Forge a Plan, Then Execute

By  Tony Rizzo
In our last issue I noted that for enterprises mobility has fully evolved from being a productivity exercise to one focused almost entirely on driving key strategic initiatives that place more emphasis on top line revenue growth than in bottom line-enhancing TCO. The single most important means for any organization to achieve this is to plan out a long term mobile strategy and to execute against it. The core element of any enterprise mobile plan will focus on two things: the mobilization of existing applications and the creation of entirely new mobile-centric business apps.

To obtain a deeper understanding of where enterprises are headed relative to mobilizing both existing and new applications Mobile Enterprise drove an exclusive research effort to gain insight into what enterprises are doing today and where they are likely to head beyond 2012. The results of the research as well as our analysis of key findings will be found in this issue’s cover story, The Top Ten Enterprise Mobile Applications, beginning on page 10.

Just as important as knowing what your competitors and partners are doing and planning to do from a mobile apps perspective is in knowing how you are going to execute against your own mobile game plan. Sure, you can take the “obvious” approach of trusting your in-house developers. That approach, however, is a gamble you can't afford to take. There is only one way to effectively evolve existing applications and to create exciting new mobile apps…you need to find the right mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) partner. There are plenty of vendors to choose from - but each comes with its own approaches to app development. Which way do you go? Start with our MEAP special feature on page 19.

With this issue we are also introducing a new feature - CIO Q&As, which will bring valuable hands-on CIO perspectives to our key stories. We kick off the new series with Justin Kershaw, CIO and SVP at Eaton.