In the first of a two part extract from the book Connected Workforce, Andy Mulholland, Global Chief Technology Officer, Capgemini and Mal Postings, Global Lead for Mobility and RFID Solutions, Capgemini reveal the ideas and attitudes needed to navigate a rapidly changing business environment. They look at the problems faced by companies that are restrained by linear processes and argue that mobility must bring business and technology together in a collaborative approach. Building on examples from a wide range of industries, they show how, at this evolutionary phase of new-technology adoption, niche operations can have a stranglehold in key areas. They make a compelling case for embedding knowledge within the business process.
There is a clear increase in the number of companies that are looking for an enterprise-wide mobility solution. Perhaps as recently as 18 months ago, mobility wasn’t even on most companies’ radar. Now, the CIO is being handed reports of an isolated pilot here, another there, 300 users in this territory, 50 in that one, some using technology X, others Y. These projects have mostly been carried out autonomously, with minimal if any change to the core IT infrastructure. The impact of these pilots is now becoming clear and the CIO is starting to have visions of improved benefits, return on investment, productivity gains and increased customer satisfaction.
The mobility market is heating up rapidly. Companies are projected to spend €50 billion over the next three years on mobility solutions with an annual compound growth rate of over 44 per cent (IDC, 2002). Ninety-two per cent of companies are kick-starting initiatives. Ninety-seven per cent are increasing their spend, and of those, 60 per cent are spending over €500k on a typical project. Mobility is clearly on the move.
So how do you plot a course through this rapidly changing environment? The problem we find is that too many companies are restrained in their thinking. Everybody’s still talking about linear processes: business-to-business, business-to-consumer, business-to-employee and so on. There is also no substantial new thinking within the typical MBA management models and methodologies like Michael Porter’s value chain, C.K. Prahalad’s ‘core competencies’ and the Balanced Scorecard which are almost 20 years old now. We need a more business and technology joined-up way of viewing the world. For mobility we have developed the ‘Mobility Service Grid’ that has at its core four different architectural dimensions: Enterprise, Marketplace, Device and User.
The Enterprise could be AXA, British Airways or your company of choice. The Marketplace is like the Yellow Pages, a host of organisations with service level agreements, pricing structures and so on.
More imagination
You need a bit more imagination when you get to the Device, because we’re not simply talking about mobile phones or laptops. It could be a car, a network-aware apartment, a fridge or any kind of device, running any kind of operating system, whether it is a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) or a Windows CE-style operating system.
And of course, you have the User. It may not seem intuitive that the user and the device are separate, but they are and this is fundamental to achieving the full potential of mobility. For example, say that Shell offers me a 10 per cent discount on fuel for the next two months. The car doesn’t come into it.
The offer is made to me, so this is definitely an enterprise-to-user communication/promotion. Under different circumstances, that offer could be made on an enterprise-to-device basis. If I’m on the road and my vehicle telematics signal that I’m running near empty, the car can broadcast that requirement to the marketplace, giving its current location and stating, in effect, that it’s now in the market for fuel and asking which enterprise (fuel station) can make the best offer. It doesn’t matter who is driving the car, it’s the car that’s actually communicating.
The Mobility Service Grid model is not just about semantics. It’s a practical tool. It gives you a workable number of relationships — about ten in fact — which can not only be used as an analytical approach but can also lead to the suggestion of entirely new services. In practice, we tend to map out our client’s requirements in true business consultancy fashion first — business process, business service and so on, identifying the various processes involved in each area — representing an ‘as-is’ position.
Then we take a step back and use this methodology as a basis for further enquiry: what do you need to do as an enterprise? What could or should be done by the marketplace? What could be done by the user? What can be done by the device? You soon find yourself putting the project into context, considering a number of options that you can evaluate in different ways, ie is this process really a differentiator? Is it going to earn any money in the future? Etc.
This is much more aligned to a service architecture way of viewing the business — and again will help in defining the bridge between the business processes (service) and relating technology needed to satisfy these services.
But often companies do not start adopting mobile technologies because they are visionaries or because they can see long-term potential. They’re usually more driven to do so by some basic and easily identifiable requirement: employee productivity in a particular department, for example, or a reduction in back-office admin.
