Avoiding Random Acts of Mobility - Forming the Mobility Center of Excellence

Large organizations are starting to suffer from Random Acts of Mobility. This is when disparate departments in an organization commission the development of an app without talking with one another or a centralized technology group.

The pitfalls of Random Acts of Mobility include increased project costs due to duplicate efforts; increased support costs due to the use of disparate technologies, increased security risks and higher risk of project failures due to each department taking on a pioneering role in the organization.

Depending on the organization, it may be unrealistic to think, at this point, IT can quickly form a team to support all mobility initiatives utilizing a consistent reference architecture and unified support organization.  But this shouldn't give the business an excuse to continue down the mobility path firing revolvers into the air;  eventually, it's going to catch up to them.

The short-term answer is a Mobility Center of Excellence (MCoE).  The MCoE is often a virtual group with representation from Enterprise Architecture, Legal/Compliance, impacted or interested Line of Business folks, Information Security and IT Infrastructrure and App teams.  The goal of the group is to start to set some standards around Mobile App Dev Platforms, Mobile Security, App/Server Side Integration, Legal Compliance and App Deployment and Distribution.  This group shouldn't hold up business initiatives but empower them.  If they don't have all the answers they can at least be aware which direction a project is going to go; and the project team, in turn, will have the foresight to know what may need to be refactored in the future so they build/fund accordingly.

It's not difficult to set up a MCoE, and given the excitement around mobile technologies, it's usually not hard to find volunteers for this virtual group. Once this group is in place, it's also easier to identify what work should be done on the enterprsie level vs. the project level.  It also begins to shed some light\justification on what enterprise level capital and expense funding may be required to help facilitate mobile strategy for the organization going forward.

If you have any additional questions or tips on forming a MCoE, feel free to leave them in the comments below or check out our Mobile Strategy service offering.