Old School Ties Are Not The Fashion In Enterprise Mobility
By Mary Brittain-White, CEO, Retriever Communications
My lunch companion was the Director of Innovation at a large telecommunications company, a new role in the past two years which reflected a desire for effective change and the internal frustration that it was not being achieved. I just did not understand why he was not embarrassed — he had just told me he had not submitted our tender response to the CIO because, “It is hard enough getting proposals through IT so I only put up two proposals from two old school large logo IT vendors.”
He then went on to say these vendor solutions could not satisfy the broad requirement so he came back to us for enterprise mobility — this last piece being more than half the project. The approach of leading with an old logo vendor would more than double the cost of the project and make deployment slower. So why would he have done this?
To understand his strategy is easy — he just wanted to get a decision through the system and start. He knew CIOs prefer the warmth of old vendor relationships and the surety that, if such a decision fails, it will not reflect on them: “Who would expect (insert old vendor logo) to have such a poor quality product?” Yet the answer is, “Anyone who bothered to actually look!”
The ugly truth is Enterprise Mobility demands of IT both an active assessment of what is required by their end users and a willingness to look outside of their current enterprise resource planning (ERP) and system integration (SI) partners. The DNA demanded for successful mobility solutions is not found in the comfortable relationships already in place, these old friends work in an office model where IT systems and methods can be imposed.
Mobility refuses to co-operate; its paradigm is all about the end user experience, reliability, and responsiveness. Reflecting the field workers’ workflow and directly assisting his productivity is the objective — it is not about imposing office systems on remote users who may be standing in front of the customer or a broken machine, about to report a safety incident or track an asset transfer in their logistics process.
And it is about to get worse for the CIO.
The nascent market of wearables will multiply dramatically the number of mobility users or data feeds and, in tandem the issues on scale and security, will reach a crescendo as business users start using solutions outside of IT’s orbit and authorization. Data collected will now not just reflect the digitization of previous paperwork, it will also include a mountain of events and data points that are collected from machines, GPS markers, and photos to establish compliance, tracking of human and inanimate objects on maps, and distribution of data to the field like trend graphs of a gas meter’s performance or active redirection of an individual to a new workgroup within the distribution center.
The upside of embracing innovation in Enterprise Mobility is a substantial impact to both your company’s bottom line and competitive market standing. Automation of in-field processes routinely delivers a greater than 30 percent productivity improvement and also takes out huge swaths of back office processes as procedures are dramatically simplified. Your customers also gain enormously — you can transparently update them on your field activities or allow them to interact easily with your company via an app. Mobility delivers like no other IT since 1990 — it has an immediate Return on Investment based on hard savings.
So mobility can make IT fashionable again within corporate: becoming an essential enabler in remodeling the company’s processes and responsiveness to customers. However, CIOs must step out of their comfort zones and embrace the new fashion and ditch the old ties.