Extending The Enterprise

Bob Egan is Director of Emerging Technologies and Telecoms at TowerGroup. He’s been a marketing analyst for the past 12 years, primarily focused on mobile and wireless technologies for the enterprise. Here, he talks to Business Management about the movement towards greater enterprise mobility and the rise of mobile device management.

BM. How are companies using mobility applications and wireless devices to extend the enterprise beyond the traditional four walls of the office? What advantages do these solutions offer?

BE. 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 to now beginning to replace desktop phones in many organizations, 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 commoditized, and people are also 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.

BM. How are such solutions helping to maximize the productivity of workers on the road? Are there any particular sectors that are especially benefiting from innovations in enterprise mobility?

BE. 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 organizations.

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.

BM. What challenges face companies looking to ‘go mobile’ over the next few years?

BE. 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 organizations 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.

BM. How should they go about planning a mobility rollout? Should they take a task-based or an application-based approach?

BE. That’s a great question. 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 evangelize throughout the organization 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 recognizing 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 organization 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.

BM. What would be your top five tips for implementing an enterprise mobility solution?

BE. Number one is to take a look at your business operations and look at 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.

BM. Revisiting device decisions will be a key part of managing any enterprise mobility solution over the coming years. How should companies approach this?

BE. 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.