The enterprise mobile discontinuity

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston the session on Mobility was fascinating - not for what was said but for what wasn't said. The panel urged innovators to look to their companies and identify the people in the organization that are "on their feet". Wireless enabling these people with access to line of business applications and tools that support the tasks they do has potential for increased revenue growth. The panel also pointed out that IT departments are looking to lock down mobile environments in order to manage the total lifecycle cost. When you put these two things together you have to realize one other factor. A major source of revenue growth could be your channel partners. This is a group you may not be able to directly control. This creates challenges, not insurmountable ones, for the mobile applications developer. While the Enterprise mobile platform may be locked down tightly by the IT or Telecoms organization there may still be a sizeable user population that need to access your applications and they may not be using that standard platform. Staying open becomes critically important.