Effective Mobile Management is Like Drawing an Owl

There are many facets to enterprise mobility management for IT and business leaders to chew over. What are the right applications to provide to different employee groups (sales, marketing, HR) that will drive the highest productivity and business returns? How do we balance employee device ownership with enterprise security requirements? Should we use a third-party app store, host our own dedicated enterprise app store or use a hybrid approach?

When pondering these issues, it’s important for decision makers to look at the big picture in terms of what the enterprise is trying to accomplish. A post by best-selling author and marketing guru Seth Godin helps put this in perspective. The problem with most business and leadership advice is that it’s often too general and doesn’t delve into the more challenging aspects of leading people or how to run a company. Godin uses the analogy of advice offered by artists on how to draw an owl. Drawing two circles to get the body of an owl started is good advice, says Godin, but that’s not the point. Most people get that part right, he says. What’s considerably more challenging is learning to see what an owl looks like. “Drawing an owl involves thousands of small decisions, each based on the answer to just one question, ‘what does the owl look like?’ If you can’t see it (in your mind, not with your eyes), you can’t draw it.”

Godin’s point is that for anyone to draw an owl effectively – or plot a business or mobile management strategy – you need to visualize what you’re trying to accomplish. This includes providing people with guidance on how they picture a situation in order to help execute on it. There’s a lot of advice you can find online about crafting and executing a mobile management strategy. Unfortunately, a lot of what you’ll find it akin to drawing two circles. At Apperian, we encourage business and IT leaders to look at the big picture and envision a thorough approach to managing enterprise mobile apps through their entire lifecycle.