Driving mobility
Competitive advantage is beginning to drive mobility, but for many the basic requirements are still in the driving seat. Maximising the return on assets is another frequent example, but most of the time it’s a simple people-focused issue. If mobility gives a travelling salesman more time to do his job while he’s on the road, then all of a sudden he doesn’t have to spend from 4.30 in the afternoon until seven in the evening doing paperwork.
Another frequent example involves compliance. Make the salesman more efficient and you can drive up sales, but foul up your compliance and you can lose your business. The problem is exacerbated because a lot of compliance is currently heavily paper-driven. To take Shell again as an example, in the Netherlands they simply cannot implement all the compliance measures using a normal paper-based admin system. We developed something very simple using an online database on a PDA that presents a workflow for compliance, enabling employees to go on their rounds and use a check-list. Compliance sorted out and cost savings into the bargain.
Unfortunately, despite the obvious possibilities, the adoption of mobility has faced a number of major challenges. The first inhibitor has been the global economic downturn, putting pressure on discretionary IT spending. One of the results of this has been an increase in the importance of outsourcing. A lot of companies are saying that having gone through the Internet revolution and suffered a great deal of heartache by re-inventing the wheel internally, it’s easier to outsource from the start. Especially now that desktop outsourcing and managed service provision is seen as normal — the extension in this service to cover enterprise mobility devices is a natural one. The issues for procurement, provisioning, support, maintenance and end-of-life are all costly and time-consuming and are not ‘core’ for many companies.
Next, you have cultural issues. Some employees may feel that they are being watched too much and no longer enjoy the freedom they had to organise their daily work routine. And others may feel compelled to now be available 24/7, actually reducing the amount of free time although the mobility solutions they enjoy should in principle have the exact opposite effect. Many organisations feel that these cultural issues are a significant inhibitor to mobility.
From an IT point of view, there are also significant technological barriers. First, of course, you have network performance, but this is being addressed steadily by the prospects of 3G. More seriously, many mobile solutions involve unfamiliar technologies: a new operating system, hardware platforms, or more esoteric issues such as the agent-based applications that come into their own when you have device-to-device communication.
The result is that a lot of CIOs and CTOs we speak to see the area as still emerging and not yet mature. They are expecting to find a robust mobility solution from the large, reliable players — but they often can’t, because these are still mainly in development. This in turn leads to another problem: the solutions that are out there tend to come from small players. We’re in that evolutionary phase of new technologies where niche operations have a stranglehold in certain key areas. Clients are impressed by — and desperate for — the solutions, but are still nervous about issues on scalability from the niche providers in the market today. This phase probably won’t last long: we expect to see more consolidation within this market. In the meantime, there’s an interesting market dynamic.
If you’re courageous, there are some smart deals to be done in this environment. From a Capgemini point of view, it’s a full circle: at one end, we’re dealing directly with 500 clients globally; at the other, we have small ISVs coming to us for a mantle of respectability and scalability, with technologies that attract a great deal of attention from the larger clients. And in the middle, we also have partnerships with the Telco Service Providers — who are providing voice but need to partner on mobile enterprise, and with the OEMs who want to sell more handsets but need m-commerce solutions to attract the clients… which takes you back to the beginning of the circle. The small ISVs are hot: their concepts and technologies are a driving force, but they’re not big enough to provide the fully managed service that key clients require. So here Capgemini looks at providing a collaborative approach with an ecosystem of partners to guarantee a best of breed service.
These managed services are essential because of the need for security, which is becoming more significant – especially where device-to-device communication is concerned — and compliance. Wrap these issues up with the challenges outlined above and you have a strong need for a service that goes from procurement and provisioning, through call centre support and maintenance, to end-of-life management.
or example, a number of companies, Capgemini included, have set up managed service offerings based on a cost per user. A client wants 5,000 devices? We might quote, say, €70 per user per month, to include cradle-to-grave management of the device and user support. This further helps by shifting the whole exercise over to an opex model, reducing the high capex costs that would otherwise be involved in operational development and support.
So, what are the real benefits you get from mobility? Find out in the second extract which will appear in the next issue of Mobile Europe.