Managing mobility

The applications and uses for mobile and wireless really cross two boundaries: telecom services focused on voice, and IT services focused on data. Voice has moved from the simple cellphone carried over the mobile operator’s network and is now beginning to replace desktop phones in many organisations, with companies taking advantage of new technologies that allow the same phone number to follow them around from office to office, location to location. Voice is becoming more and more commoditised, and people are looking at more innovative ways to reduce cost.

For wireless data, we’re seeing a slew of different applications. Certainly, there’s been a lot of publicity around wireless e-mail, and I would say that’s the number one application today. However, that’s followed pretty closely by focused on sales force information and customer relationship management. It’s primarily aimed at marketing and sales people who spend less time sitting at their desk, and for whom mobility is allowing them to spend more time interfacing directly with customers. Wireless now allows them to do that better and more efficiently because they have the tools in the palm of their hand.

There’s growing adoption across a broad range of business constituencies. Companies are looking to free up more time to be more productive, and they’re either looking to reduce costs or drive top-line growth.

Areas that are more focused on the service industry have traditionally been key in driving the adoption of enterprise mobility solutions. For instance, dispatch, transportation, etc. were early adopters and many companies in this field are now moving from small deployments to larger, enterprise-wide deployments.

The second important area is healthcare – not only are we seeing the deployment of wireless LANs to aid in patient triage, we’re also seeing wide area wireless technologies like GSM and CDMA being used to connect doctors with their hospital constituencies in order to provide better services for the clients and patients of the healthcare organisations.

Finally comes the generic, white box enterprise, in which executives have turned to devices such as Blackberries as a form of workflow system, and where (as I mentioned earlier) sales force automation and CRM are becoming increasingly mobile-enabled.

The importance of planning

For those companies that have not already done any kind of deep diligence on how to derive value from mobility, my fear is that they just try and walk blindly through that door; that would be a very dangerous proposition. Most of the success stories we have seen to date have involved organisations that have invested in three or four different initiatives before seeing a return. The first couple were likely very high cost and did not drive ROI, and it was only really by acting on the lessons learned from their first few experiences that these companies were able to get it right on the third time.

It’s really about doing your homework first: understanding which mobile operators you should be looking at, which applications suppliers are best armed to help you put easy-to-use applications in place, and managing not just the cost of deployment but more importantly the ongoing cost of support.

In terms of planning a mobility rollout, some companies are going to be more suited to move down the application parallel while others will be better suited to follow the task-oriented parallel. Independent of which route you take, the most critical factor is to break these initiatives up into small, manageable chunks that enable you to identify specific objective points so you can see where you’ve come from, and are able to evangelise throughout the organisation the benefits of what you’ve done and why you’ve done it. This will help with continued investment and continued focus.

The thing about implementing mobile applications is that it’s still a pretty complex world, and people tend to take on way too much – in many ways they get too excited. The complexities can distract them from recognising particular objectives or endpoints, and if not managed correctly the mobile rollout could turn into a never-ending initiative that doesn’t have any visible benefits. Once that happens, the organisation can often start questioning why they made the investment in the first place. Once you lose the evangelists and the momentum within the company, the project dies.

I have a number of tips for implementing an enterprise mobility solution. The first is to take a look at your business operations and areas where you have a high degree of customer interaction, where your employees have a high degree of mobility and spend very little time at their desks, and where there is a sense of urgency regarding the need for better client interaction – especially in areas that specifically derive revenue. The second area is to identify appropriate technologies and implement them in such a fashion that they are reliable and easy-to-use.

Once you’ve looked at your business operations and the available technologies, the next step is to negotiate some of the capital requirements with the application suppliers, the mobile operators and the handset manufacturers. It’s a holistic package, so all these factors must be taken into consideration together. While you’re doing this, you need to ensure you’re not inventing new applications, but are rather extending the legacy applications of your ongoing business – the desktop is not going to go away, and you need to be able to move between the mobile device and the desktop device.

Finally, all of this needs to be secure, so some sort of consideration regarding how to secure the mobile enterprise is essential.

Key trends

One of the things we’ll see this year is the rise of mobile device management initiatives. It’s been a long-held view amongst many industries that mobile phones are a ‘personal choice’ device, not a company asset that needs to be managed. However, as we see more phones with Pentium-class processors and operating systems, it becomes clear that some of these devices are on a par with the PCs of only a few years ago. As a result, companies need to look at working with operators who have implemented mobile device management, or with third parties who are very quickly coming in to the market. The last thing they want to do is do it themselves.

