8 steps to building ad1cqpkecg5rwnz.cloudfront.net/docs/kinvey-mobile-center...we lay out the eight...

8 Steps to Building a

Mobile Center

of ExcellenceMobile Center



of Excellence

http://www.kinvey.com

CONTENTSAsk yourself, do you need an MCoE?

Define the mission

Figure out who should be in it

Get buy-in from the higher ups

Communicate with the organization

Make sure you aren’t erecting barriers

Define success and measure it

Think about when you’ll close the MCoE

Case studies

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INTRO

Perhaps you’ve heard the horror stories. A small group of enterprising workers builds a very cool new mobile app for its customers. The thing is, the app pulls corporate data in a scary insecure way. The company logo that appears as the app launches is three generations old. And app users get a coupon that store employees have never seen.

In large companies, this scenario isn’t so unusual. Mobile is hot. With delusions of grandeur, all kinds of people think up great ideas for apps, hoping for the next smash app hit – and a big promotion.

To combat the problem, an exclusive set of forward-thinking enterprises have developed a smart way of reining in the bad practices while still encouraging the innovation and fast development that results in cutting edge mobile products. They’re forming internal initiatives that many call mobile centers of excellence.

“What a mobile center of excellence does for you is it gives you a centralization of mobile and connected power and resources,” said Alex Moazed, president and CEO of Applico, a company that helps others set up mobile centers of excellence. “It’s a multidisciplinary workforce of people who can work in an agile, nimble, iterative manner to operationalize and manifest whatever the mobile tech platform is.”

Mobile centers of excellence can and do take on different forms. “In a lot of companies, even really big companies, mobile centers of excellence start with one person,” said Adam Bookman, a partner at Propelics, also a company that helps others build mobile centers of excellence. Eventually, they include people from a wide range of groups within a business.

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InterContinental Hotels Group, FedEx and GE are household names that have mobile centers of excellence; other businesses in notoriously close-lipped industries have formed these groups but don’t like to talk publicly about them.

Here’s how this ebook works. We lay out the eight crucial steps you need to follow to build your own mobile center of excellence (MCoE), starting with determining whether or not you actually need one. We also feature two case studies – because they are in the financial services and insurance industries, executives spoke with us on the condition that we omit their names and the names of the companies. The case studies are designed to give you a first-hand account of why these businesses went down the MCoE road and how it helped improve their mobile practices.

8 Steps to Building a Mobile Center of Excellence

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“The concept of a mobile center of excellence is very, very new. Most companies don’t have one or don’t know what it is,” said Bookman.

But just because you’re in the know and have heard about these organizations doesn’t mean you need one.

You’re unlikely to form a functional organization if you have little experience building mobile apps. “You have to be at a certain level of maturity before it makes sense for a mobile center of excellence to kick in,” Bookman said.

He has seen businesses build these groups too soon, making them more technically heavy than they needed or failing to include people from key business units. One large pharmaceutical company called him for help after creating an MCoE that sat idle. “They built it but nobody came,” he said.

Typically a business should already have developed one or two apps but if not, it at least should have good energy around mobile. “Mobile has to be a ‘thing’ in the organization,” Bookman said. Otherwise, a governance organization can end up squashing momentum.

If you’re working on a single app, maybe your first, a mobile steering committee might be a better bet. Propelics is working with a large energy company right now that’s launching its first consumer app that might end up being used by more than a million people. Since they need involvement from many different groups in the company like tech development, customer support and the outage center, they created a steering committee made up of people from each of the relevant units to guide the app development. But without another mobile app in the works, building a mobile center of excellence doesn’t make much sense.

CHAPTER 1ASK YOURSELF, DO YOU NEED AN MCoE?

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Once you do decide you need an MCoE, before hiring or appointing a single person you must set the strategy and goals for the group.

“Figuring out what you’re governing is very critical and has to be set up at the beginning,” Bookman said.

