Mobility Sparks Innovation

There are more mobile devices on the planet than people. Think about that for a second. That is a fact, it happened last year, 2013. By 2015, 81% of the US cellular users will be using some form of smartphone. It seems as if we have freed ourselves from our wired constraints and have started to envision how our lives (and businesses) can be enhanced by mobile technology. That is where innovation lives today, at the intersection of mobility and work/life.

With mobility as the rally point for the next wave of innovation, I submit the formula below as the way to drive innovation inside or outside of education.

innovation platform = (mobile + cloud + social) * devops / vision

+mobile
Providing unfettered access to information when and where the user wants it, that is mobile in the context of education. Let’s face it, at the end of the day, any innovative catalyst has to be mobile, as it is the main ingredient of any forward looking technology strategy. By thinking mobile-first and aligning your offerings and strategies toward the user and their experience you begin to spark the change in thinking around IT. No longer is IT thought of as a ‘public utility’ but it now becomes a ‘strategic driver’ for the business.

“Mobile phones are misnamed. They should be called gateways to human knowledge.” — Ray Kurzweil

+cloud
In less than 5 years Seton Hill’s computer infrastructure went from physical hardware in our datacenter to virtualized hardware in the same datacenter to a cloud based infrastructure that was built inside of the AWS Cloud. As you can see, we went from wired, to virtual+wired to cloud. Many people today are choosing to skip the intermediary step of on premises virtualization and migrate their data and applications directly to the cloud. With that leap of faith these brave souls are realizing benefits that simply aren’t plausible in a wired world. The best part of being cloud based is that you control your infrastructure through APIs. This feature alone helps build a culture around the concept of DevOps.

“Ultimately, the cloud is the latest example of Schumpeterian creative destruction: creating wealth for those who exploit it; and leading to the demise of those that don’t.” — Joe Weinman, Senior VP at Telx and author of Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing

+social
Once you have untethered your users, and have provided them access to their data, a social context is not far behind. A perfect example of this was our moving from Microsoft Office & Exchange to Google Apps for Education. The savings from the hardware alone was enough to make a real business argument for the change. The real benefit was the spirit of collaboration it gave everyone. From students to faculty and staff, this new social context is used daily to engage with each other around their data and business processes.

And you thought I was going to talk about twitter. ☺

*devops
To thrive in tomorrow’s technology world you must adopt a DevOps mentality. With the rapid pace of innovation currently in the educational technology space, this method of management lends itself perfectly to our formula. You need to be super agile, hyper lean and iterate quickly to multiply the effect of the three previous variables (mobile + cloud + social). Through a DevOps culture the underlying transformation will provide you with the ability to align with your users needs.

If DevOps is a foreign concept, or you would like to read a work of fiction that will convey this concept very well, check out The Phoenix Project from Gene Kim. A novel about DevOps and the effects of it on IT and the business. I have recommended this book to techies and non-techies alike, all find value in its pages.

“The end goal of infrastructure as code is to perform as many infrastructure tasks as possible programmatically. Key word is “automation.”

/vision
It all comes down to how clear and focused your vision is. Better yet, does your organization have ‘one’ vision for the strategy behind the application of mobile technologies? That is the reason I divide the equation by vision, there can only be one. If you divide by anything more, the top speed of your value engine will be diluted into mediocrity. It is pretty simple 3rd grade math.

When I think of vision I can’t help but think of Steve Jobs. A documentary about the start of NeXT computers featuring Job’s leadership called Steve Jobs Keeper of the Vision shows it best. Watch the video below and you will hear first hand why one vision, and the constant reiteration of it, is imperative for success.

The end result of the above formula applied to Seton Hill University was their Mobile Learning @ The Hill Program. It has changed not only the way they teach and learn but how everyone interacts with data and each other.

My favorite key performance indicator is how the students rate our application of technology and the support of it. For the past two years the Mobile Learning Program and our Solution Center (a much nicer way to vision your Help Desk) have been ranked #1 by our students.

KPI = Great Student (Customer) Experience — Check!