Introduction

The flood of new mobile technology and the rapidity with which it is changing offers new business opportunities but also brings along its own set of challenges. Customers now expect to have access to products and services from anywhere, via both the web and apps, using the device of their choosing to interact and transact. Mobile workers look to mobile solutions to help them be more productive and efficient.

“Mobile is so important; put your best people on mobile. If you don’t have a mobile strategy, you are no longer relevant.”

Eric Schmidt
Former CEO and current Executive Chairman, Google

Even the most technically sophisticated corporate IT infrastructure is challenged by the mobility demands coming at them from all directions, both internally and externally. Gone are the days when it was enough to build solutions that handled one specific problem. Organizations must work from a new, contemporary baseline to build out their mobile strategy.

A mobile strategy needs to holistically define business objectives, key target groups and processes, policies, management and governance structures, quality assurance measures, and tangible measurement models for continuous tracking of return on investment (ROI). These are the mobile strategy pillars. They should be used to focus thinking on the future growth and acceleration of an entire company and to create its relevant technology and implementation roadmap.

Market Trends

Mobility is omnipresent in almost every aspect of our lives. We keep in touch with family and friends using mobile web and apps over a plethora of social networks. Entertainment, such as online games and streaming media, is available from anywhere. Across all markets, consumers and customers have shown that they are not only ready but also able to buy, download and use apps and often prefer to use their mobile devices to share experiences, be inspired and make transactions.

“Developing and implementing a comprehensive mobile strategy is important to many firms”

Forrsights: Mobility Dominates Enterprise Telecom Trends in 2011, Forrester Research Inc., July 22, 2011

Consumerization of IT is determining mobile usage patterns for many key employee and customer groups. Workers in their daily sales, service or management routines have come to expect that the information they need to accomplish their tasks will be current and readily available through their mobile devices. By arming mobile workers and mobile customers with real-time access to information and services, these users now expect to be “always on,” so they can get relevant information about customers, prospects, partners, products, and more – on demand. For businesses, how to connect with these customers and the personnel that are part of their remote workforce are mobile decisions that need to be given serious consideration.

Whether it is to have greater customer interaction, increased productivity, or reduced costs, many companies are recognizing that mobile technology has a significant impact on their organizational effectiveness. And in today’s world of high expectations, fierce competition, and ever-changing technology, companies are also leveraging mobile solutions to further differentiate themselves from the competition.

What is an Enterprise Mobility Strategy?

An Enterprise Mobility Strategy is one that is holistic in nature, meaning that it includes the business and technology as well as governance aspects of mobility. This all-embracing view of strategy is critical to securing the success of future mobile implementations. An Enterprise Mobility Strategy defines business goals and objectives, lays out an implementation roadmap on how to get there, determines policies for governance and defines relevant measurement models to follow-up on ROI.

Benefits of an Enterprise Mobility Strategy

When you create and execute a well-planned mobile strategy for your enterprise, you can:

Maximize ROI and leverage your current enterprise technology, such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relations Management, etc.

Decrease integration requirements and effort

Reduce end-user training needs

Increase customer satisfaction through quicker response times and a personalized experience

Improve productivity and employee efficiency through accelerated responsiveness and accuracy

Improve quality and availability of information enterprise-wide.

From the standpoint of your customers, mobile solutions allow them to connect and interact more freely and easily with you. Mobile solutions allow your employees to collaborate with partners, automate data entry, extend the power of business applications, and manage a broad range of transactions – anytime, anywhere.

Enterprises are continuing their transformation to highly fluid and distributed organizations where key decisions are being made at the point of interaction. Ultimately, the ability to improve the speed with which these decisions are made and how to draw people at the edges of an organization into the process are setting apart best-in-class operations. Organizations are looking to mobile computing and wireless communications solutions to enable these real-time remote transactions. Add customer service becoming a more critical – and revenue-generating – segment of operations and it seems likely that investment in mobility solutions will continue unabated.