The point of an MCoE is to build standards and best practices in a handful of areas. It should be able to answer questions like: What development languages should we use? What security systems should we support? What devices should we support? How do we handle device testing? How will we promote the app? Are there internal groups that need to approve my app? And how do we know when an app is ready to be released?

Your MCoE can approach those questions in a couple of different ways, depending on how you decide to structure the group. In some businesses, the MCoE includes developers, designers, architects and engineers so that the group actually builds every app. In others it’s more a repository of best practices and a set of coaches who liaise with teams within business units that are building apps.

Regardless of which approach you take, it’s worth thinking about the order that you first develop best practices. For example, if you don’t have a new app that will become available in the next year, building best practices around user support shouldn’t be top of the list of things to do, Bookman said.

Also, it’s important to decide if the MCoE will support both internal and external apps. Some businesses have two mobile centers, to focus on employee apps and external apps. That’s not a bad idea given that apps in each category might have very different standards. If you do end up

CHAPTER 2DEFINE THE MISSION


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SOME BUSINESSES HAVE TWO MOBILE CENTERS TO FOCUS ON EMPLOYEE APPS AND EXTERNAL APPS

with two centers though, make sure they have a line of communications. “Often they’re forced into silos and they don’t talk, then they come up with standards that are contradictory,” Bookman said. Plus, a company might find benefits in terms of efficiencies if both kinds of app share similar standards. Keep in mind that part of the process of shepherding new apps through development is actually rejecting ideas. “Some things don’t make sense to mobilize,” said an architect we spoke with at a large insurer. Occasionally someone will approach his group with an idea to, for instance, build a mobile app that might require heavy data entry or might draw from a legacy system that will be difficult to interface with. In those cases, the MCoE will explain why the app doesn’t make sense.

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Even large businesses often start with one person to head up an MCoE. “They’re kind of like a master of ceremony, bringing everything together,” said Bookman.

That’s how Intercontinental Hotels Group got started. “It was one person who on their own recognized this was a priority and started to be an early evangelist and started to build momentum in the space,” said Michael Menis, senior vice president, digital and voice channels for IHG.

Choose that person wisely. Mobile centers of excellence can quickly get complicated and too big. That’s because with mobile “you have tentacles into all the different parts of the organization,” said Bookman. “So you feel like you need someone on your team from every part of the organization. But if you have one person from test, support, development, security, HR, legal and branding, you’d be building a company,” he said.

Better to start out with someone who already has connections broadly across the company. “The biggest role of an MCoE is to have someone or people in place that can make those connections, build the bridges,” Bookman said.

It’s far more important to build those bridges than try to work in a silo. “An all or nothing mentality is dangerous,” said IHG’s Menis. Rather than force all the work to be done in a central team, you’ll be more successful if you tap into the expertise of other areas of the company, he said.

Plus, there are benefits to keeping head count low. “You have to let the team itself be small enough to move fast,” said a prominent technology analyst. Keeping a small team also helps with focus. “It’s really easy

CHAPTER 3FIGURE OUT WHO SHOULD BE IN IT


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MOBILE CENTERS OF EXCELLENCE CAN QUICKLY GET COMPLICATED AND TOO BIG

to have these become over-complicated with a lot of people involved because everyone wants a part of the action,” he said.

Over time, IHG has grown its MCoE to around 20 members, including developers, product managers, UX pros and designers.

In addition to those roles, a pharmaceutical company Propelics worked with had a liaison who connects with the clinical trials, sales and research groups to find out what mobile use cases they might have. The liaison acts as a resource so that anyone in those groups knows that if they have an idea for a mobile app, they don’t have to do it all themselves.

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“You need that person who will act as a shell if you’re getting bombarded and act as your advocate in the highest circles of the organization,” said Applico’s Moazed.

Creating an MCoE can be a politically sensitive project, depending on who is spearheading it and how it might impact existing technology centers at your company. Having a senior executive who is a tech visionary and who champions the project can be key to its success, he said.

