The Quick will Make the Money!
Investment on mobility in India has been on the rise during the last year, predominantly to enhance customer service and to make operations cost-efficient
In today’s world of business, time is money, therefore resolving the problem fast and providing information as quickly as possible are the needs of the hour. Hence enterprise mobility is regarded as having high potential and is slowly gaining traction in order to improve the produc- tivity of mobile employees within the organization. Employees on field job and less on desk can complete their tasks quickly and more efficiently. Mobility facilitates to turn downtime into productive time, when mobile employees are supported with business tools, viz voice and email.
On a Growth Spree
Enterprise mobility market has been growing strongly maturing in India. It’s definitely moving into the ‘must-have’ set of solutions from the ‘good-to-have’ segment. Adoption of smartphones and tablets by business users in India has caught up, and is increasing faster than
ever. CIOS are excited about the ability to empower the mobile workforce by delivering more capabilities via the devices they use. They are seeking to build cohesive strategies for rolling-out innovative mobile solutions for their business. Moreover, recent developments in the hardware, network, applications, and middleware segments indicate that the growth in enterprise mobility is set to accelerate further in the next couple of years.
Despite industry’s consensus that enterprise mobility has gained momentum in the US and Europe, in India the rate of adoption is relatively low but it has gained significance. According to Sumanth Tarigopula, director, Best Shore application services, HP India, there is a radical shift to mobility. The trend Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is making mobility absolutely real. Also, convergence of cloud, mobile, and real-time analytics will further accelerate the in-take of mobility.
Steps for Deployment
In India, businesses are not designed for mobility. The key to mobility success depends on how closely organizations align both business and IT drivers. Also, its key to success is careful mobility planning. Sunil Lalvani, director, enterprise sales, Research In Motion India notes, “Understanding your mobile users is an important step in being able to make the right mobility decision for an organization. The success of the project can depend on the uptake and the use of mobile applications. As a result, it makes sense to start with an understanding of who within organization is mobile. How mobile are they and what devices, processes, and applications do they require to do their job? These facts and figures can be used to create a segmentation model, which provides a view to understand current and predict future mobility needs and to build your plan for mobility.”
Be sure to canvass all applicable user groups when you gather information. Categorizing the tasks and requirements of each user group makes it easier to determine how to support them with mobility. Also, it’s important to understand how people within each user group view their growing mobility. Their attitude and
The key to mobility success depends on how closely organizations align both business and IT drivers and categorize the tasks and requirements of each user group
perspective is important for the success mobility planning and deployment in an enterprise.
Consultation before the deployment is paramount for having the right IT and administrative policies in place. It enables enterprises to shortlist on the software, whom to provide access, what information ought to be provided, and on devices.
Enterprises will have to make an initial investment on license fees, hardware and software costs, professional service fees, and labor cost. Besides, companies have to incur voice and data expenses. Enterprises ought to have right policies in place. “CIOS can choose to provide what information to be accessed. They should not allow the access of all information but only the relevant information,” states Prakash Sreewastav, CEO, WINIT.
“Integration of the back-end infrastructure is crucial. Back-end should be located on cloud. CIOS have to rationalize, they have to consider which are the right apps to mobilize,” advises Sunil Gupta, SVP and head, mobility service lines, Symphony Services.
Underlying security should be apt and CIOS should consider infrastructure security and enterprise security. “Mobile integration architecture, low latency, testing, and quality should be considered before the deployment of the solution,” points out Tarigopula.
As per Sreewastav, CEOS and CIOS ought to understand the efficacy of key operational processes and the linkage to enterprise applications. Developing a
security policy for mobile devices that matches or exceeds security for desktop PCS and laptops is crucial.
Last year, investments on mobility in India have been on the rise, predominantly driven by the motivation to enhance customer service and to make operations cost-efficient. Large companies have been able to extend the power of their enterprise applications to the shop floor personnel and control engineers to improve data capture accuracy, and to ensure fast and error-free operations. SMES, too, are investing to enhance their competitive edge by providing differentiated services to their customers. They are leveraging mobility for providing ‘feet-on-street’ personnel real-time visibility into their supply chains and distribution networks, as well as to provide access to enterprise information that can enrich customer interactions. More innovative uses of enterprise mobility in India have been in the areas of delivering business intelligence and enabling customer self-service.
Multifaceted Roles
Enterprise mobility assures an enhanced business efficiency, increased productiv- ity, employee satisfaction, improved field service management, improved resolution of customer issues, better customer experience, shortens time to market, improved ability to resolve issues, and it shortens sales cycle.
According to S Sridharan, managing director, TAKE Solutions, “Mobility plays a multifaceted role in transforming how business is done. By adopting mobility solutions, businesses have shown how to create value in terms of building competitive edge, enhancing customer satisfaction, optimizing operations, streamlining
Employees in sales, field service, and executive management roles are the highest beneficiaries of enterprise mobility
supply-chains, improving productivity of workforce, and enabling better decision-making. The biggest impact by far is created by the fact that they are able to sense market changes quicker, and respond swiftly by taking pro-active decision-making to right where the action lies—the shop floor and the field.”
Employees in sales, field service, and executive management roles are the highest beneficiaries of enterprise mobility, as their productivity enhances tremendously. Referring to a Forrester research, Lalvani asserts, “Productivity benefits range from saving 1 hr to 2 hr per week for sales, field service, and executive management in reactive organizations, to improving productivity by 13-21 hr per week for sales personnel in an integrative deployment stage enterprises.”
“With the rapid emergence of cloud computing services and infrastructures, CIOS now have access to a unique set of capabilities and applications that address the challenges associated with proprietary/owned mobility frameworks and infrastructures, and this is providing them the opportunity to roll out the next generation of enterprise mobility solutions,” says Sridharan.
The mobile device/smartphones landscape is quite fragmented with several operating system—blackberry, Android, Symbian, Windows mobile, and iphone. Enterprise mobility in itself is a challenging proposition. With the ‘BYOD’ phenomenon catching up and employees using their own smartphones, tablets, and even netbooks for business purposes, enterprises are facing stiffer challenges. Some of them include embracing an open architecture, reviewing and re-hashing enterprise security policies, enabling remote management of enhancements and end-point security, leveraging prevailing on-premise infrastructure, ensuring enterprise software license conformance, mitigating risk of data breaches, and use of cost-effective options to scale infrastructure.