Mobile App or Mobile Web?

At the outset of many new mobile initiatives there’s a debate about whether it will be best to develop the desired mobile capability as a mobile app or mobile website.  Each approach has its virtues and fans and, over the last several years, much as been written about the effectiveness of both approaches.

For scenarios where a single approach—a mobile app or the mobile web—will be selected there are a number of comparison points that will decisively sway the argument, depending on the unique characteristics of your business objectives and technical environment.

The tables below identify key points of comparison, which we’ve grouped into three categories: 

• Strategic and Operating Concerns
• Target User Engagement
• Devices and Hardware Integration

Next, we’ve rated the relative strengths of each approach on a simple scale.  Please note that the priority of each comparison is completely dependent on the nature of your targeted business capabilities and objectives.

Strategic and Operating Concerns

Strategic and operating concerns are those factors that will directly impact important mobile initiative planning, including:

• Time and Cost
• Security
• Product Marketing
• Product Development Roadmap

Summary

Clearly each approach has its strengths.  The mobile web is fast to deliver, cost-effective, has great reach, is easy to deploy and update.  Mobile apps are highly flexible and have few boundaries, are highly secure, and provide rich data to drive business insights.

Target User Engagement

Next, target user engagement highlights those factors that most likely to indicate whether a mobile initiative will be well targeted to the intended users and able to influence desired behaviors, including:

• Quality of User Experience
• Online/Offline Support
• Ability to Actively Engage Users

Summary

By almost every measure mobile apps provide a richer, more interactive and engaging user experience.  That said, the mobile web is still great at enabling a user to quickly lookup information such as a store location.

Device and Hardware Integration

Lastly, device and hardware integration factors will indicate which approach is best given the following needs:

• Access to Device Hardware
• General Device Integration
• Device Support

Summary

Again, mobile apps are much more completely and capably integrated with users’ mobile devices in just about every case.  The mobile web, however—even with browser support challenges, still shines as the best way to go to market on the greatest number of devices.

Closing Thoughts

Planning the best approach for your mobile initiative is a complex task.  And it's important to understand the far-reaching consequences of the decisions required to bring a mobile product to market that will deliver desired business outcomes. 

Making the right decision—mobile web or mobile app—is just one of many decision points along the journey.

A Simple Guide to Assessing Mobile Maturity

“Jim, how do our company’s mobile capabilities rank against our competitors?  What do we need to do be the Uber of our industry?”  

If you’re Jim, you have your work cut out.  Often you’ll want to start with an effort to gauge your current “mobile maturity”—where you are now—and then map out steps to grow and compete at a target level.

Assessing your organization’s level of mobile maturity is a daunting task—the mobile ecosystem is a large, fluid and complex web of people, processes and technologies.  And shooting for “Uber-fication” is a tall order only a few companies—all startup/disruptors—have mastered.  What’s more, by the time you complete a typical full organizational evaluation and plot a path forward the landscape will have shifted, sometimes significantly. 

Industry Guide Posts

Looking to leading industry analysts, Forrester and Gartner each provide approaches to evaluating mobile maturity based on progressive frameworks.

Based on the seminal book The Mobile Mind Shift, Forrester has developed the Mobile Mind Shift Maturity Framework (subscription required).  In short, Forrester sees mobile maturity as a progression through four key stages:

Gartner takes a five-stage approach to their Mobile Maturity Model (subscription required) which is more process improvement oriented:

Both models are very useful maps for pinpointing your current position, identifying steps to improve outcomes and finally transforming your business.  However, as Gartner pointed out in a recent webinar, “evaluating all the elements [of mobile maturity] takes too much time” and that “a complete evaluation may not tell more than a limited one.”

Getting a Mobile Maturity Snapshot

So, what’s an efficient and effective approach if you want to get a quick snapshot of your current position?  Based on working with a variety of clients’ (of widely varying levels of maturity) mobile initiatives over the years, we believe that there are seven key areas that go a long way toward quickly determining current mobile maturity level:

1. Prioritization
2. Measurement
3. Ownership
4. Governance
5. Talent
6. Technology
7. Customer Experience

For each area (and in no particular order) we’ll briefly describe three levels of maturity on the scale and also reference related posts should you wish to dig in further.

