Your second-largest customer just halted a key manufacturing
line due to a problem with one of your products. This customer's contract
calls for hefty financial penalties if operations cannot be restored within a
few hours. Resolving the problem, however, requires a coordinated effort from a
maintenance team that combines engineers and logistics people from your firm,
engineers from two of your partners, and the customer's engineering and
machine-operations staff.
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Your firm has crafted a response protocol that you know
works. All team members have substantial computing resources at their disposal,
including powerful personal computers, broadband networks, and functionally rich
applications. They may even have wireless capabilities-in the form of pagers,
cell phones, and PDAs-or they may have Wi-Fi-enabled tablets or notebook PCs.
As the executive ultimately responsible for directing the maintenance response,
you know it's time to connect the team, execute the service protocol, and get
the customer back online.
It sounds simple. The problem is that, team members are
constantly on the move. When they're online, they may be using devices with
tiny displays that are inappropriate for complex service work. Moreover, they're
probably connected to applications that cannot deliver the critical information
the team members require to execute their tasks. Finally, they may not have
access to any kind of secure network resource.
So you alert your team members to the customer's problem
and wait for them to get to a secure system that allows them to:
Of course, as you wait, your customer waits.
The Occasionally Connected Paradigm
This is a classic example of an 'occasionally connected'
problem. Despite all the computing power, network bandwidth, and applications
capability that have been delivered; execution teams still face real computing
constraints. They cannot always be online. Nor can they be slaves to a single
device.
Given these limitations, how can we ensure that our business
systems are able to consistently deliver competitive capabilities regardless of
location and time? Or, put another way, how can we finally use time and location
to our ultimate advantage?
Occasionally Connected Business
The Internet has altered the definition of business bounds.
Before the Internet, businesses thought in physical terms: a meeting at
headquarters, ringing up a transaction at a point-of-sale terminal, a sales call
at a customer's office, or any other means of handling exchange between
individuals-both present and accounted for.
With adoption of the Internet, traditional physical
boundaries became secondary to boundaries defined by the network: the Web-based
transaction became an efficient means of handling exchange between concurrently
connected entities. Indeed, firms today are as concerned with digital security
as they are with physical security, if not more so.
However, both traditional and network-based business modes
presuppose the existence of some form of concurrent channel (for example, a
place for doing business or a network connection). If no channel exists, no
business is conducted.
Mobility is altering the definition of business bounds again
by altering the requirement for concurrent connections. Wireless technologies
are sensitizing customers, suppliers, sales partners, and employees to the
possibilities of gaining access to a firm's resources; independent of time and
space, whatever the goal.
But wireless technologies, by themselves, change only the
type of physical medium involved. While users may not be able to see the
wireless medium, their access to service is limited to coverage areas (wireless
access areas). The service discontinuities inherent in this technology mean that
mobile/wireless PC users have to operate in an intermittently connected world.
Unfortunately, many of today's applications fail to deliver seamless
productivity in such an environment.
No matter how it is defined, ultimately, mobility (and
mobilized solutions) means being able to move from one place to another without
losing the connection to resources. Customers want to-and therefore business
users must-maintain their sessions without disruption as they move in and out
of subnets and in and out of connectivity.
Why Mobilize? Creating Business Value Through Mobilized
Solutions
Mobilized solutions apply information technology to business
processes in a way that allows people to work productively at any time,
anywhere. Mobilized solutions generate enormous coordinative capacity for firms.
Deployed properly, they make obsolete most physical barriers to business
coordination in a complex, global marketplace. Thus, mobilized solutions create
business value in two primary ways.
In complex markets, execution requires people to take
discretionary action. The folks to whom execution authority is 'granted',
take action as fast as their expertise and mandate allows. Agents operating in
complex environments face questions about their mandates. They must 'check in
with headquarters' periodically to get the green light. Moreover, even when an
agent has a mandate to act, the right action to take may remain uncertain.
Agents may have to check the system to determine what commitments they can and
should make. These circumstances create latency, which can lead to lost business
opportunities.
Execution speed is a coordination problem. Mobilized
solutions allow distributed business resources to act faster while remaining
under control. Through mobility, the business system functions-that today
frame the business behaviors-can be distributed to agents anywhere and at any
time. As a result, the quality of business behavior becomes less dependent on
the agent's location or mastery of complex business protocols. Through their
business systems, agents literally can be anywhere.
The coordinative capacity made possible through mobilized
solutions creates a list of emerging application domains, each of which promises
significant business returns.
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Self-service portals feature significant testing or other
interactive features, and not just the 'how to' type of content, which the
customers ultimately reject (or worse, view as a blatant attempt to cut down
service levels).
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Product lifecycle management (PLM) applications are capable
of enfranchising expertise, irrespective of physical location, time zone, or
institutional affinity.
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True customer relationship management (CRM) applications
integrate customer requirements with business capabilities in a collaborative,
mutually beneficial way (this is much more than 'smart' order entry or 'robust'
sales force automation).
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Complex service response (SR) applications can intelligently
transform service workflows in response to difficulties in identifying problem
causes; availability of expertise; location of service resources; and
determination of service-level commitments.
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Execution management applications translate project
management plans into execution initiatives.
This is just a partial list. But all will come back to this
simple notion: mobilized solutions revolutionize the coordination of business
processes, not merely their automation.
Mobilized solutions can also create business value by
reducing a firm's dependencies on proprietary technology assets. Just as the
Internet dramatically altered the need for proprietary investments in wide area
data networks, so too are mobilized solutions creating new opportunities to meet
the vexing challenges of intermittently connected businesses, including the
following.
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GPRS, EDGE, CDMA, UMTS, and other 3G networks which span much
beyond Wi-Fi
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Software that automatically synchronizes information across
different device types, including: personal computers, PDAs, and telephones
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Business continuity solutions that aren't dependent on
access to data centers
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Application integration tools that can be utilized for less
than Rs 500,000
Again, this is just a partial list.
Ravi Subramanyam, director, MobileOne Infocom
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