be easy for critical information to flow right on by the people it's intended to reach. Having the ability to configure and use filtering that "learns" from your activities over time is one way to get important and relevant information in the correct hands, as are notifications that are controlled and set by each individual based on his/her information needs. Context aware information is an even more powerful concept, although currently it's not really technically widely available. As the ability for information to become "smart" increases the capability of the system to present relevant information to the correct employees and at the time of need would relieve a great deal of the current burden created by the increasing volume of data. Search is also a very important tool for employees to get to relevant information when needed. This is true in email clients as well as activity streams / ESNs and other communication and sharing tools.

Seamless conversations is an interesting concept that I suppose has roots in the unified communications (UC) activities of the past several years. It's not a hardware problem though, but as UC becomes more software focused it's possible to more easily solve the problem of how to easily move conversations across channels. This includes automating presence and availability. Taking this further I think that we eventually need to get to a federated or  consolidated client that pulls all online communications channels into a single UI, presumably in the ESN. While several companies including IBM and Microsoft are working in this direction we have some way to go technically before it's a reality.

Lastly I suppose there is the other wide use of email, that is, for high volume broadcast marketing (hopefully highly targeted and personalized, but personally the vendors that send me email are not particularly good at targeting). The volume of marketing email continues to rise. It's not surprising, there's really not a great alternative to it, and yet, the more it grows the less effective it is overall. Permission based email marketing is a great concept, but it falls down on targeting and shear volume. I now have one inbox that's so overloaded with marketing emails that I don't even check it anymore. Unfortunately my main personal inbox is also starting to see quite a lot of marketing emails. Now I wouldn't, at least for the most part call it spam (my gmail spam filter does a pretty good job there). But even for brands that I've given permission I find that I often delete the email unread. I get a lot of email and frankly the marketing emails are probably just too much. I do read some, but the subject MUST be compelling and I need to know that the targeting is at least reasonably accurate. I'm often surprised at how bad companies with massive amounts of my transaction data are still at targeting (Amazon, please pay attention). Now there's a good argument for why socialytics and analytics have to get better and companies have to use that information to individualize each customers' experience.

So what do you think, is email on life support? Is your company trying to replace email with other new social tools? Are you being successful? Leave me a comment, I'd love to get some more examples in either direction.

Tags: email, ESN, socbiz, social business, customers, CX, UC, Microsoft, IBM, Google

Managing Social Network "Sprawl"

At the recent YamJam12 conference there was quite a bit of discussion of the concept of social network sprawl. Not a new concept of course, and something that I have tracked over the past year or so as more companies are deploying enterprise social networks (67% of North American companies are implementing / using some type of social software according to a recent IDC survey), and as more software vendors start to embed varying types of networks and communities in other enterprise software products. On one hand, the move to embed networking capabilities into other software is a welcome trend, the more the ESN exists at the work process level the more likely it is that employees will adopt and use the system, which increases the value of the network. The problem, or maybe I should say the risk, is that these networks are hampered by the fact that most enterprise software, particularly from different vendors, is not particularly easy to integrate, or at least isn't pre-integrated. This could lead to the proliferation of the very problem that these networks are supposed to solve (or at least help to solve), the various networks end up as silos.  

I guess the first question is whether this is really a problem. Many companies have more than one instance of an ESN, often caused by the grass roots nature of early social experimenting. Many of the current ESN tools are available in a free version so there's a very low barrier for bringing them into a company. It's also likely that those networks are in different departments, not "officially" sponsored or approved, and only adopted by a limited number of employees. At the point that the company reaches a higher level of maturity there's generally an effort to consolidate on a single, approved ESN and to kill off the other networks. How successful that effort is depends on a bunch of factors including how the approved ESN is implemented, which tool it actually is (does it really meet the needs of the business, is it a good user experience, were the users actually involved in its selection or was it forced on them by IT, etc.) and do the other tools have to strong a hold on a specific population of users. There is certainly the possibility that the effort to consolidate might not really eliminate all of the other existing networks.

The other source of the network sprawl could be from networks embedded in other systems. In some functional areas there is at least an argument that a specialized network might be a better fit. If there are special feature requirements that are captured by the embedded network if might be in the best interest of the users to implement it in that business area. Human capital management (HCM) systems for example, seem to be on the forefront of this trend, both Oracle Fusion HCM and Workday HCM include an embedded social network. Oracle Fusion HCM is solving the issue itself in a future release as it will replace the embedded network with its standard ESN product, Oracle Social Network (ESN). The trend though seems to have some momentum and might continue to add to the proliferation of ESNs and thus add to the sprawl.

So what's the solution to network sprawl. At the simplest form, integration is the key to dealing with ESN sprawl in most businesses. It's not unreasonable to expect that many businesses will find use cases for more than one ESN tool, particularly as more tools become embedded inside other enterprise software. The ESN for many companies could really be an interconnected set of networks that solve different business problems. From a best practices standpoint though, I think that businesses will need to establish a social backbone with an overarching and very feature rich ESN to be the connection point for all the other networks. In fact, there is also a need to include communities that exist outside of the corporate firewall, like customer communities, partner communities, supplier / trading communities and maybe even some public social networks. Yammer's CEO, David Sacks referred to this concept as building an enterprise social graph. What ever you call it, each business will have to define its own set of communities and networks, and ensure that each is properly integrated to prevent the proliferation of organizational and system silos.

Tags: social, socbiz, social network, ESN, enterprise, Yammer, integration, HCM