CIOs must focus on 2G innovation: Gartner

MUMBAI, INDIA: Heightened expectations from both employees and customers mean that many enterprises need to overhaul their current mobile strategies, according to Gartner, Inc.

Analysts said that CIOs must build innovation into their next generation mobile strategy in order to respond to rapidly shifting business and societal drivers.

“Second generation mobile strategies differ considerably from those of the first generation,” said Leif-Olof Wallin, research vice president at Gartner. “They must be multichannel, part of your holistic digital strategy, as well as including innovative mobile-only capabilities. They must include a wide variety of mobile endpoints including mobile to mobile and be prepared for the day that native applications are overtaken by HTML5.”

As a result of the swiftly changing nature of the mobile market, Gartner analysts said, CIOs must plan for at least three distinct mobile strategies in 2012. These include an employee-facing strategy which must address several separate issues such as collaboration, role-specific applications like sales force automation, consumerisation and basic connectivity.

There will also be a tactical consumer-facing strategy which is a 12-month window, and a more strategic consumer-facing strategy dealing with slower-moving and more predictable issues and technologies such as Long Term Evolution (LTE).

Wallin said that employees are behaving more like consumers, demanding a wider choice of devices, exploiting consumer devices and applications from app stores, and adopting new strategies such as 'bring your own' IT. As a result, the distinctions between a person's role as an employee and as a consumer are more blurred than ever.

At the same time, consumer behavior is changing as online activities switch from PC and Web channels to the mobile channel. The consequence will be major changes in consumer- and employee-facing mobility that will, in turn, lead to increased use of innovations such as Near Field Communication (NFC).

The most popular use case for NFC is to turn the smartphone into a digital wallet. However, many other use cases are possible.

“Personal Area Network (PAN) transforms the smartphone into a bridge to other devices,” Wallin said. “For example, a cardiac monitor can leverage a mobile phone to transmit the signals to a monitoring station or system.”

Wearable devices such as watches and pedometers, and peripherals such as blood glucose monitors can all wirelessly interface to the Internet via mobile phones. Gartner believes that enterprises can use these concepts as ideas for innovation.

Analysts at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through November 23, today discussed the rapidly changing face of corporate mobility.