How do enterprise mobility deployments get justified?
Some companies measure the impact of the deficiency in the their business process and rationally identify enterprise mobility as a way to address it. Others spoof it and come up with an approach that looks like an un-budgeted good idea or even better “our competitors are doing it so we thought we had better join in”.
It’s IT so the plot can get lost from time to time. All the same rules apply there are some excellent projects being undertaken and some real stinkers.
In many companies first time enterprise mobility newbies are often IT staff schooled on desktop systems or operations people still using a phone just to make calls. They soon realise this area is not what they are used to. The supplier landscape is different from the mainstream, devices and apps are from weird sounding vendors OS’s can be different and issues like comms and security can cause headaches. At the same time the project needs them to combine business transformational app functionality with the nuts and bolts of app delivery that can include everything from sign on screen printing receipts and charging a device in a vehicle. The moving parts are all out there the trick is to get them to all work together to ensure high employee adoption.
So how do you figure out if spending precious time and budget to automate your mobile workers is worth it? If your management team believe that you need to address any or all of these 10 compelling events then you are well on your way to justifying your project?
- Need to save money on back office functions. Especially re-keying data from one medium to another
- Improve key metric cycle times such as invoicing.
- Improve customer satisfaction perhaps by providing better information or faster response times.
- Enable a remote worker to be more productive with their time. or
- Put staff in a position to undertake new customer facing tasks.
- Have an ERP system to feed?
- Making a business process work that was probably re-engineered in the past.
- Ensure compliance being met and recorded.
- Need to optimise route and journey planning.
- Improve accuracy of data collected in the supply chain.
The key point is to address a business process deficiency and do something about it. Try and avoid deploying technology just for the sake of it – Surprise !
Next time – some thoughts on the sort of devices used in enterprise mobility projects.