Getting Started on Your Enterprise Mobility Strategy

We recommend that the process of bringing together a complete Enterprise Mobility Strategy begins with defining and setting up a Mobility Steering Group. This entity should include representatives from stakeholder groups such as marketing, sales, IT, and business owners. In some scenarios, it may even be relevant to include end users in the steering group.

It is important that all stakeholders agree on a unified vision for the organization, especially when it comes to business requirements, project goals, and potential process changes.

Once a strong, committed, representative team is assembled, we suggest the following set of elements as criteria for establishing and managing a comprehensive mobile strategy:

Figure 1: The critical success factors for establishing and managing a comprehensive mobile strategy

Policies

Every enterprise needs a mobile strategy policy rulebook that targets both long-term goals and short-term objectives. It should cross multiple processes and technologies and define multiple management disciplines. Often implementations unravel because an organization has not set out clear policies for enterprise-wide compliance. Key elements of the policy rulebook should show:

Documented support and endorsement from senior management for the company’s mobile strategy and its related efforts

A structured approach to gathering and prioritizing new mobile initiatives

A budgetary framework for costs relating to enterprise mobility (including strategy efforts, services, software, licenses and hardware).

Objectives

It is necessary to determine from the very start what the overall goals and business objectives are and what the appropriate operational alignment within the organization is. Revenue generating and cost saving objectives need to be laid out in detail, as well as serve as overall objectives for improving the effectiveness of every part of the organization.

It is essential to evaluate internal and external processes to determine what needs to change to achieve the objectives and how changes to business processes will impact business goals within the organization. Implementation of mobile projects is usually the beginning of a more comprehensive business transformation. In some cases it’s a planned initiative and in others, it’s simply because mobile implementation creates the opportunity.

Scope

Key target groups need to be identified, be it different customer groups or internal users such as executives, mobile workers, or employees of other businesses. By defining new processes or clarifying the processes with the highest potential for improvement using mobile technologies, the effort of designing well-aligned and supporting features becomes more efficient. It is especially important to consider the information being made available to the mobile devices and how this information might support the user:

For mobile customers, successful solutions are geared to helping them find, buy, transact, and manage information quickly and easily, as well as for branding and marketing purposes

In the case of mobile workers, many first-time mobile applications tend to focus on mobile business intelligence, collaboration, and eliminating paper through automation of business processes. A newly automated process will often quickly become a critical component of a company’s ongoing operation. Internal mobile applications usually target cost reduction or increased business productivity.

Often, the first tentative attempts to leverage mobile opportunities are focused on providing information similar to what’s already available on a company’s external website but optimized for mobile devices, using Responsive Web Design (RWD). [1] Another typical approach is to use a mobile application to increase a revenue stream, such as enabling customers to be inspired by products or services as well as actually buying them from their devices.

Technology

It’s an understatement to say that technology plays an important role in an Enterprise Mobility Strategy. But the real challenge is keeping ahead of the technology changes in the mobile arena. An effective strategy needs to involve a process that can deal with unavoidable and constant movement in the industry. It requires an integrated approach for your software, hardware, and communication plans so that the needs of your organization and its various methods of transmitting information are met.

A fundamental technology aspect of an Enterprise Mobility Strategy is defining a relevant supporting system architecture that has the ability to securely and effectively integrate with back end systems, i.e. billing systems, as well as scale up the pace when mobile usage grows. This is especially important when multiple applications or cross-applications are involved.

The decision about what architecture to use usually boils down to a choice between a common mobile infrastructure or one cobbled together from independent applications. If the decider for this is an IT-based decision maker the focus will usually be more on the technical aspects of the mobile implementation including reliability, availability, compliance with open standards, interoperability, support, security, and recovery. If the decision is handled by the business owners, the focus will usually be on functionality, return on investment and gaining operational efficiencies. To be truly successful, the decision must be one that takes into account all aspects of the process so that the solution selected will best achieve the desired results for the enterprise.

Some integration questions to be asked:

Which back office (back end) hardware and software will be impacted?

What is the level of interoperability?

What enterprise software is already in place (legacy, CRM, ERP, supply chain, etc.)?

