Deploying enterprise-mobility technology seems to create as many pain points as Wile E. Coyote suffers at the bottom of a cliff.
Which employees get a mobile device? What brand? What applications should it run? How does the company manage it? How secure is it going to be? Most important, does the competition have it?
“It’s not easy to do, but if your competitor has it and you don’t, that’s a pain point,” said Dan Shey, a business mobility analyst at ABI Research speaking at a smart-phone conference Monday that was a prelude to the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2007 convention beginning Tuesday in San Francisco.
The market for business mobility technology – smart phones, network access, software applications, hosted management solutions – is expected to grow to $390 billion by 2012, from $242 billion in 2007, Shey said. But the technology that money buys adds to the complexity and management challenges of deploying it to an increasingly mobile work force.
The task can be “daunting,” said Michael Woodward, vice president of mobility business marketing at AT&T, speaking at another related conference, because of the vast and diverse ecosystem of mobile technology: mobile devices, networks, operating systems, middleware, applications software, security protocols and others.
But while a project might be daunting, the goal should be simple, Woodward said: Take the data employees work with when they're in the office and deliver it to them when they're out in the field.
Industry analysts, consultants and vendors of mobile technology provided some guidance about how to successfully deliver enterprise mobility at a series of presentations leading up to the opening of the annual convention of CTIA-The Wireless Association:
* Identify only a few key “anchor” business processes to start with, such as service dispatch, offering price quotes or completing sales orders.
* Involve users in determining needs, testing different technology and providing feedback.
* Train employees so they optimize use of the mobile technology. “We would not enable their account on the [mobile] application until they had completed the training,” said Manoj Koduru, IT program manager at KLA-Tencor, a provider of technology to improve yields for chip makers, which gave RIM BlackBerry smart phones to 750 employees globally.
