Mobile Expert Interview Series: IDC's Nick McQuire, Part 1

IDC's Nick McQuire

Nick and I will both be attending the upcoming conference in Brussels entitled, The Enterprise Mobility Exchange.  I saw him on the agenda and arranged an interview with him.

Note: These are not Nick McQuire's exact words, but rather my notes from the interview.  However, Nick did review this article and provided edits in advance of publication.

Kevin: Tell us about your roles and responsibilities and what areas you cover?
Nick: I have been at IDC for just over a year, and I was at BT Global Services in the strategy arm working across the mobility and UCC portfolios before that.  Before BT, I headed up Enterprise Mobility research in Europe for Yankee Group so have been directly and indirectly in the enterprise mobility segment in Europe for close to ten years now.

Kevin: What are your focus areas today?
Nick: Enterprise mobility and M2M (machine-to-machine communications) in EMEA.  I focus my research on the mobile and M2M value chains in terms of vendors and service providers.  In terms of end users, at IDC we do a fair bit with CIOs, especially in terms of our events platform, but also we run numerous CIO dinners across Europe throughout the year working with them on their challenges in terms of mobility.

Kevin: What do you think is the value of attending an event like the Enterprise Mobility Exchange in Brussels on May 9 - 11?
Nick: I was particularly interested in attending this event based on its success in previous years, especially in terms of field services.  I am especially keen to hear how recent enterprise-wise mobile trends are impacting the field services community, especially in terms of consumerization of the enterprise.  Are enterprises still looking in silos in terms of their approach to mobility?  I am interested in hearing best practices around mobile strategies and deployment in general and given the breadth of attendees and the scope of industry topics covered, I am sure there will be lots to learn in Brussels!

Kevin: What do companies need to think about before starting an enterprise mobility project?
Nick:  Of course many companies will have different approaches but we tend to advise CIOs that the starting point should be to conduct a general audit and rationalization of the estate to determine what enterprises have and what the priorities should be.  This should range across mobile infrastructure, devices and contracts and liability schemes to determine the costs, inventory, policy and any projects that are in place already flying under the radar.  This process in itself is often a revelation for many companies and going through this rationalization exercise up front is a critical step because it often lays bare a few key, previously hidden, priorities early on.

The next step, once organizations have determined what they have, should be to engage the business units to understand their requirements and what mobility means to them to do their job effectively. Having cross functional user buy in early on helps with sponsorship internally but also with prioritization as well.  We also argue that IT should functionally profile their users during this process to best determine user requirements and solutions for specific user groups, work styles and work spaces within the organization.  Not all workers are mobile workers and equally some worker roles have higher risk profiles than others. Gone are the days when blanket policies and standardized technology apply to all workers in organizations, so functional profiling is an important exercise.

Next, after the fact finding, it is then critical to put in place a mobile strategy that aligns with wider business goals of the organization and takes this input from the business teams.  What are the priorities for the company over the next two to three years, and what is needed to achieve them?  Is it to cut costs or to drive growth and greater customer interaction?  Is it to foster better collaboration and innovation or more effective business continuity?  Is it about talent recruitment and retention?  A mobility strategy should directly align to and enable these strategic priorities.

Finally, we argue that success for wide mobility implementations within enterprises needs central governance especially in its infancy.  Perhaps it’s a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Mobility within the company or a VP of Mobility internally.  But some form of central governance, which considers cross functional interests across the mobile workforce for sure, but also senior management and functions from HR, Legal and Operations.  This 360 degree view will ensure considerations across the business are met from employees, partners, legal, including unions, etc., and of course customers.  It will also ensure governance across the business in terms of avoiding duplication and unnecessary costs as well as to ensure priorities and standards are in place.

Read Part 2 of this interview.

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst, SAP Mentor Volunteer
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Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mobile Workflows in the Field, SAP and Other ERPs

The way business processes are designed, implemented and standardized within a company can often mean the difference between success and failure. If often takes years of trial and error, and sometimes flashes of brilliance to come up with just the right business process that will mean success and competitive advantages.

Once the perfect business process is proven it needs to be implemented and automated. Why automated? Because humans are forgetful and have even been known to be from time to time lazy. They want to cut corners and avoid that which is tiresome. Automation enforces and manages the perfect business process.

For years software vendors and ERP developers like SAP have developed applications that help design workflows and workflow engines to run them. These provide the technology infrastructure within the enterprise to automate these business processes and to ensure they are followed, however, once an employee exits the building and drives away in a company van to perform a task remotely, the automated business process breaks down. Suddenly, the business processes that you have spent years perfecting are useless. The employee has broken the "connection" and walked out the door to freedom.

Even today, most mobile field service workers leave the building with a clipboard and a stack of paper service tickets or work orders. How they perform their work, in what order and the processes they utilize in the field are now unsupervised and up for interpretation. The field service technicians often don't much care for the business processes designed by the teams of MBAs in suits at the office. They have their own preferences and opinions about how things should be done, and in remote jobsites who is going to argue?

Many large companies have up to 40% of their employees working remotely and/or in the field on jobsites. How can the SAP or other ERP Business Process Expert design and implement business processes that can be utilized and enforced in mobile and remote locations? This is a challenge worth resolving.

Think about it, a company pays tens of millions of dollars implementing SAP internally and designing business processes and workflows to operate their enterprise. Yet for many services based businesses the money is earned outside the office at remote locations. The location where the customer interaction takes place and where the money is made is often devoid of best in class business process automation.

Mobile applications that need to synchronize with ERPs, should implement mobile workflow support. This requires a client server architecture whereby the mobile client software understands that a workflow or event manager is associated with a particular process and the server also understands that it is both producing and consuming data with the mobile device that is part of an event or workflow. Let me provide a scenario.

A service technician has a ruggded PDA or other mobile device on his belt. He receives an alert that he needs to be dispatched to a jobsite. This initiates a business process with a workflow associated with it. A series of tasks that make up the dispatch and completion of a service ticket are now initiated. The tasks may include:

1. Dispatch receives a service call


2. This initiates a series of tasks including estimating the availability and analyzing the location of all service technicians in the area.


3. Once the nearest available service technician is identified a service dispatch can be sent


4. Service technician confirms availability and accepts the job


5. Least cost and fastest routing information is sent


6. Service technician arrives at the jobsite and pushes a button on his mobile device annoucing his arrival.


7. Arrival message synchronizes with the server workflow or event manager notifying dispatch of his location on site.


8. The workflow may include an inspection, detailed findings, proposed solution, repair and collection of the fee


9. Any parts needed will be automatically deducted from the service vehicle's inventory


10. The workflow can also include sales and marketing activities such as promoting an Annual Service plan or equipment upgrade to the customer


11. The repair is complete, dispatch is notified


12. The service technician is available for another job
    

In this scenario, the mobile client application using a workflow engine that interacts with the server side application steps the service technician through the various tasks included in the business process. These steps can be directions in the form of alerts, messages, next steps, data fields that require input, and feedback from the dispatch office. Each step of the workflow required input from the service technician to confirm that the step had been completed and this information was in turn synchronized with the server side workflow engine. This enables the best practices supported by the company to be practiced and supervised in the field.

SAP has a solution called Event Manager. It is designed to manage activities happening across a geographically dispersed supply chain. It requires data input via B2B and EDI data communications. Similarly, mobile applications can feed data into a centralized workflow or event management solution that helps support and ensure best practices across remote jobsites.

A workflow engine and a mobile client version of a mobile workflow engine is required by companies that want to standardize business processes in the field where interactions with customers take place and where revenue is earned.

If you would like to discuss this concept in more detail please email me.

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http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/ /
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