Enterprise Mobility, Digital Transformation and Work Spaces

I had the opportunity to spend some time recently with Asure Software's VP/GM of EMEA and APAC, Nigel Clarke, and to discuss how digital transformation is impacting work spaces and the mobile workforce.   In years past I attended facility management conferences and developed mobile apps to help manage facilities, assets, rooms, inspections, materials and supplies.  We were counting and inspecting physical objects.  Today, however, there are digital transformations taking place in this industry.

Today, companies less often require employees to work in the physical office (sorry folks at Yahoo!). Often equipment is not associated with a location, but moves to where it is needed at any given time. When people do come into the office there is a need to find a desk, conference room, video or projection equipment and to use additional services to ensure their use of the office is optimized and efficiently managed.

Every day the office layout and who is using the office and rooms may differ.  This requires several different strategies:

1. Real-time communications with on site teams
2. Agile building, parking and network access
3. Digitization of a physical building into digital spaces
4. Digitization of time that can be carved into increments that can be manipulated and reserved
5. Associating digital times with digital spaces
6. Agile room layouts
7. Collaborating with third parties to provide services for particular spaces and times
8. Mobile apps for the mobile workforce

All of these changes must be supported on mobile apps.  Time, space, temperatures, resources, equipment, access, parking, networks and services can now be reserved and managed from thousands of miles away in a cloud computing environment.  This requires a real-time system and an office layout conducive to agile use that can quickly be transformed to meet different needs on different days.

These can all be coordinated digitally via mobile apps.  But that is just the beginning.  You could also arrange caterings services and reserve special equipment and car services associated with time and space from thousands of miles away.

Can you imagine trying to support this kind of environment without online and mobile apps?  What a nightmare.  Some companies may think their industry is not being impacted significantly today by digital transformation, but they're probably wrong.

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Crowdsourcing, Collaboration and Enterprise Mobility

I spent time with a company recently that identified one of their strategic initiatives for 2013 as being crowdsourcing.  Are you familiar with the term?  Here is Wikipedia's definition, "Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people."

This company, we'll call ACME Inc., is purposely asking their employees to contribute ideas which are then reviewed, voted on, and the winners identified and rewarded.  I love it!  Now to be sure this is all very new to ACME Inc., but I applaud their thinking!  If employees know their ideas can make a difference and be recognized, and that actual thinking will be rewarded, then the sky is the limit on innovative thinking within a company!  All too often employees think only certain bestowed titles and roles in the company are paid to think, while the rest of the brain power in the company is put on sleep mode.

I am here to tell you - in the coming months, quarters and years, it's going to take all the brain power a company can muster to stay in front of the millions of competing digital disruptors as author James McQuivey calls them in his book Digital Disruption - read the WSJ review here.

With cloud based SaaS (software as a service) solutions available today, even the smallest companies can use world class CRMs, ERPs, SCMs, workforce management systems, finance and payroll systems on a monthly subscription basis.  This means your competition can appear overnight, unencumbered by your overhead, legacy IT systems, debt load, unionized workforce and benefit burdens.  If your company is going to be competitive in the market of the future, things need to change.

I also spent time with another company this month that had completed a POC (proof of concept) with a social collaboration platform.  I asked how the POC went.  The answer - not much happened.  There were no earth shaking discoveries or results to report.  Upon further questioning, the person shared that the social collaboration platform did not include a mobile app.  STOP the PRESS!  No mobile app?  Can you imagine Facebook or Twitter with no mobile app?  They wouldn't have anywhere close to the number of users as they do today.

Very few social networking users wait until they sit down and boot-up the desktop or laptop to become social.  Social is about being connected anywhere and everywhere.  You don't want to wait until later to update people and share your thoughts and ideas.  Social is all about immediacy, and immediacy is all about mobile.
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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant

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Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Interesting SAP Mobility Discussion Highlight

In the comment section of the article SAP Mobility Challenge, Part 4 there is an interesting discussion that I wanted to highlight for those that may have missed it.

***Comment 1

Kevin,

I agree about the small custom mobile solutions for small number of users. Usually such projects have high ROIs based on the urgent business needs. However, this is what happened in the past 10 years in the absence of a successful SAP mobility strategy and solutions.

Currently, companies look for company wide mobility strategy which covers most of the departments, or at least covers the main mobility requirements of the main business areas, which need it and prove to deliver high ROI. Based on different market researches and my own daily experiences, the trend is MEAP-based mobility solutions for mid and large size companies. Small companies still have the choice to continue using non-MEAP solutions like Sky Technologies.

Based on the definition of MEAP, vendors like Sky technologies don't deliver that category of mobility platform. MEAP requires middleware for many obvious reasons such as composition, data orchestration, performance... Instead, Sky delivers "innerware", which can be installed inside SAP, based solutions for SAP.

I admire Sky products for small companies. However, to get rid of the big troubles we had and still have on business mobility market, such companies will either have to merge with MEAP vendors or focus on small businesses, which are usually not the main group of SAP customers.

Best Regards,
Ahmed

***Comment 2

Ahmed,

You make some interesting points with regards to MEAP vendors, and I'd like to take the opportunity to discuss a little the Sky Technologies "inside SAP" approach to this. Although the Sky Technologies solution is delivered and implemented “inside SAP” this does not mean that the functions of the MEAP vendor middleware platforms has been ignored.

Using the “inside SAP” approach the Sky Technologies technology enables all of the key functions you describe (composition, data orchestration, performance, etc) to deliver SAP mobile solutions to global enterprises. This has been proven out over and over by the large number of global mobility deployments and customer references currently using Sky Technologies.

These large enterprise implementations understand that being “inside SAP”, the deployment, implementation cycles, ongoing maintenance and support are greatly simplified and lead directly to lower cost of ownership and greater return on investment.

I’d also like to take a moment to talk about “the middleware” requirements of the other major SAP mobility vendors. If we were honest the word “middleware” should be used in a plural form. These vendors require a highly complex landscape of middleware-upon-middleware in order to function. Not only do you have to implement the vendor middleware platforms, but this then has to be integrated with SAP via the SAP DOE Middleware platform. This leaves the mobile user many steps removed from the SAP process being mobilized.

By definition these other vendors mobilize their own middleware, with all of the associated duplication of business processes and rules in the middleware layer, and then attempt to integrate with SAP. In effect there are now at least two versions of the truth in respect of the business processes being mobilized. Sky Technologies maintains a single version of the truth - SAP, and truly mobilizes SAP.

Richard Ling, VP Technology, Sky Technologies
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Please add your thoughts and comments to this thread.

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Author Kevin Benedict
Mobile Strategy Consultant, Mobile Industry Analyst and Web 2.0 Marketing Expert
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***Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant and Web 2.0 marketing expert. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
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