Are there market solutions built for integration purposes, like a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP), already available? (Make sure your team is dedicated to building solutions, not platforms or integration layers. Don’t reinvent the wheel.)

As mobile technology advances and companies feel the need to be more competitive, there will continue to be a paradigm shift away from siloed mobile solutions to a composite framework built by combining multiple services. Developing or enhancing your corporate mobile strategy is the perfect time to consider such a move.

It is also the perfect opportunity to consider which system tools need to be part of your overall plan. There are products to cover multiple management aspects, such as:

Mobile applications management

Mobile lifecycle management

Mobile inventory and asset management

Mobile device management

Mobile operations management

Cloud-based opportunities management.

Since mobile applications typically do interact with some kind of back end application, an integration platform is essential. The strategy should be to avoid deployment of integration platforms that only address mobile functionality. Rather, the approach should be to deploy integration platforms that have the ability to handle functionality requested through any channel, be it mobile or web applications. Companies that already have implemented an enterprise-wide system architecture based on Service Oriented Architecture principles have an advantage when deploying new mobile applications.

An increasing number of companies are adopting a “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) strategy towards devices used by their employees. It’s important that the strategy encompasses multiple scenarios:

A mobile customer might prefer to use a smartphone in one scenario and a tablet in another. Apps optimized for each form factor are essential, as is Responsive Web Design for mobile web access.

Some employees may choose to use one type of device; other employees may choose to use several types of devices and platforms.

A mobile worker handling frozen foods in a cold-room warehouse, for example, would fare far better with a touch screen and a stylus than with a phone-style keypad, for the simple reason that he wears bulky gloves all day.

Another key consideration in your mobile technology planning is to understand what information is needed for the user to effectively perform the task at hand. High quality user experience and interface design is critical to ensure that the workflow matches the way the user performs her task – not necessarily the way the paper form or website was organized. Cross platform tools and technologies can emerge from the need to address several different mobile platforms. It’s important to understand when these solutions are appropriate and cost efficient and when they are counterproductive and lead to poor usability and design.

A successful technology implementation strategy often takes into consideration two dimensions: business benefits and complexity. By mapping each opportunity to these dimensions, it helps clarify where the process should start, i.e., where business benefits can be optimized with the lowest level of complexity possible.

Other things to consider as part of your implementation strategy:

Multi-site, multi-country, multi-language, implementation

User experience and user interface design policies

Critical nature of customer representation during the testing phase

Maturity of your audience and how much training they will need

Amount of training your internal people will need to support mobile solutions

Expect to identify a large number of both internal and external opportunities.

The reality is that mobile solutions are often implemented without considering the long-term implications and changing technology landscape which, when ignored, results in creating work silos, integration nightmares, increased support costs, and frustrated mobile users. Mobility consultants who have the breadth and depth of experience to know what works, what doesn’t, and why that is the case can be an invaluable asset when implementing mobile enterprise solutions.

Management

Defining clear, comprehensive management processes can mean the difference between a failed and a successful mobile strategy. Some recommendations to consider:

Establishing procedures for dealing with employees’ changing needs and requirements, covering areas like Bring Your Own Device, securing access to sensitive network resources, setting up an internal App Store and providing a self-service portal

Agreeing on and adopting an agile project development approach

Including User Experience Experts, User Interface Experts and senior developers and testers in your projects

Implementing efficient design and coding guidelines

Setting up a structured approach to mobile testing that includes both a way to define test processes and how to prepare the infrastructure for testing through emulators, cloud-based device services and through physical devices

Addressing platform diversity (many client platforms in many versions), functional test automation, and end-to-end performance testing as part of an overall testing plan.

An overarching focus on reliability and quality assessment is essential if the enterprise is to avoid the possibility of damaging the corporate image or revenue loss due to unavailability of a service.

Measurement

No strategy is complete without the ability to measure its deliverables. It’s critical to define key metrics for estimating, managing and following up the implemented solutions. Some central Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) include:

New revenue generated through the mobile channel

Cost savings driven by mobile solutions

Customer and user satisfaction

Benchmarking of scope and implementation versus industry best practice and competition

Key metrics from actual usage such as number of visits, number of downloads, page views, conversion, location, time on site/in app, path analysis, ratings, and so on.