Plus, having buy in from on high will help when you look to secure the kind of funding you’ll need to staff and maintain the center.

At IHG, support from senior management helps allow the MCoE to evolve in ways that ultimately might have a big impact on the company’s overall business, Menis said.

For instance, IHG’s MCoE has moved past being an organization that’s focused primarily on driving revenue and bookings to one that is also focused on improving the guest experience while at a hotel. But making that change required top leaders at the company to understand the evolution and its potential impact on the business.

CHAPTER 4GET BUY-IN FROM THE HIGHER UPS

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“A lot of people spend a lot of money on centers of excellence and they fail at ridiculous rates,” said Bookman. “Mostly it’s because they’re not getting the word out or they’re providing the wrong thing.”

Start with standard internal communications channels to spread the word, like email or internal social network tools. MCoE leaders can hold brown bag lunches, webinars or mobile summits.

Also, look for bragging rights. “For us early on the focus was to make sure we had some really early quick wins,” said Menis. “If you can gain some momentum early on, you can build an internal dialog that helps to educate people about the idea of a center of excellence. It’s much easier to be speaking from a position of early success.”

To get that early success, IHG focused on “low hanging fruit,” in its case, a loyalty app that worked on multiple devices. “That brought with it success in the form of revenue which helped build out our thought leadership brand within the company,” he said.

The ensuing visibility doesn’t hurt when trying to negotiate for budget or headcount.

Still, be on the lookout for the chance that your communications system isn’t foolproof. “Lines of business continue to have shadow IT,” an architect with a large insurer told us. That’s despite his group’s efforts to use internal channels like message boards and a corporate social media system to promote itself. The insurer is a large company and there are just 12 core people running the MCoE so it’s a challenge getting the word out, he said.

CHAPTER 5COMMUNICATE WITH THE ORGANIZATION

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“Centers of excellence in general are not well liked in organizations,” Bookman said. If your MCoE is seen as a gatekeeper or a source of extra busy work, people will avoid it like the plague.

“You need people to come to you. That’s the trick,” he said.

IHG’s Menis agrees. “Ultimately, you want it to be a sought after resource. It shouldn’t be around policing people but more around providing value.”

One way to do that is to keep hard and fast rules to a minimum, instead offering helpful information that can guide project leaders through decision making processes.

For instance, one early decision mobile project leaders face is whether to develop in HTML5 or build a native app. Rather than make that decision for a project leader, the MCoE can offer essentially a checklist, showing a project manager what scenarios work best in which development process.

IHG’s MCoE doesn’t insist on slavish adherence to standards. “The thought process is that we need to leverage scale where it makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t make sense,” Menis said. For instance, the company has been offering hotel visitors an app that they can use to check in on-site. In most cases, it makes sense for hotels to use the same platform, processes, tools and procedures in building their check-in app. But in China, user expectations and the way hotels handle passports is different than most other regions. It made sense to diverge from the standard there.

CHAPTER 6MAKE SURE YOU AREN’T ERECTING BARRIERS

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...IT IS IMPORTANT FOR AN MCOE TO SET SOME HARD AND FAST RULES. ABOUT WHAT, HOWEVER, WILL DEPEND ON THE ORGANIZATION

“It’s a balancing act not to alienate people,” said a mobile architect who built the MCoE for a large financial services company. For now, his group has a well-defined architecture and technology framework that it sticks with. “Having said that, as we are becoming bigger, as different teams are mobile-enabling their portfolios, we will see the architecture will become more of an enabling architecture. We won’t be hard set on, ‘you have to use this framework or library,’ as long as the conceptual philosophies of the architecture are being adhered to,” he said.

Also, he’s careful to let people cut loose at the early stages of development. When a new idea comes in, his group works on a proof of concept using any technology they want. “We just mash things up and see what sticks,” he said. That results in a very agile environment that keeps the innovation moving, he said. Once it’s time to productize the app, the group begins following the set processes.

