Over the last few days, I have been working on a mobile reference app of the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), which I submitted to the Apple App Store this morning. I will let you know once it’s approved and ready for download.

I always wanted to dig deeper into MOF, partly because I had noticed many of our larger customers increasingly utilize it in their mission critical operations. Developing this app has provided the opportunity to do so. I find that developing an application forces you to understand the underlying details of subject.

In developing the first version of this app, I gained a thorough understanding of MOF’s meta-model. I am very impressed with MOF’s vast amount of practical content, and am already thinking about designing the next version of the app with much more content.

My overarching goal in developing these mobile references is to represent the already codified body of knowledge in a form more conducive to internalization. My belief is that the Mobile Internet Platform is ideally suited for effective internalization of codified knowledge.

This is a work in progress but I feel it will mature rapidly.

During the last few months, I have spent most of my time on mobile process improvement tools. Working on these apps has had the side benefit of giving me a more in depth knowledge of exciting process improvement bodies of knowledge and even more appreciation for their scope.  Bodies of work such as these codify a vast amount of practical knowledge and best practices from which any size organization or team–formal or agile–can greatly benefit.  I feel the persistent bottleneck stalling wide utilization of these bodies of knowledge is due to the difficulty of internalization.  I strongly believe that having the right tools is the remedy for this internalization problem.

The majority of these tools will be imbedded in or made accessible via the user’s exciting systems such as ALM platforms, but a subset of them will run on mobile Internet platforms such as iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. The ubiquity and instant accessibility nature of these devices make them specially practical in situational usage. You are not always at your desktop when you need process improvement related assistance.

We at Osellus have been working on ALM based process improvement tools for over eight years, and more recently we have started working on mobile process improvement related tooling.