How to embrace mobile change

How to embrace mobile change

Mobility has the chance to bring about more

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How to embrace mobile change

change than the Internet revolution did. So how can IT leaders take charge and lead the way to the new mobile frontier? Read on to uncover tips for taking full advantage of the rising trend in mobility technologies. How to embrace mobile change
By Niel Nickolaisen A few years ago I decided to take one item off of my bucket list by completing the MBA program I had started about 600 years ago. So, for about 20 months, I spent my Friday nights and Saturday mornings in a classroom with a group of students much younger than I. At first, the other students were shocked to see someone my age in their program. But they soon learned that I was the ideal person to have on their project teams. It turned out that after 15 years of leading IT and large put-thebusiness-at-risk projects, all it took for me to complete a case study or case analysis was to blow the dust off and update some project I had worked on years before. The topic of one of the MBA courses was organizational development. One section of the course was of particular interest to me: the section on how individuals and organizations deal with change. According to our textbook, people and organizations deal with change in one of three ways: denial, resistance or embrace. Ever since that class, I have pondered these reactions to change and would like to add one more to the list: lead. It seems, particularly as IT leaders, that when we are faced with changes in technology, business rules, market conditions, etc., one of our best options is to be leaders. This goes beyond embracing the change by being in the forefront of the change. In my experience, it seems that how we react to change has a direct effect on our careers. If we, as IT leaders, deny change, we make ourselves obsolete. If

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we resist change, we get fired. If we embrace change, we keep our jobs. But if we lead change, we prosper, IT prospers and the organization thinks we are geniuses! Leading is very important in the face of megatrends, and we are now in the early stages of a megatrend that creates an incredible opportunity. This is the mobility megatrend and includes advances in wireless technologies, the consumerization of IT and endpoint devices that are getting smarter and smaller. I believe that this megatrend will rock our worlds just as much as the Internet revolution did 15 years ago. But this megatrend has one critical difference: While the Internet drove changes in IT that connected us with our customers and partners, the wireless/consumerization/smart small-device megatrend opens the door to dramatic change for our workforce. Since I want to lead the way into this megatrend, I have come up with four specific things I can do to be a mobile workforce leader: Think future perfect. This means that, over time, all technologies become perfect. So, as I put together my thoughts of how to support an increasingly mobile workforce, I should not let current technological barriers limit my thinking as to what I can eventually do with mobile technologies. Be a pattern matcher. Recall how the Internet changed business rules and interactions and extend those patterns to how mobility will change how work is done. One of the words the Internet age taught us was disintermediation. What processes and roles will mobility disintermediate for our employees? Be willing to experiment. I always form a small group of users usually some of ITs toughest criticsto be the test case for the new technologies and processes we are considering. Members of this group put the new technologies through their paces and let me know what they think will and wont work. This allows me to test, and fail, on a small scale and gather early feedback that I can use to course correct as needed.

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How to embrace mobile change

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Be open. I dont know everything. I certainly cannot imagine everything. So I need to be open to the ideas and experiences of others. To lead in the face of the mobility megatrend, I probably need to think well outside the box. I cant do that if I have already made up my mind about what will and will not work for the mobile workforce.

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How to embrace mobile change

Mobility represents a seismic shift in how we interact with customers, each other and our employees. I want to react to this change by being a leader.

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How to embrace mobile change

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How to embrace mobile change

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