Still, it is important for an MCoE to set some hard and fast rules. About what, however, will depend on the organization. The mobile architect from the financial services company is open about whether an app should be developed natively versus as a web app but his group isn’t flexible when it comes to the user experience, which should have a common look and feel across the company. Security is another topic that many mobile centers of excellence don’t – and shouldn’t – bend on.

In the end, having too many rules won’t just alienate people, it’ll slow down innovation. “You can’t get so set in your ways that you can’t move,” said the architect from the large insurer.

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CHAPTER 7DEFINE SUCCESS AND MEASURE IT

Figure out what would make your MCoE a success and then make sure to check in regularly to find out if it’s meeting your goals.

“Early on we recognized that our measurement of success was revenue,” said Menis. “So we developed solutions to generate revenue and that brought with it some wins.

“Too often companies just say, ‘we need an app,’ and that’s probably approaching it from the wrong direction,” he said.

Instead, take the time to set some key performance indicators and decide how frequently you’ll sit down and determine whether you’ve hit them. “It’s important to measure that you’re actually doing the job and doing it well,” said Bookman.

That said, give yourself a bit of slack. “You have to be comfortable with some level of failure because you’re going to try to move quickly and not everything is going to be a success,” Menis said.

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You read that right. An MCoE shouldn’t last forever.

“You need to have an end game in mind,” Moazed said. “This should be viewed as transitory.”

An MCoE might be in place for a few years as your business goes through a transition in its business model designed to capitalize on the many changes coming about because of the growth of mobile. The center allows for the flexibility and agility that a business probably doesn’t have otherwise, he said.

“You don’t create an MCoE because everything is fine and dandy and you aren’t experiencing disruption,” he said. “You create an MCoE because your environment is changing and you need agility and nimbleness.”

In a way, mobile app development at enterprises is similar to the early days of websites. “Everyone decided they needed a website. So one day you had no web site and the next day you had 20 sites for that company, all with different URLs and looks and feels and different backends. Some were .Net and some were Java. There were no standards. It was the wild west,” said Bookman.

Now, it’s second nature for people to understand that a company has one website and one organization that manages it.

You can expect a similar evolution in mobile. That means your MCoE may end up growing and taking on more and more of the hands-on mobile development work. Over time, you won’t have to worry so much about communicating its existence to the rest of the company. Instead, people will understand that if they have a mobile idea, they work through the established mobile development group.

CHAPTER 8THINK ABOUT WHEN YOU’LL CLOSE THE MCoE

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Case study: Too many cooks in the kitchenOne large insurer started down the path toward forming an MCoE when around two years ago it realized that its disorganization around mobile development was leading to some serious potential security issues.

“We had too many cooks in the kitchen,” said an architect at the insurer, who didn’t have approval to talk on the record and so asked not to be named.

Since mobile tends to touch so many different groups within an organization, the insurer found that everyone from line of business executives, app developers and IT people who run backend systems were all working on various kinds of mobile projects.

“What we were seeing, and we’re in a highly regulated industry, was people pushing the envelope. We saw people off doing their own thing and trying to serve business and end user customers but not doing so securely. They were reaching outside of best practices,” the architect said.

In an industry like insurance, with tough security and compliance regulations, that could cause serious problems.

“Fortunately, we had leadership who stepped in and said, ‘we really need to pull everyone together and get a strategy,’” he said.

The company decided to hire a consultancy to help it figure out how best to proceed. The consultants pointed out that the insurer didn’t have policies and standards in place or a project management system for mobile. They also recommended that the insurer designate some people to focus on mobile.


The insurer ended up building an MCoE that is designed to be a cross-functional, multidisciplinary team that includes different levels of people in the company, ranging from C-level executives to architects and line of business professionals.

The center comprises around 12 people, many of whom spend part of their time working on mobile projects. The architect we spoke to spends around 75 percent of his time working for the MCoE.

