The market is aflood with questions and ideas on whether and how to create an enterprise mobility strategy. Many leading organizations are well on their way, but most are just starting to explore the tangled web of mobile devices, solutions, and promises of untapped business value. If you are just starting on this journey, or have met stalled efforts to build organizational buy-in, don’t underestimate the power of WOW! And by WOW!, I mean the kind of eye-popping, heart-stopping features and functions that your audience is accustomed to seeing in their consumer use of mobility (a la the magical unveilings and slick marketing of industry pioneers like Apple).

But I also mean the kind of eye-popping, heart-stopping business value propositions that excite executives and stakeholders. After all, you may never get the opportunity to entice executives, users, and customers with some amazing mobile capabilities if you can’t first engage their fiscal senses with a sound and compelling strategy that considers a holistic view of how mobile technologies impact all facets of your business. I’m tempted to offer an example of how one of our clients is building an amazing mobility platform to drive new revenue opportunities and edge out the competition in how it serves customers. I’ll get to that later, but I don’t want to fall into the common trap of narrowing the scope of mobility to just include business apps and sophisticated user experiences. Rather, you should consider the holistic nature of mobility:

• Asset/device management
• Wireless quality and cost management
• Mobile operations and application management
• Security
• Help desk support

Finding the WOW! in all of these facets may seem difficult, but with some investigation you will find cost savings and efficiency gains that raise some eyebrows and move some feet into action.

Executive and Organizational Support and Momentum

Now onto my story…an example of where WOW! leads to executive and organizational support and momentum. One of our clients is making some significant investments in a mobile pilot that will deploy some pretty amazing capabilities to a field force numbering in excess of 2,500 reps. I’ve seen some early demos, and it really is eye-popping and fully leverages the power of the user experience we have come to love in our iPads and Android devices. So they have certainly hit the WOW! button and are rapidly building excitement and buy-in from management, field users, and customers.

But before they spent a dime (or several hundreds of thousands of dimes), they demonstrated WOW! in the business strategy and proposed value offered by going mobile. In a high-touch field sales environment, they were able to build a compelling strategy that unlocked new:

• Revenue and margin opportunities by leveraging market analytics
• Product information
• Sizzling marketing materials
• Real-time supply chain performance
• Customer performance information

Even as a hypothesis, the story was so full of WOW! that executives approved the pilot and lined up to get one of the first demo iPads. So this approach worked great for an organization with an active field-based user community. The approach and story will be different for you and your business. But amidst all the hype surrounding mobility, you need to find and exploit the WOW! that is meaningful to your business.

For inspiration, watch any Apple product release video (recent iPad and iPhone 4S unveilings are a great place to start). But don’t stop there – marry your imagination with your business savvy to find the WOW! in an overall strategy. Visit the Enterprise Mobility Forum at www.theemf.org to join the discussion and access some great thought leadership. Then don your favorite mock turtleneck and a pair of jeans for the big presentation…