It is critical that companies establish a mobile strategy that satisfies today’s business requirements while remaining flexible enough to evolve and adapt to technologies of the future that promise to be even more powerful and pervasive. Accelerated developments in speech recognition, form factors, wireless networks, augmented reality, mobile wallets, new types of single purpose devices, and digital imaging, will all be contributing factors. Mobile strategy has proven itself an essential component of business strategy and its implementers are already enjoying measurable benefits in branding, revenue, productivity, cost savings, and overall growth.

The Time Is Now

If you want to sharpen your competitive edge, maximize your business value and reduce the total cost of ownership, it is important that you start with a well-planned mobile strategy that incorporates input from all key stakeholders directly affected by the plan: IT, business owners, end users, and the executive sponsors. Then, evaluate the criteria identified for your mobile solutions from a perspective of what your business needs and what the technology can accomplish today, but also with an eye on the future needs of your company and the future of technology. Identify the KPIs that your organization will be using to measure success for mobile solutions. They are anything but static and you’ll need to continually measure performance against your KPIs to identify where improvement is needed.

Mobile Strategy is one of five distinct yet complementary solutions encapsulated in Capgemini and Sogeti’s Enterprise Mobility Orchestrator (See Figure 2). The Orchestrator represents a comprehensive and modular approach that allows us to identify problems to be solved, objectives to be achieved and benefits to be realized. Our focus is on enabling organizations to innovate, thus helping them meet their current business needs and establish a foundation for future business needs. The Orchestrator is all of our mobile knowledge in a framework of harmonized methodologies, accelerators and industrialized services that allows us to create and implement effective mobile strategies. Our approach is holistic and extends beyond basic functions to support and deliver true business process transformation.

Figure 2: As an Enterprise Mobility Orchestrator, Capgemini and Sogeti offer an end-to-end service framework

Mobility surrounds us and engulfs our daily lives. Expectations about mobile solutions are high and getting higher and more impossible for organizations to ignore. In order to develop a holistic, thorough mobile strategy without duplication or gaps, you need to know both the right questions to ask and the right people to ask them to. And you need to do it now.

[1] Responsive Web Design (RWD) is an approach to web design in which a site is crafted to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones)

* * *

Watch Enterprise Mobility Orchestrator video

Read more at:

www.capgemini.com/mobility

www.sogeti.com/mobility

For more information, please contact:

Josean Mendez Rios

Capgemini Technology Architect

jose.mendez-rios@capgemini.com

+1 404 200 0545

Andreas Sjöström

Global Mobility Practice Lead, Sogeti

andreas.sjostrom@sogeti.com

+46 70 60 98 513

About Capgemini and Sogeti

With more than 120,000 people in 40 countries, Capgemini is one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services. The Group reported 2011 global revenues of EUR 9.7 billion. Together with its clients, Capgemini creates and delivers business and technology solutions that fit their needs and drive the results they want. A deeply multicultural organization, Capgemini has developed its own way of working, the Collaborative Business Experience™, and draws on Rightshore®, its worldwide delivery model.

Sogeti, its wholly-owned subsidiary, is a leading provider of local professional services, bringing together more than 20,000 professionals in 15 countries and is present in over 100 locations in Europe, the US and India.

Capgemini and Sogeti offer end-to-end Mobile Solutions for mobile strategy and services as an Enterprise Mobility Orchestrator. Deploying a framework of harmonized methods, accelerators and industrialized services, the Enterprise Mobility Orchestrator services can help create, implement and support an organization’s mobile strategy. To address all areas of a business going mobile, the service portfolio covers: Strategy; Mobile Applications; Mobile Platforms; Managed Mobility; and Reselling. Together, Capgemini and Sogeti have combined their extensive capabilities in strategic consulting, technology excellence, industry solutions and global delivery to help organizations optimize their mobile business potential.

Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved by Capgemini and Sogeti. Rightshore® is a trademark belonging to Capgemini Group.