The Role of a Mobile Strategist

Tomorrow, Wednesday January 16 at 2 PM EST, I will be discussing "9 Reasons Every Business Needs a Mobile Strategist" on a live webinar with Jim Somers, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, with Antenna Software.  This is an interesting topic to me as nearly every executive team I meet is struggling with the development of a mobile strategy.

I think the reason developing a mobile strategy is so difficult may be related to this excerpt I came across recently in the book Social Business By Design, "The real challenge is to act strategically enough to matter."  Mobility matters, it really, really matters and this means uncomfortable change.  Let's think about this excerpt together, "The real challenge is to act strategically enough to matter."  What does that mean to you?  I think about companies just slowly dipping their toe in the water of mobility and supporting simple HR apps on smartphones.  Is that strategic enough to matter?

In the NFL (national football league) and in college football there is an evolving trend to use a different offensive strategy that involves playing the game at a much quicker pace than is generally played.  This strategy also involves using players with different body types, new formations and plays, and using players with more endurance than is typical.  It is a different way of playing the game and it has proven quite successful.

The football teams that succeed with this new strategy have not just changed one player, or one play, or one formation.  They have developed a whole new philosophy that impacts every part of the organization and strategy from recruiting, to teaching, to workouts, practices, and the way the game is managed and played.  Companies that act "strategically enough to matter" will embrace change in much the same way.  They will recognize how strategically important mobility is and will review all aspects of their business to understand what needs to change to truly matter.

Join us on the webinar - register here.

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

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.

Mobile Strategies - Time, Place and Waste

Wasted Food

The economist, philosopher and theorist of markets Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) wrote, "The knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place - To know of and put to use a machine not fully employed, or somebody's skill which could be better utilized, or to be aware of a surplus stock which can be drawn upon during an interruption of supplies, is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques."

I love the way Hayek describes the value related to "the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place," as being "socially useful."  It is also very useful for businesses and can deliver competitive advantages!  I, of course, read this as a call for mobile strategies, mobile technologies and location-based services to support the real-time exchange of information, even though Hayek may not have lived long enough to have used them himself.

Hayek goes on to write, "And the shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp-steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others."  

If you have ever wondered as to the competitive advantages available to your company by implementing real-time mobile communications and business analytics, this is it.  I found it profound that Hayek described the ability to optimize productivity and improve efficiencies as being as socially useful as new innovations and inventions.  Hayek was talking about sustainability and environmentally friendly before we knew the terms.

Today I read a CNN article titled World Wastes Half of Its Food, Study Finds.  The article explains where food is wasted."  This, at a high level, is due to the following:

• production inefficiencies in developing countries
• market and consumer waste in more advanced societies

The article referenced a report by the British-based independent Institution of Mechanical Engineers.  They claimed about 4.4 billion tons of food is produced annually and roughly half of it is never eaten."

Why is this food never eaten?

• inefficient harvesting
• storage problems
• transportation problems
• wasted by markets or consumers

I see an application of the words of Hayek, "The knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place - To know of surplus stock which can be drawn upon... is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques."  It's time we look at using mobile strategies and solutions, real-time business intelligence and analytics to reduce waste and improve sustainability.
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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

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.

Aberdeen Group, SAP and Mobile, Social and Cloud

"Over the previous 12-24 months the silos of social, mobile and cloud gradually began to overlap and converge with the use of cloud-enabled social technologies, or cloud-based mobility allowing enterprise workers to connect with one another across secure networks via their mobile devices." ~ Service Organizations and SoMoClo report, Aberdeen Group

Over the past 12 weeks I have met with nearly 20 large companies across Asia, North America and Europe on the subject of mobile strategies.  In all cases social and analytics were also brought into the discussion.  I agree with Aberdeen Group's findings and their belief that SoMoClo (social, mobile and cloud) are converging technologies.  Here is another excerpt from Aberdeen Group's report, "the three disruptive technologies [social, mobile, cloud] act as a unified construct: cloud is the core, mobility its edge, and social the connection through the cloud between mobile endpoints."

Gartner expands this notion by adding a fourth element, social, mobile, information and cloud to the mix.  They call these four converging technologies, "The Nexus of Forces."  My job title at Cognizant is Head Analyst for SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud).  The same four elements, but with a catchier acronym.  I can talk SMAC all day long.

