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| Hans Nygaard |
This is Part 2 in of my interview with Hans Nygaard. You can read
Part 1 here.
Kevin: What are some of the most surprising trends you are saw in mobility in 2010?
Hans: Personally I have to say that I am surprised by the fact that the large vendors (SAP, Sybase, Oracle, QlikView) still push hard on BI solutions for smartphones. The UI/UX doesn’t lend itself to a task like that. It looks sexy, but if you are running an important business function, why would you need to see dashboards, cut and slice BW data etc. on a 3.5” screen? They are pushing a segment that is served (well) by laptops with 3G wireless – and a keyboard!
A second surprising trend for me was that most companies emerged from the financial crisis ready to take on new IT projects. Yet a surprisingly small number of companies (in Scandinavia) have enterprise mobility on the agenda. In transportation, supply chain, field service, maintenance, QA, etc., we continue to demonstrate dramatic business cases, yet many top managers seem unaware of the gold lying at their feet! I think that the processes mobility can improve are either not core to the company (i.e. internal maintenance and inspection) or not sexy enough for decision makers to bother about! Often the process ownership is in middle management, and it’s not in their job description to be visionary.
Kevin: What are some of the biggest challenges you see in mobility today?
Hans: Awareness in the enterprise market. Mobility is core to many companies, but not yet on management's agenda. Also, most of our enterprise users own a smartphone and are pampered by snazzy app stores, where apps compete in looking sexy and offer the best UX. To offer similarly appealing enterprise apps is a real challenge and user adoption and project success depends on it.
Kevin: How are enterprise mobility implementations different from other typical IT projects?
Hans: We work exclusively in the SAP market space. Mobile projects often fail to reach their success criteria when done exclusively by the SAP project organization; too much ASAP (accelerated SAP Implementation methodology) does not work well for SOA environment.
Kevin: What do companies fail to plan for when implementing mobility?
Hans: If they have no SOA experience, they fail to realize how many links there are in the mobility business ‘service chain’, from cell phone plans to VPN certificates over middleware application management, help desk training, etc. Most are used to operating just the monolithic ERP and office apps and their respective GUIs.