How does your organization identify and then determine which mobile initiatives will be worked on?  (See also Why Your Mobile Initiative Isn’t Getting Funded)

How does your organization measure mobile initiative success?  (See also Developing a Mobile Analytics Strategy)

 

How does your organization approach management of mobile products?  (See also Mobile Project Vs. Mobile Product)

How does your organization manage mobile initiatives and products over time?  (See also Eight Reasons Why You Need Mobile Governance)

 

How does your organization ensure that top minds are designing, delivering and evolving product?  (See also Magenic Technologies' Best in Class Consultants or Learning on Your Dime)

 

How does your organization ensure the technology foundation for mobile initiative investment will be effective and durable?  (See also Magenic Technologies’ Choosing a Mobile Development Platform)

How does your organization ensure that customers’ (internal, partners, external) mobile experiences are high quality and exceed expectations?  (See also Frictionless Mobile Experiences and Why They Matter)

Closing Thoughts

While the journey toward mobile maturity for each client is unique, we've learned a great deal from our own and clients’ mobile successes (and failures) over the years.

Maybe you’ve been scoring your organization as you’ve been reading.  How did you do?  Of course, the biggest room in the house is always the room for improvement!

Capturing the Mobile Moment

If your company’s enterprise mobile efforts are primarily focused on deploying devices and writing policies, you may be losing a definitive battle in the war to win, serve and retain customers, employees and partners.

To wit, we see competitive advantage being successfully realized by business leaders that focus on identifying and leveraging what Forrester Research calls “mobile moments”.  

Prominent success stories like Uber, founded in 2009 and now estimated at worth more than $50B USD, illustrate how responding to a customer’s moment of need with a tailored mobile experience creates significant value.

Mobile Moments

Most of us are familiar with the term “customer journey”—a series of increasingly complex touch points and interactions between a business and its customers, partners and employees.  

Mobile moments are points in time and space along the customer journey when someone pulls out a mobile device to get what he or she wants in the context of that immediate want.

Here’s a simple example in a familiar consumer retail context (more examples):

Mobile Moment	Context	Action in App
Where’s the nearest location?	Nearby, in a car, walking	Locate nearby locations
Can I get a free drink?	Waiting in line	Check rewards balance
Can I pay using my app?	Waiting in line	Check available balance
Pay for my drink/food	At checkout	Use rewards or scan to pay

From an enterprise perspective, it’s important to realize that mobile moments aren’t limited to customer-facing interactions—employees and partners experience many mobile moments, too.  Typically, these mobile moments surface when employees need to consume information, communicate or share information, perform a transaction, or create something.  

In short, companies need to enable employees and partners to make the most of their interactions with customers and colleagues, and take direct action to get things done regardless of location.

Micro Moments

Because opportunities to take advantage of mobile moments have been available for several years now, consumers’ expectations for immediacy, simplicity and context-based relevancy have increased.  Alongside rising expectations, advances in technology such as wearables, iBeacons, analytics, connected products, sensors, interactive icons and notifications have given rise to the “micro moment”.

What is a micro moment?  A micro moment is a mobile moment that requires only a glance to identify and delivers quick information that it can either be consumed or acted on immediately.  Information may be a text, sound, notification, vibration, or icon change that proactively anticipates a need based on user’s context or preferences.

Examples of micro moments include being alerted to a stolen credit card, delayed flight, price change, sports score or bill due.  More complex examples intelligently examine several services to create new information.  For example, a business contact with whom you’ve been exchanging email regarding a meeting is determined to be nearby and your calendar has an open slot—a notification is triggered for you to take action and send an invitation.  (Additional examples of micro moments from marketing and enterprise productivity perspectives.)

Leveraging Mobile Moments is a Challenge

For established businesses identifying mobile moments and strategically leveraging them to create or enhance value can be a real challenge.  Forrester Research reports that:

• Less than half of digital business professionals surveyed have even identified the unique needs of customers on the go
• Only 28% use context to deliver relevant services or to streamline and personalize the delivery of their mobile content and services
• More than a third used mobile apps and websites as scaled-down versions of the corporate website

Clearly, many companies are grappling with engaging mobile customers effectively in their mobile moments, whether they be consumers, partners or employees.  Why?  There are a wide range of inertial factors from significant business process change requiring a mobile mind shift to technical architecture limitations.  

