Strategic Mobility Comes of Age

By  Tony Rizzo, Editor in Chief
As 2011 winds down, many things are in motion in the mobile world. For one, I’d like to say hello as Mobile Enterprise’s new Editor in Chief, an exciting opportunity to participate in an important publication and e-media franchise at exactly the time that enterprises have finally come to recognize the enormous potential of mobility to drive their businesses in strategic new ways.

Mobility in the enterprise has long hidden under the guise of enhanced workforce productivity. But it is much more than that, and enterprises now understand that mobility will be critical for driving major new top line revenue growth and for developing key advantages over competitors.

Dragged into the 21st century by the now familiar consumerization of business technology—which this year has also spawned its own acronym, BYOD—enterprises have fully embraced mobility. The 2011 Mobilizer Awards that are presented in this issue (which themselves this year celebrate a decade of uncovering mobile excellence) demonstrate it quite clearly. This year’s entrants for the best mobile deployments ranged far and wide, with tablets and smartphones taking center stage at every turn.

What I find most interesting is the dynamic that exists between keeping what the user sees—the mobile app—as simple as possible to use, and the rapidly growing complexity the technical folks have to deal with behind the scenes to make that simplicity a reality. Mobility Outlook 2012, based on exclusive Yankee Group research, demonstrates this dynamic: enterprise mobility is rapidly moving beyond the modest demands of consumerization and on to the far more rigorous demands of IT to ensure the bulletproof security and manageability of BYOD-driven deployments.

Delivering the broad range of mobility insights necessary to help meet rigorous IT demands is the core mission of Mobile Enterprise. I call it the ‘enterprization of mobility,’ and I predict it will be the key mobile trend of 2012.