* Getting a top-down mobile plan in place
When it comes to providing mobile tools in the workplace, who is in charge of the big picture in your organization?
Assuredly, when it comes to the traditional vertical applications that are easily identifiable as strategic to the business – warehouse, retail floor, service dispatch and even patient charting in healthcare – this isn’t so tough a question. The productivity benefits are fairly clear-cut. When the very nature of the business and supporting tasks are mobile, an organization can’t thrive without the mobile tools.
But how much to invest in mobile connectivity for the everyday business professional is still a hazy ROI question for many organizations. Are marketing professionals and finance folks most productive when at their desks – or at somebody’s desk – or when traveling about? These are really questions for business executives in charge of determining high-level business goals and the processes that support them.
Of course, they must communicate with employees who know their jobs best in order to determine what those processes should be. Then they must align with IT, telecom and others to figure out how to get the goals executed.
Now many vendors have “ROI calculators” on their Web sites. I did overhear a woman at a recent trade show politely state during the Q&A portion of an educational session that it was difficult to trust those, since the vendors have a vested interest in making the returns look good. She also said she was having a tough time convincing upper management about the benefits of investing, say, in wireless LANs because “once you have it, you won’t want to go back,” as the leader of the session offered as a deployment rationale. Points taken.
The use of mobile tools today, except for the vertical applications, is still largely being driven by an employee’s desire here and there, rather than being thought out strategically, from the top down. Many IT tools have entered the enterprise this way over the years. Now, however, it’s getting time for IT to align with executive management and get a mobile plan in place for the enterprise overall that embraces productivity, mobile security and mobile management. Not only will this yield the greatest return, it will save money by eliminating redundancies on the various wireless usage plans and making best use of volume discounts.
I’ll share some stats that may help on this score in the next newsletter.
