The Six “P”s of a Successful Mobile Technology Strategy, Part 6: Float Mobile Learning

Procedures

So, you have a Platform for your organization, you’ve Procured the devices, developed your mobile Policies and Provisioned the devices for deployment. The devices are in the field and you have figured out Publishing. You would think you’re ready and have everything in place for your company to take advantage of mobile in the workforce easily and effectively.

If you did this, you’d be overlooking a vital part of this strategy, the Procedures. Procedures are the realization of a standardization of the first 5 P’s. Without careful documenting of the policies, the steps to purchase and provision the devices, and the rest of the P’s, there is no hope to achieve a standard operating procedure. Every time you execute the steps, there will be variations in the end results that will lower quality, increase costs or in some other way limit the true return on investment. So, the Procedure, then is where the rubber meets the road. With proper planning and execution, written into a list of Procedures, you will get the following:

A planned platform or platforms to support and purchase with no surprises as new handsets are released.
A procurement process that takes into account equipment lifecycle and replacement as well as buying discounts and service level agreements (SLA)
A policy that can be enforced and is legally defensible. This should protect your company’s intellectual property and your employee’s rights. The Procedures covers the “What Ifs” when the policy isn’t followed and spells out the enforcement steps that will be taken.
You will have a technology solution and business process in place to provision the devices as they are brought into the work place. This should cover and enforce your policy, making BYOD devices and company devices equals when it comes to accessing information needed for performance support. This solution is not dependent on any one individual for its implementation – it must be institutionalized.
Getting your apps out to your audience shouldn’t be a problem either, since with the Publishing section of your documented procedure, you know when and if you are targeting mobile web, private app catalogs or MDM/MAM solutions or putting your apps out to public marketplaces like the Apple App Store or the Android Market.

As you can see, this is the formulation and the culmination of all of your hard work. You’ve come so far, you owe it to yourself and your company to finish the job.

Here are some keys to keep in mind as you do so. The type of document must have the following characteristics to succeed:

It must be accessible. Put it in a centralized repository or the intranet so that all parties that need to read it have access.
It must be collaborative. One person is simply not knowledgeable about all aspects of a company’s mobile strategy to manage everything. Establish a workflow for editing the document or use a team environment like a wiki to store this vital resource.
It must be updated as time passes. Mobile moves fast. No document is going to be etched in stone because the mobile industry just goes too quickly to assign arbitrary update cycles to this.
It must be workable. If your Procedure document is so loaded with jargon and legalese as such that it makes it tough to implement for your staff, you’ll never get to see the benefits of its creation and rollout. Keep it simple!
It must be transferable. This is after all, your company’s policy, right? This is not a single person’s domain, even if you only have one person manning the servers at your company. Since very sensitive data may be being sent on these devices outside of the company’s firewall, it’s important that more than one person know how these things work.

So, there you have it. Procedures: the sixth P in the series. Hopefully now you have a clear understanding of the key components in creating your mobile technology strategy. Should you have more questions, feel free to contact us by leaving a comment, and be sure to subscribe to our newsletter. There is certain to be more content coming up on this topic very soon.