The one additional element to all these acronyms that seems to be missing though is IoT (the Internet of Things or M2M).  This is an important emerging area of focus.  SAP now has dedicated executives and departments focused on M2M (machine-to-machine) interfaces to SAP, and analysts are predicting there will be 25-50 billion connected devices by 2025.  SAP partners with companies like ILS Technology to be the platform and interface between connected devices and SAP solutions.

These connected devices have cameras, barcode scanners, RFID scanners, accelerometers and an endless number of other sensors on them.  These sensors are collecting data in real-time and wirelessly sending it to a central service for analysis.  This massive amount of new data, plus the ability to operate machines remotely from great distances [think UAVs/Drones for example] will soon change the way many businesses operate and will provide many areas of competitive advantages.
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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

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.

Twitter, Smartphones, TV and Real-Time Feedback

There was an interesting article by John Letzing in the The Wall Street Journal on December 18, 2012, titled Twitter Creates New TV Metric.  It was about a new partnership between Twitter and the TV ratings giant Nielsen Co.  Apparently, Twitter becomes very active around different TV shows and Nielsen wants to be able to monitor and report on this activity.

Letzing writes that the joint service called, Nielsen Twitter TV Rating, will develop a metric based on Twitter activity.  These days, TV viewers increasingly have one hand on the remote and the other on their smartphone tweeting.  The new service will gauge "the reach of the TV conversation on Twitter," and provide "TV networks and advertisers the real-time metrics required to understand TV audience social activity."

This is a fascinating development to me.  It is a real-time-virtual-meets-human-meets-virtual-meets-bigdata (#VMHMVMBD) solution.  My apologies for the acronym.  It just seemed like a requirement.  This kind of real-time feedback has the potential to significantly impact broadcasters, TV production companies and the advertising industry.  I can imagine companies wanting to get immediate viewer feedback on new ad campaigns before making long term commitments.  I can see completely new business models erupting based on real-time tweets.  I can see companies connecting ad agency fees and contractual terms to the real-time social sentiment.

This partnership demonstrates more time-space compression.  There is less time between an event and event feedback.  Less time between feedback and adjustments or changes.  Viewers opinions from across a wide geographical landscape are immediately known.

The increasing pace of business introduced by social, mobile, analytics and cloud solutions will be a very interesting development in 2013.

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

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.

Measuring the Value of Social and Mobile Solutions in the Enterprise

"The impact of new technologies is invariably misjudged because we measure the future with yardsticks from the past."  Stephen Baker

How does one measure the value of mobilizing and socializing an enterprise?  In the book Social Business by Design: Transformative Social Media Strategies, written by Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim, they report that in 2010, McKinsey and Company published survey results of companies engaged in social business activities that  showed firms engaged systematically in social business processes had 24 percent higher revenue.  Frost and Sullivan found similar results showing companies that deployed social tools saw improved performance in innovation (68 percent versus 39 percent that didn’t deploy), sales growth (76 percent versus 50 percent that didn’t deploy), and profit growth (71 percent versus 45 percent that didn’t deploy).  From those results it appears something good happens to companies when they embrace the social business concept.  I think it is too early to say exactly how these improvements happened, but at this stage it is simply important to recognize the correlation.

Measuring the ROIs for mobile and social is difficult.  We know the exercise of determining an ROI is useful in order to set priorities, but most of us, down deep know these innovations are important and necessary even if we cannot exactly identify the ROI.  They have significantly changed the way we all communicate in our personal lives, and they are guaranteed to change the way we communicate in our work lives as well.  These innovations are changing the very way business is done.   At the least we should be studying these trends and engaging in pilot projects.

Some of the most significant changes social and mobile technologies are making in the enterprise today are based on:

• faster communications
• more open exchanges of ideas
• reduced communication channel hierarchies that prevent open communication
• communication accountability - names are associated with ideas
• faster identification of problems
• knowledge exchange
• more collaborative decision-making
• shared situational awareness
• data-driven decision-making

What is the value of having enterprise-wide situational awareness?  What is the value of being able to see an entire project or account discussion in one collaboration site?  What is the value of eliminating artificial barriers to ideas and innovations?  It is a whole new way of doing things and we may have to develop new yardsticks for measuring these capabilities.
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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

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.