In short, a successful effort to engage mobile users in their mobile moments will require new, innovative approaches to all aspects of your business.

Where to Start?

Begin with creating a strategic plan to assess business opportunities to leverage mobile moments:

• Identify, organize and prioritize business mobile moment opportunities based on user needs, value, complexity and ability to execute
• Build an integrated roadmap with client product owners and stakeholders, including features, supporting/shared technologies, and dependencies for prioritized initiatives that lays out a plan for product development for near (~1 year) and long-term (~2+ years)
• Assist clients in identifying KPIs and success scenarios to ensure that the right approach is taken to realize objectives
• Envision and develop proof of concept for target near-term initiatives that richly illustrate key interactions and may be used to socialize a very tangible representation of product value

The Right Moment for Enterprise Mobility is Now

One of the toughest elements in mobility for many enterprises to understand and internalize is that mobility is not a destination…it is a journey.

The mobile ecosystem (devices, OS's, development frameworks, etc.) is changing so rapidly that enterprises waiting for the “right time” to jump into mobility will be at a competitive disadvantage.

Get a good partner to help you, get a strategic plan based upon your business’s mobile moments and get going on your own mobile journey.

Developing a Mobile Analytics Strategy

Would you invest in a stock if there were no way to track its valuation?  Owning the stock would be a blind venture:  no way to know if you should buy, sell—or if you’ve already lost your shirt.

Similarly, to make confident investments in a mobile products portfolio you need to establish clear measurement of progress against business objectives, proactively track performance, and create actionable insights to guide future product development.  

Mobile analytics enable you to execute on all these critical tasks.  And, according to MIT research, top performing companies tend to leverage analytics 5 times more than competitors.

Here are a few examples of how mobile analytics data enabled companies to directly improve business results:

• Comcast used analytics to improve its recruiting mobile app’s user experience and saw a dramatic impact on its overall recruiting results, with mobile applicants increasing by over 20% overall and mobile candidates completing their applications at a rate of over 50%
• Overstock.com used insights gained from Flurry’s mobile analytics to increase in-app purchases per user by 25%
• Airbnb improved conversion rates 5x using Mixpanel’s mobile analytics

Creating a mobile analytics strategy would seem to be a obvious part of every mobile product development effort.  However, it is often an after-thought at best.  Why?  

The simplest answer is that delivery teams focus on what’s needed to get an app to market, not how to manage business results.  But—much like managing a stock portfolio—it’s imperative to plan from the start how to measure, track and improve a mobile product over time.

Now, mobile analytics can be a complex topic.  There are a variety of vendor solutions, many of which are web-oriented solutions that have recently bolted on mobile capabilities rather than being truly fine-tuned for mobile.  (On the other hand, the traditional web analytics solutions more readily offer cross-channel insights, especially if your choice of mobile analytics tool is not integrated.)  In any case, among the mobile-focused vendors, while there is a lot of functional overlap, products are often targeted for specific business models or types of analysis.  

So, how to start?  Here we’ll explore three steps to creating and implementing a mobile analytics strategy.

Plan

Initially, there are three main categories of information you should focus on supporting:

• Business Measures of Success/KPIs.  Each product has a unique set of business outcome or success measures—these KPIs can include business results, technology performance, user behavior, and so on.  Whatever the business objective, make sure that the data required to calculate each KPI is accurately captured.  Also, know that KPIs may change over time as you gain insight and product matures.  Your objective is to ensure that all stakeholders can track the KPIs by which products’ contribution to the business is measured.
• Technology and Operational Monitoring.  Track technical aspects of product performance; for example, response time for a key operation, which devices are being used, app crash details, network connectivity, etc.  Your objective is to proactively surface defects and performance issues—before they are posted in a negative review or result in app deletion—that prevent users from enjoying an optimal experience.
• Engagement, Tracking User Behavior.  Prepare to listen for users’ signals about how and when they use the app, favored features, interactions and paths through the app.  Your objective is to connect the data points to surface insights on how to improve the aspects of user experience that are important to overall success.

