CIOs Must Focus on 2nd Gen Mobile Strategies

As the expectations from employees
and customers keep rising over how they can use their mobile devices to access
and interact with data, CIOS must build the next generation of mobile
strategies to meet them, Gartner analysts said at the recent Gartner
Symposium/ITxpo event.

Due to the rapid shift of business
and societal drivers around mobility infrastructure, Gartner analysts say that
in 2012 CIOs will need to be prepared with a strategy that covers three
distinct mobile issues.

The first prong of the strategy
should be an employee-facing plan to address issues such as collaboration,
role-specific applications such as sales force automation, the increased
consumerization of IT and filling in gaps within basic collaboration.

The second and third prongs of the
strategy should focus on consumer-facing issues. One part of that should deal
with the more tactical issues that will crop up within the next 12-month window
and the other on strategic issues around slower-moving plans for technologies
like Long Term Evolution (LTE).

“Second generation mobile strategies
differ considerably from those of the first generation,” said Leif-Olof Wallin,
research vice president at Gartner. “They must be multichannel, part of your
holistic digital strategy, as well as including innovative mobile-only
capabilities. They must include a wide variety of mobile endpoints including
mobile to mobile  and be prepared for the
day that native applications are overtaken by HTML5.”

With regard to the employee-facing
strategy, Wallin warns CIOs that as employees continue to behave more like
consumers, IT will find it must fulfill demands for a wider choice of devices
and learn to operate and secure an environment full of consumer devices loaded
up with applications from app stores. Meanwhile, on the consumer side, the
rapid change of preference to use mobile channels over PC and Web channels mean
that organizations that can best meet consumers’ preferences will prevail in
customer satisfaction.

In order to do that, Gartner says
that CIOs need to adapt and utilize bleeding-edge innovations such as Near
Field Communication (NFC), which can turn the smartphone into a digital wallet,
or Personal Area Networks.

“Personal Area Network (PAN)
transforms the smartphone into a bridge to other devices,” Wallin said. “For
example, a cardiac monitor can leverage a mobile phone to transmit the signals
to a monitoring station or system. Wearable devices – such as watches and
pedometers – and peripherals – such as blood glucose monitors – can all
wirelessly interface to the Internet via mobile phones. Gartner believes that
enterprises can use these concepts as ideas for innovation.”