Before I jump in to solution, it will be good to look at challenges what organizations face with respect to options they have in mobility.   Diversity in technology along with budgetary constraints have been inhibiting organizations from adopting to full-fledged mobility strategy.

Let’s look at diversity of technology both at device level and at software level.

There are variety of devices from many vendors including Apple, Samsung, Google, Nokia, RIM with various form factors (i.e., 4 inch, 7 inch, 10 inch) and Operating systems such as Windows, Android, iOS and so on, In this case I would say “more options leading to confusion”, which is much higher than just the browser compatibility problems we dealt with during the internet era.

Adding to these, mobility field is still evolving.

We shouldn’t forget one other important aspect when it comes to enterprise adoption i.e., information security.  Organizations are seriously looking at the option of “BYOD” ( Bring your own device).   This means that in an enterprise any permutation – combination of the above choice scan exist.

Here I must say that significant attention being given to security aspects both from hardware and software perspective, by leading vendors such as Apple, Google, Microsoft.

Now, I would touch upon the other aspect I mentioned, i.e., budget.  Organizations are taking very cautious approach in taking steps towards mobile enablement.  They also want to see quick results with small experiments.  They don’t want to have high investment while the field is still maturing.   Most of them are taking one or two applications at a time and see how it gets enabled on mobile.

All of these aspects forcing the organizations to trod the same path as we did with web enablement.

In my view, we have better options, while we have all the above challenges.  In my view, first step is to look at the maturity of the organization / business unit for mobile adoption.   This would enable them to do a quick analysis and put a road-map for enterprise mobility.   This step would probably take couple of months effort with minimal spend.  As a next step, having a strong enterprise backbone for mobile enablement is necessary.    After this, one can experiment with few applications.  This will be a scalable model.  This will drastically reduce time to market and reduce total cost of ownership.