In short, the data you track should support creation of information that either alerts you to issues to address or opportunities to explore.  This information will be historical (older than 24 hours), operational (today) or real-time.  

Plan to start simply:  Start small, test data accuracy and relevance, and iterate often—just like you’re doing with your mobile product as a whole.  Then assess the data and information you’re getting (or not getting) and optimize data being tracked—or even which tools are being used—to ensure you’re  generating actionable information.

Next, over time and as your analytics capabilities become more relevant and accurate, plan to generate insights from users’ cross-channel experiences, not just mobile.

Finally, ensure that everyone—including the development team—has access to the data so that they can suggest ways contribute to product improvement.

Select Tools

When should you select mobile analytics tools?  The answer is as soon as your product feature roadmap and supporting technology stack is established.  

As noted above, there are many mobile analytics tools available.  What’s more, mobile analytics tools are relatively new and immature.  So, what approach and which tool(s) to choose? 

Selection of the right analytics tools for your specific application can be a complicated task as vendors tend to be focused on various aspects of analytics; for example, app store analytics vs. crash data vs. defined user event analytics.

Here are some general principles to guide you:

• Start with what’s free and basic—a combination of Google Analytics and Flurry.  These two popular tools, along with the app store tools (if your app is in the public app stores), will provide a strong foundation.  Also, there are open source options, such as Countly, available.
• Understand your product’s category.  Don’t pick an analytics tool geared for mCommerce if your app is more focused on content delivery.  Also, assume that over time a blend of tools will be necessary to meet your specific needs.
• Understand your product roadmap.  Pick analytics tools that will grow with you—and that you can still afford—as you add features, users, platforms and/or countries.
• Look for features that enable you to clearly comprehend and quantify user behavior.  Two such features are   session playback, which lets you watch a simulation of actual users actions in your app, and heatmaps, which help you visualize which parts of your applications are highly utilized.
• Ensure that app architecture is designed to enable you to easily use multiple and/or switch mobile analytics tools as needed.
• Consider how you will track user activity across devices.  Tools like Google’s Universal Analytics track user paths across devices.

As you refine your selection of tools and approach, don’t forget to leverage enterprise data from operations, customer support, marketing or other relevant sources to build unique insights into your business and its customers.

Act

Beginning to collect product analytics data when your app goes live is missing a very valuable opportunity:  beta and/or pilot data.  A pre-release period using an early adopter group or a savvy user set (for example, through PreApps) can yield a significant amount of actionable analytic data.  

You may discover, for example, that real-world users don’t use your app the way you envisioned and you need to make navigational or usability changes, drop or add features, optimize technology performance or re-prioritize your roadmap—valuable insights that will make your general availability release more successful.

Analytics data is often your first alert—before user reviews or even a phone call from customer support—that something is amiss.  Consequently, when your app goes live establish a regular schedule to review analytics data.  If your app is customer/consumer facing you may choose to review salient data daily with a full weekly review, including carefully sifting through data to discern trends and user signals.  Make sure to provide all stakeholders with regular KPI reporting, as well as actionable insights you’ve developed.

Finally, make sure that the information generated from your mobile analytics is appropriately factored into continued product roadmap planning.  Objective data should play a significant role in feature prioritization (what to keep, improve or drop), evaluation of underlying technology performance, user experience design effectiveness, and quality to name just a few areas of influence.

Closing Thoughts

We believe that all enterprise mobile apps—whether for the employees, partners or customers/consumers—can significantly benefit from the insights enabled by mobile analytics.  We'd recommend that everyone plan to deliver durable value by developing and implementing a clear mobile analytics strategy for each mobile product in their portfolio.

Frictionless Mobile Experiences—and Why They Matter to You

We’ve all now heard how important a great mobile user experience is to customers.  But what is a “frictionless” mobile experience?

In the mobile context, “frictionless” means to simplify key elements of the user experience to the point where they’re almost unnoticed, taken for granted—and therefore truly delightful, and ultimately more useful.

Popular Examples
Let’s look at a few well-known examples:

Uber

Using location-tracking technology Uber knows where you are (you don’t have to supply an address) and the driver closest to you.  This makes getting a cab quickly one button press away—it couldn’t be any simpler.

