Contrastación de hipótesis

The mobile steering committee is an executive decision body. It needs an execution arm to implement the decisions. This has led to the rise of the mobile center of excellence (sometimes called digital center of excellence or digital transformation group) that operates by authority of the mobile steering committee. There is no single organizational model for a mobile center of excellence. To create the one that works best for your company, you’ll need to figure out three things.

First, decide if the mobile center of excellence will also include the people who build applications—will it encompass the resources on the IDEA teams? At GE, the mobile center of excellence based in Detroit has more than 900 people dedicated to improve the mobile and customer experience across the rm. At American Airlines, the center of excellence has 80 full-time employees. But not all mobile centers of excellence build things. For example, at Northwestern Mutual, ten people appointed by the steering committee meet weekly to keep mobile initiative on track, but they don’t actually build them—they work with the teams or agencies and integrators that do.

Second, gure out which department hosts the multidisciplinary center of excellence. A mobile center of excellence may be part of the eBusiness organization, as at IHG; the digital strategy organization, as at Starbucks; or the technology department, as at American Airlines.

Third, determine how you will sta your mobile center of excellence. The positions might be full time as at GE or part time as they are at some other companies. Some centers of excellence have implemented programs where people cycle through to master the skills. At IBM, developers and product managers take crash courses in the Austin design center. At GE, employees from di erent product teams come to Detroit in three- month assignments to master the process. But other employees in GE’s center are permanently assigned and full-time members of an IDEA team.

Once you have made those decisions, you must next decide what parts the IDEA team, center of excellence, and steering committee play in making and implementing decisions ranging from the brand experience to the development technology (see Table 12-1). For the mobile center of excellence and its sponsoring steering committee, decide

where to educate people, where to coordinate activities, and where to control outcomes.

Educate people to create and share best practices. Some mobile practices are best

handled with guidelines and assistance rather than restrictions and oversight. For activities like a mobile moment audit or experience design, the mobile center of excellence plays an education role. At GE, for example, the mobile center of excellence o ers strategy workshops to bring business and technology teams together. This kind of education unites sta around common goals and interests to launch them in the best direction to complete a mobile product.

Coordinate activities that need clear leadership but where many people are working

on execution. Most organizations won’t and shouldn’t centralize mobile initiatives or even mobile app development.5 _{The breadth of mobile products makes it impossible to}

control output. But simply educating people on the topic is often not enough to keep an app moving forward at the right pace. Sometimes, the mobile center of excellence needs to implement a decision and coordinate activity around that decision. For example, at one global bank, the center of excellence designated the software development tool to bring consistency to the application.

Table 12-1: One Example of How a Mobile Organization Could Function

Responsibility Mobile steering committee

Mobile center of

excellence IDEA teams Setting

investment priorities

Set and audit the investment themes.

Make recommendations based on collective

needs.

Create the case for mobile apps and associated systems. Defining the

brand experience

Work with marketing

to define. Audit brand experience.

Implement the brand experience.

Designing apps Establish design as an investment priority.

Set up design choices, training, and services.

Incorporate design into the agile

development process. Building mobile

apps and sites

Ensure commitment of supporting groups and systems.

Broker changes in

processes, systems, and organizations.

Build and continuously

improve the mobile experience.

security, privacy, and compliance

Authorize, support, and audit the policies.

help of legal, security, and compliance teams.

security, privacy, and compliance policies.

Determining a skills plan

Assess skills mix needs, determine whether to train or acquire.

Create job descriptions, including salary levels.

Hire or train team members with the right skills mix. Building

technology platforms

Prioritize platform requirements.

Aggregate requests across IDEA teams.

Define the platform requirements for mobile apps. Managing technology choices Enforce technology decisions. Recommend technology choices. Adhere to technology guidelines. Managing agency or development partnerships Ensure compliance with strategic partners. Own agency or integrator relationships. Manage agency or integrator relationships.

Control outcomes that give you scale or put you at high risk. The technology group

typically owns the security policy, while marketing is usually the watchdog of the brand. For these elements, the mobile center of excellence must insist on compliance to a standard. At Cisco, for example, all apps for the Apple App Store go through a single senior manager. But the center should be careful to govern only the things that carry the most risk, like security, brand, and access to back-end transactions systems such as the customer database. Too much control will turn what should be an enabling organization into a major barrier to deployment and success.