The center has a series of regular meetings. Committees designed to work on a new project might meet once a week as the project ramps up while other long standing committees meet once a month or once a quarter.

One of the most important services the MCoE provides is a set of documents defining best practices. “The best thing we ever did was dedicate the hours to creating policies and standards. They say ‘this is what we recommend.’ They are easily understood and readable and concise so [project managers] can run and not walk,” he said. Then members of the MCoE make themselves available as a resource to help interpret the documents.

“We’re fairly loose with the frameworks but we have strong recommendations. We’re not afraid of innovation so we’re not afraid of looking at new things but we do have some favorites that we like to see people use,” he said. “We’re providing the kind of guidance so we allow people to be creative within the framework.”

He feels that part of the mission of the MCoE is to stay on top of trends so that when people approach him about a new technology he can say “yeah, we already thought of that and here’s our plan.”

That means the group is continually revamping its strategy based on emerging trends, yet it always keeps a core strategy intact. “Our clear path is secure the data and offer the best user experience,” he said. Delivering products that support those goals ultimately helps the business make money, he said.

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This MCoE doesn’t worry so much about being regarded as a gatekeeper. Since it’s in a highly regulated business, it sets a baseline that apps have to adhere to and people in the organization understand how important that is. To help developers follow that baseline, it has created coding practices that show developers the standard they have to adhere to as they build for specific devices or as they develop a web app.

Case study: A grassroots startAround two years ago, an architect at a financial services company joined a group of coworkers who all had interest in mobile and together they began “tinkering” with mobile on a volunteer basis in their off-hours. They built a few proof of concept products only used by the small group in an effort to figure out what was possible in mobile.

A few members of the senior executive team took notice. “They said, ‘we need to do something more formalized around this energy we have in the company and see where it goes,’” said the architect, who isn’t authorized to speak on the record.

The company hired a new vice president who charged the architect with building a mobile center of excellence. “I was taken aback. Going into it, I didn’t have a clear idea of what to do with it or for that matter are we mature enough for it,” he said. He started out by forming processes around building a mobile app, beginning with a model for reaching out to business units to develop ideas and including the entire lifespan of app development and launch.

Immediately, these processes resulted in efficiencies for the company. “What would happen in the past without this structure and these processes is the work would get done and the people would move on and


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there wouldn’t be any value retained from all the effort being put in,” he said. “A lot of documentation was missing.”

In addition, he says that one of the most important outcomes of the MCoE is the forum it created. Each month the MCoE holds a well-attended conference call that attracts a wide range of contributors from IT, security, the user experience team and various business units. The call serves as a brainstorming opportunity and a chance for participants to share information they’re hearing about trends in the industry.

Bringing together that range of people is one reason the financial services company was able to unify the look and feel of its mobile apps with its web presence. “We felt there was a huge disconnect between the experience we were designing for the web properties and the apps we were trying to make,” he said. Bringing together all the people involved with web and mobile projects helps to standardize on the company’s overall look and feel to the public.

Initially, all mobile development for the company was done by the four or five developers in the mobile center of excellence plus any external developers the center hired on an outsourced basis. But that’s now starting to change. “After two years, we are coming to the stage where multiple teams would be interested in contributing or mobilizing their own portfolio of apps,” he said.

To enable that, the center is working on teaching the developers in the other groups, many of whom have web backgrounds but not much mobile experience, about the work flow, best practices and to offer guidance on things like architecture and design.

The MCoE consists of the handful of developers, the architect we spoke to and the vice president. Otherwise, a group of people including from the security, design and user experience teams switch gears and work full time for the center when they get pulled into a mobile project.


What is Kinvey? Kinvey makes a fully-featured Backend as a Service solution, offering 3rd party data integrations, multi-platform support, push notifications, and custom business

logic on a platform where it’s free to get started and you only pay when your app is successful.

Project Managed ByKelly Rice

Designed ByJake McKibben

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