This obviously impacts areas such as inventory management, too. You’d be surprised how many companies have boxes of phones and other mobile devices they didn’t even know they had squirreled away in closets or drawers. There are a couple of issues here. First, many of these phones/devices were turned on by employees that have since left the company, but the service itself was never shut off, so the company is just throwing money away. The second thing is that these devices cannot simply be recycled outside the company because quite often there is critical company information sitting on these devices – key contacts, customer records and calendars, perhaps a database synced with some key customer requirements, etc.

The bottom line is that asset management is a really big deal, and companies are going to spend a lot more time worrying about it as we move through 2006.

Top five steps for implementing mobile devices in the workforce

1. Mobility assessment – who are the mobile workers in your organisation, what do they do, what information do they need, and what are they currently using?
2. Business process assessment – understand how mobility impacts the current business process and operational workflows within the organisation to understand where transformation can occur with mobile technology investment. This will build the business case for mobility.
3. Understand mobility and coverage requirements – determine what type of mobile access is needed, what type of wireless networks, what carriers and service providers are available to address the geographic needs of the organisation.
4. Develop policy – determine who has rights to mobile technologies based on their needs, and establish security and purchasing buying policies.
5. Device and application infrastructure selection – the core mobile technologies should serve the business requirements and policies established by the organisation.

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Device advice
CXO speaks with Gene Signorini, Director of Wireless and Mobile Enterprise Solutions at Yankee Group, to get his thoughts on the key issues relating to mobile technology.

What does mobilising an enterprise entail?
At its core, mobilising an enterprise is about addressing the information and connectivity requirements of mobile workers and managing remote assets. Businesses have always had to deal with this challenge. On average, 38 percent of workers can be considered ‘mobile’. Until recently, the technology tools at their disposal were less than sufficient to really solve the business problem. With the emergence of mobile technologies – especially network technologies such as 3G and Wi-Fi – and compelling wireless devices, businesses now have the opportunity to address these problems.

What advantages/ROI can a business expect?
Well, companies already have mobile workforces. The issue is whether there are measurable benefits to invest in wireless technology to support these workforces. The business case for investing in wireless and mobile technologies will vary from company to company. But generally, ROI can come from three areas: reducing costs through greater operational efficiencies or other IT savings, improving the level of service to customers and clients, or driving revenues through greater sales and marketing effectiveness.

How should an enterprise connect its employees?
The first step for a business is to conduct an assessment of their mobility requirements. And that starts with understanding who your mobile workers are, what they do currently and need to be able to do when they’re mobile, and what technologies they’re currently using to do their job. Most companies don’t have a very clear understanding of this. Investing in mobile technologies before understanding the basic organisational requirements around mobility and how mobility impacts the company as a whole is the wrong approach, but it’s often the case today. I call this ‘opportunistic’ mobility, instead of ‘strategic’ mobility.

Ideally, the strategy should always come first. However, many companies have invested in mobility opportunistically, with devices driving some of those opportunistic investments. And that’s not always a bad thing, because using these devices begin to open the possibilities for strategic mobile deployments. Getting compelling mobile devices into the right people’s hands can result in an ‘a-ha’ moment. But ultimately, the business need should drive technology choices.

What about security and mobility – can they realistically co-exist?
They can and have to co-exist. Companies cannot stick their heads in the sand and ignore mobile technologies. For one, since we’ve established that companies have mobile workforces with information needs, ignoring or blocking the growth of mobile technologies will place companies at a competitive disadvantage. Secondly, mobile workers will adopt the technologies on their own if IT is slow to act. Mobile technologies certainly raise different security challenges – wireless networks have different vulnerabilities than fixed networks, and mobile devices are more prone to loss and theft. But IT can also apply many of the same security tools they’ve used in the laptop environment: VPNs, devices management, etc. The first step for IT is establishing sound policy around mobile technologies and then evaluating the technologies to support the policy.

What challenges face companies looking to go mobile?
I think that the first hurdle for companies is the challenge of getting their arms around their mobility requirements – the basic questions of who our mobile workers are, what they do and who needs mobile technology are not always easy for companies to answer. The next challenge is the wide variety of technologies and solutions that exist. There’s a wide choice of options out there.