Over the last 5 years, I have been involved with more than 25 mobility projects that have achieved varied degrees of success, partly due to planning and partly due to implementation.
A common thread through most of them has been more of a managerial than a technical issue and that is that mobility has not been the CIO’s primary focus area. That is understandable, because a CIO is responsible for smooth running of the company’s enterprise systems and ensuring that they keep up with the times. And alas, mobility was considered a nice-to-have add-on but not essential. I met with numerous CIOs between 2005 and 2009 who would say, "Our ERP implementation is still getting stabilized so we will look into mobile solutions later." And those that did take them up could not give them the attention an enterprise system needed.
The good news today, after the huge downturn and thanks to HP and SAP making billion-dollar news on enterprise mobility, is that CEOs have woken up to the fact that the business world has changed and they cannot cling to the past and that mobility is here to stay and should be given closer managerial attention.
A big mistake is to not allot a full-time person, with adequate authority, to be fully responsible for a mobility project. A mobility project often becomes yet another project in the project manager’s responsibilities. A manager in a bank once complained to me, “I have 20 projects under me at any given time, how can I give mobility priority when my core system upgrade is more important?”
India is a large country and most companies want to deploy mobile solutions through out the country. That is a very difficult task because implementation involves field level support such as hand-holding the user in the initial stages of the implementation, management of devices including repairs, replacement, data connectivity, etc. Most software producers are not geared to provide this service. And more importantly, many CIOs may think that it is a trivial issue, especially as a mobile is such an easy device to use and manage. Implementations can fail if sufficient importance is not given to this aspect. And not just importance but sufficient budget too! Did you know, there are companies now that specialize in providing only mobility implementation services including providing handsets entirely as a service?
Here is another big issue with a mobile solution implementation: Do some of you remember when you first introduced enterprise grade solutions, one of the big issues was overloading of the system resulting in poor user response when all planned users got on to the system? Companies then made millions selling load-testing tools! That is now a common issue today in mobility – CIOs tend to assume that a mobile solution will easily scale up, after all a mobile solution is quite simple and straight-forward. Unfortunately, just like any other enterprise system, if the underlying technology platform is inadequate, a true on-line mobile solution will fail under load. I know of an insurance company that implemented a sales solution, not ours I assure you, that croaked when just 400 users were using it concurrently. Naturally that got fixed post-facto at immense cost and resulted in a delayed implementation.
To summarize, in my opinion, there are three important factors that can affect implementation of enterprise mobility projects,
1) Focus needs to be given by the company’s top management, that is the CEO and CIO,
2) Implementation logistics are critical and should be addressed, preferably using a separate service provider,
3) It is important to have a strong technology platform for mobility that can handle load.
Friday, July 2, 2010
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