Then, when your ride is complete, you just walk away.  No fishing for payment or tip, no receipt—no waiting while the cabbie fumbles for their manual credit card imprinter.  Secure.  Awesome!

Amazon

Amazon launched one-click buying in 2000.  Complex on the backend, but a simple-as-possible customer experience.

Now, with Amazon Dash, Amazon has made buying replenishable items even easier.  You’re out of laundry detergent?  Click a button mounted by your washer and another container of laundry detergent is shortly at your doorstep.  The cost of the Amazon Dash Button is rebated on your first purchase and shipping (with Prime) is free.  With apologies to Office Depot, this is the “Easy Button”!

Square

Square has something for both retailers and customers.  First, for retailers, Square is a small device that turns any connected smartphone or tablet into a point of sale terminal.  And transaction fees are lower than most competitors.

For customers and retailers alike, Square delights by associating your credit card with your account.  As a result, the retailer now has no need to print a receipt as your receipt will go directly to your email address—and you don’t have to carry a receipt or enter your email address (after the first time).  A very simple transaction for both parties.

Now let’s look at how to create a frictionless experience from another angle:  the learning pattern the experience requires.  Typical mobile experiences tend to be cognitive; that is, the learning pattern requires the user to read basic instructions in order to learn how to use an app.  Frictionless app experiences, however, tend to be perceptional where the learning pattern provides the user just enough information to allow an empathetic engagement where the user can “feel” their way through the experience.  No instructions required.

Here are several more examples from a learning pattern perspective:

Domino’s Pizza iPad App

By using a known, almost pre-prescribed perceptual learning pattern, customers engage and “play” with building the order they want.  Little or no cognitive learning is needed and the experience is almost entirely perceptual.  Customers are engaging in the experience without really knowing it.  The “why” can be understood by Domino’s mission statement: “Sell more pizza, make more fun."  The experience was so well received it got Domino’s a webby. 

Motion Savvy App

Natural user interfaces (NUI) are redefining what “frictionless” experiences can be.  Not only can they provide intuitive engagement patterns that are built on a perceptual learning model, they can take very complex cognitive learning patterns and translate them. The Motionsavvy mobile app uses a NUI to provide a masterful engagement model that will only become more mainstream as a learnable model.  Voice, eye tracking, gesture tracking and location will be the new input devices for these emerging models.  The “Why” is rooted in the source of all of user experience… the right accessibility offered in the best mental model.  Leap, Kinect for Windows, and Myo are all emerging and will redefine how we engage with our devices.

Shyp App

Using a very simple experience the customer becomes part of the process verses just engaging with an app. Simple, direct, and a clever model that plays on the embedded expectations that customers already have with regard to buying and selling on the web.

So, why does all this matter to you?  Because without a conscious focus on creating a frictionless experience pitfalls await.  A few examples:

• It is all too easy to simply duplicate an experience designed for the web
• Mobile’s unique hardware capabilities are not well used (e.g., GPS/location services)
• The mobile ecosystem is not effectively leveraged and you lose opportunities to add value

In short, you risk losing mobile users and that means losing significant business to competitors who are thinking how to create a frictionless experience.

How to Eliminate Friction
So, how can you make your mobile users’ experience frictionless?  Here are a few suggestions to get started:

• Simplify registration and authentication.  Use Facebook, Google+ or another service—don’t make users create yet another user account with IDs and passwords they won’t remember.  Use biometric authentication—no one forgets their thumb.  And don’t make a user log in unless they have logged out on purpose (secure apps like financials, healthcare, excepted).
• Respect users’ time (and lack of patience).  Can data be loaded in the background?  Can important information be shown on one screen instead of two?  Can a transaction be completed with one tap instead of two?  Or better, can you do something valuable for the user without their explicit input (e.g., use location services to fix their location, determine time to get to an appointment, etc.)?
• Use appropriate learning patterns.  “Intuitive” is overused when describing mobile user experiences.  But what we’re aiming for is an experience that flows (e.g., is perceptional), needs almost no explanations, clearly identifies objectives and makes it easy to perceive how to reach them.
• Remember.  Remember me and my data so that I don’t have to re-type anything.  If I have to input data, make it easy—for example, accept voice input or a text message (see what /Slash has done to make things easier).
• Leverage context.  Is the user at home, in a store, at an event or favorite haunt?  If they’re in a store, push information they want like offers or coupons.  If they’re at an event, inform them when friends are nearby.  Anticipate needs and desires.
• Technical ecosystem.  To make things even more seamless, make sure you take advantage of the users’ technology ecosystem.  For example, a user may have a smartwatch, TV device, tablet, etc.  How can those devices—all with their unique usage contexts—become part of a complete and satisfying experience?
• Experience ecosystem.  What partnerships with other apps might support your offering of a complete experience?  For example, Spotify partnered with Nike+ and RunKeeper to deliver music while users are exercising.  Sonos, who makes wireless audio systems, partnered with Pandora and Spotify to enable Sonos users to play their music libraries from directly inside the Sonos app.  Less friction, more satisfaction.

And, last of all, pay attention to the user experience through analytics and automated reporting of application issues—there’s always room for improvement.

Closing Thought
Create the frictionless mobile experiences users crave and meet your business objectives successfully.  Do something amazing!

Eight Reasons Why You Need Mobile Governance

Starting your enterprise mobile journey often appears deceptively easy.  

Someone identifies a business need for mobility, responds to a stakeholder’s interest or competition demands a mobile capability and then you either build or buy a solution.

What's the Worst that Could Happen?
However, companies quickly find that this ad hoc, tactical approach to enterprise mobility leads to a number of unfortunate results.  A few typical examples we see:

• The “brand injury” – User experience and brand representation is poor and creates any variety of off-message perceptions by employees, customers and/or partners.
• The “one-hit wonder” – No plan for product enhancement, not built for support and maintenance, architecture creates many risks such as privacy breeches, compliance problems, performance issues, etc.  See also “brand injury.”
• The “money pit” – Development approach is unsuited for meeting business objectives and much re-work, delays and technical debt result.  Or pursuing this project eats up budget for another more strategic project.  Executives regret they ever approved the work and mobile as a whole loses momentum.
• The “over-promise” – Inexperienced product teams are unable to meet business objectives due to technical challenges/delays, lack of stakeholder involvement, unrealistic expectations for success (or no defined success criteria), lack of user insight or inability to pivot based on actual results.
• The “stinker” – Skunk works project distracts key resources from valuable work, duplicates another initiative or is not aligned with the business, no effective leverage of best practices, infrastructure, existing code or business logic.  Who approved this?!  See also “one-hit wonder.”
• The “duplicate” – Someone decides that what’s needed is a mobile app that duplicates all the functionality of an existing web app or fat client app.  The app doesn’t address users’ “mobile moments” and is quickly on its way to life as shelf ware.  See also “brand injury” and “money pit.”

To avoid these common pitfalls, companies should make the investment not just in mobile development, but also in mobile governance.  

What exactly is mobile governance?  While mobile development is the execution of a specific release of a mobile product roadmap, mobile governance focuses on how to most effectively execute on all aspects of an organization’s mobile strategy, including management, measurement, best practices and standards—all with the objective of being best in class and achieving competitive advantage.

To better illustrate what mobile governance is and how it can help you be more effective, here are eight reasons why you need mobile governance:

Strategic Alignment and Focus

Making the right investments in mobile requires involving stakeholders from across the business, as well as key partners and customers.  This diverse group is best positioned to identify, organize, prioritize and fund mobile opportunities for the company as a whole and ensure alignment with overall business objectives and digital strategy.

To facilitate stakeholders’ priorities, the mobile governance team must socialize and manage mobile initiatives as a cohesive program made up of a number of product development efforts which will yield clear benefits.

Plan to periodically review prioritization—the competitive landscape and technology opportunities are highly fluid.

