Ashish Kothari

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Next Steps Things to consider when deciding to go mobile

This article should serve as a call for action for all business unit managers to unleash a witch hunt to identify all areas where waste can be reduced and transform existing business processes to leverage PDA enabled productivity gains. Even though, the previous sections discussed the opportunities of revenue enhancement - “serving the customers better” and cost savings – “serving the customers cheaper” as stand-alone, taking them as such would be living in the old paradigm where companies had to make strategic choices about whether they wanted to embrace customer intimacy strategies or operational excellence strategies. In “Blown to Bits” (Boston Consulting Group), authors Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster make an excellent case of how the traditional richness-reach trade-offs have been blown away and the impacts this has on the businesses today.  Business managers need to take a similar mindset when evaluating each of your business processes and operations against these two criterion.

Here is one of the potential many approaches you as business manager can take to "untether your corporation" (Untethering the Enterprise – Joe Manget, David Dean, Mark Gilbert , Boston Consulting Group)

Step 1:

Deploy a multi-functional PDA applications champion team comprising of business unit managers and IT managers to

·          Develop a clear high level mission statement for the effort.

·          Develop criteria for selecting areas where the PDA deployment efforts make sense.

·          Develop a communications strategy to introduce the concept to the workforce and energize them to actively look for such opportunities.

·          Set up  a 2 level incentive structures to give base-level rewards to those employees who come up with innovative ideas and a higher-level rewards for those ideas which eventually get implemented.

·          Act as the PMO for the individual “mobilizing” efforts. 

Step 2:

For each of the ideas that you receive, classify them into whether they offer opportunities for both Revenue Enhancement and Cost reduction or one of the two.  

Clearly the ideas, applications that fall in the top right quadrants are your big hitters and the ones which you need to focus on first. This approach will also ensure that non-genuine opportunities i.e. those that might not offer big enough cost reductions or revenue enhancement get weeded out early in the process. Which group of ideas you look at next will depend on your overall industry and firm dynamics and how elastic the demand you face is. For example, if you are in a low margin business and significant competitive advantages can be  had from cost cutting , you might want to explore opportunities in the rightmost lower quadrant first.

Step 3:

Choose the level of connectivity you would like you PDA solution to have to the enterprise data. The options range from 100 % real time wireless connectivity to only batch connectivity using HotSync^R or other comparable technologies. There are costs and benefits associated with each of these and there is no Black and White answer to what you should go with. Further, unlike a common misconception, even if you go with the wireless solution, you should perform due diligence to choose the level of wireless technology (2G, 2.5G or 3G) you go with. You do not have to wait for 3G technology to start harnessing the gains from PDA applications. Most of the applications we talked about in the previous sections, in fact did not have wireless data access and relied primarily on batch synchronizations.

Step 4:

Develop business cases for each of the opportunities, that clear your pre-screening at two levels – one at the individual project level to analyze the cash flows associated with the project and another at the firm level that looks at these projects collectively to harness economies of scale that could be leveraged across the business units. Choose an appropriate cost of capital to reflect the risks associated with these potential cash flows. This step is critical for you as a business manager to be able to quantify each of these opportunities in terms of the gross benefits they offer. Step 5 will give you the costs you will need to undertake to reap these benefits.

Step 5:

Having developed the benefits side of the model, it is now time for developing the cost side of the model. And what better way to do so, than by asking different vendors to quote you what it will cost you to implement these solutions. Having done previous implementations and projects quite similar to embark on, they will be able to give you better information about the costs associated than people in your organization.  At this point you will now have a complete picture of both the benefits and the costs associated with these projects.

Step 6:

It is time to now choose your  Service Providers( Systems integrator and vendor partners) to help you implement these projects. Make sure that when evaluating the contenders, you look not just at the price, but also at their past experience, their references, their capabilities in terms of future product/technology enhancements and their experiences with business process redesigns.

Step 7:

Choose one/two applications for it and go for it.

Conclusion

Palm based devices have opened a new frontier in technological efficiency and effectiveness which the current business leaders better not ignore. Further, the PDA revolution is not just an IT revolution but one that will affect each and every aspect of your business. Those who take the pioneering steps will gain a competitive advantage over their peers and fundamentally change the landscape. Businesses should thus seize the initiative and embrace the handheld computing environment to serve their customers faster, cheaper and better.