Many corporations have large mobile workforces in sales and field service roles. Frequently, these mobile workers have little or no remote access to their organization’s core business applications. Voice and paper are still the main communication methods for these employees to communicate and interact with the corporate backend. An obvious example is a Salesperson who has to make a voice call to the corporate office to inquire whether an item he is selling is in stock.
Typically, he would make this call during his sales negotiation with the prospect. If he manages to close the deal, he will manually fill out the order form, which he will hand deliver to the corporate office at the end of the day. He will fax the organization to the corporate office if it is slightly tech-savvy. The inefficiencies in this communication approach are apparent. Imagine if the corporation had implemented an enterprise mobility solution – the Salesperson in our example would be equipped with some PDA – to enquire about the stock information, and he would key in the item code in the stock query application running on his PDA.
Which would instantly tell him the answer by querying the database in real time. If a sale were made, the Salesperson would fill out the order form on his PDA, which would be uploaded to the corporation’s sales order processing application at the backend. The above example depicts the manual vs. mobile-enabled business process for a Salesperson. Imagine how many corporate business processes can be mobile-enabled and the resulting efficiency and productivity gains. What is more interesting is that research in the US indicates that corporations plan to implement mobility solutions as part of their business strategy and not for productivity gains alone.
Enterprise mobility applications
A corporation can enable its business processes to be mobile in several ways. There are many solutions in the marketplace, and the choice of what solution to implement depends on the business objectives around implementing mobility. The mobile solutions available can be classified as follows: Mobile Office – These applications include wireless access to office solutions such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, Groupwise, etc., for real-time connectivity with E-mail, contact information, personal calendars, and diaries. This is the simplest way to get started towards mobility and can be achieved with very little capital or operating expenditure. Some mobile operators in India have already begun offer such solutions as part of their corporate packages.
Mobile Web Content—This set of applications mobilizes the Intranet and Internet content, making such content available on mobile devices. Again, this rollout is simple and does not require major investments—the benefits can be offered immediately to employees and customers. The limitations of these applications are around the device’s form factor—not all devices have large screens conducive to browsing such content.
Mobile News, Alerts, and Notifications – These applications provide information and alert people on the move – based on a certain trigger, e.g., if a certain threshold is crossed – a text message to the systems administrator when the server disk space crosses 80% capacity. This category of applications also does not require major expenditure – however, the benefits of a rollout of such kinds of applications can be immense – as key information can be made available to the concerned person even when mobile. Most such implementations use SMS features available on GSM networks.
Mobile Commerce—Several corporations need to provide Mobile Commerce applications. Through these applications, a corporation can augment its revenue streams. Typically, a consumer can transact with the corporation over a mobile channel. Some examples from India are the Cadbury implementation—chocolate vending machines operating through SMS and m-donation—and paying money to a temple through a mobile phone.
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Mobile Enterprise Applications – This category of applications provides the corporation with the potential to realize the true benefits of mobility. Under this category of applications, a corporation would typically mobile-enable large chunks of its business processes. The required effort is substantial as implementing such an application involves many organizations and existing IT applications. All kinds of information can be available to mobile workers, including sales orders, inventory, production schedules, accounts payable and accounts receivable, etc. Some typical examples of these applications are Sales Force Automation and Field Service Automation. An organization typically invests in devices, mobility middleware, substantial systems integration, and data contracts with a mobile operator.
Key considerations around enterprise mobility
Each IT manager in an organization faces the challenge of implementing enterprise mobility. Besides internal time and budgetary constraints, the IT manager must consider several factors. Some of these are listed below: Device standardization – The industry is flooded with devices. These devices run various operating systems (Palm, Pocket PC, Symbian, etc.). The rate at which new devices are introduced is also phenomenal as device manufacturers fight each other for market share.
Also, the device is quite a personal issue—people have their own preferences for devices. All these factors make a choice a difficult one. The commonsense approach would be to implement a solution that can support as wide a spectrum of devices as possible; however, this must be balanced with the costs involved. Also, remember that an application that works on several devices is also costly to maintain.
Network type and coverage—In any country, multiple networks with different standards coexist—e.g., in India, both CDMA and GSM are popular. In addition, there are connectivity options for GPRS, Edge, HSCSD, etc. Please remember that the application must support important protocols and be resilient to failover if the coverage is inadequate. For example, if a GPRS connection does not exist, the transaction could be completed over GSM at a lower speed of 9600 bps.
Security – IT managers view wireless networks as prone to security breaches. Therefore, one must take a holistic view of authentication, encryption, non-repudiation, and data integrity.
Systems integration—Enterprise mobility cannot be achieved in isolation. Typically, the backend corporate applications need to integrate seamlessly with some mobility middleware, which poses complex challenges, especially if the backend is a legacy application.
ASP model vs. Enterprise hosting—The IT manager must also choose a deployment model. It is possible to procure an enterprise mobility solution that the solution provider hosts. In such a deployment, only connectors are provided to the backend. The solution vendor is responsible for maintaining the platform. The other approach could be to deploy the solution on its servers. This approach has the benefits of security and control. However, it offers greater challenges in ongoing maintenance.
Multiple applications—The selected enterprise mobility solution should allow multiple applications to coexist on the same platform. For example, the organization may start with sales force automation and later deploy a mobility solution for the field service engineers.
Business process change—The enterprise mobility solution must support business process change without requiring application redesign and reprogramming.
Costs—The IT manager must consider the capital expenditures involved in procuring and deploying enterprise mobility and be mindful of operating costs such as network costs, hosting charges, device maintenance, etc.
Vendor experience—If a third party is involved in the mobility solution, the IT manager must consider the vendor’s experience providing similar solutions. An important item to look for could be the vendor’s systems integration expertise.
Conclusion
Deploying enterprise mobility solutions is becoming a necessity for corporations. If the right solution is chosen and the deployment strategy is carefully selected, the possible return on investment could justify such a rollout and provide a significant competitive advantage to the corporation.