Business and Technical Oversight

Business oversight through the mobile governance team can prevent many of the negative scenarios described above.  Focus areas for business oversight include:

• Product portfolio management and product roadmap direction
• Legal and compliance
• Marketing and brand alignment
• Operational alignment, integration and readiness, including acceptance testing, pilot programs

Like business oversight, technical oversight has a major role to play in prevention of negative scenario development by providing clear guidance and support in the following areas:

• Support for and best use of enterprise mobile infrastructure
• Best practices for architecture and development, security
• User-centered design, adherence to platform standards
• Technical standards and approaches, preferred tools
• Quality management and testing methodologies, tools

Expectation Management

Like all nascent technologies, mobile is full of hype.  And, according to Forrester Research, even the most successful mobile applications take at least three major release cycles to find the right balance and meet business objectives; many must make a significant pivot after the first and/or second release.  Consequently, one of the most important functions of the mobile governance team is to set and manage expectations, including:

• Return on investment (ROI)—and when to typically expect it
• Total cost of ownership (TCO) for a product with many releases vs. a project
• Challenges and barriers to success.  Common example:  Immature or non-existent mobile infrastructure is a serious barrier to the best laid product plans and may require significant remediation and investment to enable the business to meet objectives for mobile initiatives
• Need for innovation and velocity.  Many sponsors expect they’ll just need one release this year—it’s the mobile governance team that needs to set enterprise expectations for competitive innovation and the development velocity to support it
• User expectations.  Much has been made of the “consumerization” of IT—and this applies particularly to mobile.  Product owners need direction on how to build the right experiences for different user groups.

Momentum

When it comes to building mobile capabilities for the enterprise and integrating mobile into overall digital strategy, companies often struggle to make progress—especially if they experience one or more the unfortunate scenarios described earlier.  

The mobile governance team must be well-positioned to drive enterprise visibility to and awareness of mobile initiatives.  By reaching the organization as a whole the mobile governance team can help drive collaboration among the many constituents required to design, build and maintain a successful mobile program.

Measurement and Reporting

The high percentage of mobile initiatives that have no or ill-defined success criteria would likely surprise you.  Or success criteria is defined but there’s no way to actually collect the supporting data.  At a higher level, mobile programs also need established measures of success and periodic reporting of results.

The mobile governance team must drive common measures of success for individual products.  Clear, regular and relevant communication of results by product teams will strengthen program momentum.  In addition, the mobile governance team should establish and report measurement of the mobile program as a whole.  

Finally, mobile governance should set standards for the use of mobile analytics and integration of mobile data into enterprise business intelligence to catalyze cross-channel insights.

Brand Protection

Design, quality and innovation signal brand vitality to employees, partners and customers.  One of the mobile governance team’s core tasks is to closely align with marketing to ensure:

• Product fit in overall brand strategy
• Brand guidelines are appropriately implemented
• User experience supports and enhances brand personality

Moreover, the mobile governance team must be a beacon that guides product teams in designing products that support brand cohesion.

Leverage and Scalability

Product teams tend to work in silos, especially if they are in separate business units or functional organizations.  This organizational fragmentation is difficult to oversee and often leads to inconsistent implementation of standards even when they exist.

One of the most important roles the mobile governance team can play is to enable organizational and technology leverage and scalability.  For example, coach product teams on best use of:

• Existing infrastructure services
• Common, reusable components and code
• Abstraction and configuration over custom or single-use code
• Skilled resources across products
• Agile methodology to achieve velocity

Equally valuable, the mobile governance team should foster cross-team sharing of experiences, lessons learned and how they implemented enterprise best practices.

Supportability

With product teams rightly focused on velocity, without oversight supportability is a frequent casualty.  And, as a result, products go into production that the organization is ill-equipped or prepared to support.

Consequently, the mobile governance team must establish application architecture standards for supportability, a clear process for support transition for various release types (major, minor, break/fix), and guidance for prioritization of common issues (new OS version support, device support, etc.).

In addition, the mobile governance team should set the enterprise standard for support tools such as EMM (enterprise mobile management, formerly mobile device management (MDM), MAM, and so on, to ensure operational support is effectively using tool capabilities to support the business.

Closing Thoughts

Clearly there are many persuasive reasons for organizations to consider implementing mobile governance.  However, mobile governance doesn’t have to start with a full Mobile Center of Excellence to be effective.  Start with a mobile "community of practice", grow toward a steering committee approach, and then, when your mobile product portfolio can support it, create a center of excellence.