As You Wait, Your Customer Waits

Your second-largest customer just halted a key manufacturing

line due to a problem with one of your products. This customer's contract

calls for hefty financial penalties if operations cannot be restored within a

few hours. Resolving the problem requires a coordinated effort from a

maintenance team that combines engineers and logistics people from your firm,

engineers from two of your partners, and the customer's engineering and

machine operations staff.

Your firm has crafted a response protocol that you know works.

All team members have substantial computing resources at their disposal,

including powerful personal computers, broadband networks, and functionally rich

applications. They may even have wireless capabilities-in the form of pagers,

cell phones, and PDAs-or they may have WiFi-enabled tablets or notebook PCs.

As the executive ultimately responsible for directing the maintenance response,

you know it's time to connect the team, execute the service protocol, and get

the customer back online.

So you alert your team members to the customer's problem and

wait for them to get to a secure system that allows them to log on; interact

with the documents they need; and work from a location conducive to getting your

customer back up and running.

The Occasionally Connected Paradigm



This is a classic example of an "occasionally connected" problem.

Despite all the computing power, network bandwidth, and application capability

that have been delivered, execution teams still face real computing constraints.

They cannot always be online. Nor can they be slaves to a single device.

Given these limitations, how can we ensure that our business

systems are able to consistently deliver competitive capabilities regardless of

location and time? Or, put another way, how can we finally use time and location

to our ultimate advantage?

Occasionally Connected Business



The Internet has altered the definition of business bounds. Before the

Internet, businesses thought in physical terms: a meeting at headquarters,

ringing up a transaction at a point-of-sale terminal, a sales call at a customer's

office, or any other means of handling exchange between individuals both present

and accounted for.

With adoption of the Internet, traditional physical boundaries

became secondary to boundaries defined by the network: the Web-based transaction

became an efficient means of handling exchange between concurrently connected

entities. Indeed, firms today are as concerned with digital security as they are

with physical security, if not more so.

However, both traditional and network-based business modes

presuppose the existence of some form of concurrent channel (for example, a

place for doing business or a network connection). If no channel exists, no

business is conducted.

Mobility is altering the definition of business bounds again by

altering the requirement for concurrent connections. Wireless technologies are

sensitizing customers, suppliers, sales partners, and employees to the

possibilities of gaining access to a firm's resources independent of time and

space, whatever the goal.

But wireless technologies, by themselves, change only the type

of physical medium involved. While users may not be able to see the wireless

medium, their access to service is limited to coverage areas (wireless access

areas). The service discontinuities inherent in this technology mean that

mobile/wireless PC users have to operate in an intermittently connected world.

Unfortunately, many of today's applications fail to deliver seamless

productivity in such an environment.

Ultimately, mobility (and mobilized solutions) means being able

to move from one place to another without losing connection to resources.

Customers want to-and therefore business users must-maintain their sessions

without disruption as they move in and out of subnets and in and out of

connectivity.

Mobilized Solutions



Mobilized solutions apply IT to business processes in a way that allows

people to work productively at any time, anywhere. Mobilized solutions generate

enormous coordinative capacity for firms. Deployed properly, they obsolete most

physical barriers to business coordination in a complex, global marketplace.

Thus, mobilized solutions create business value in two primary ways:

• Strengthening the ability of an authorized agent to take
  
  action

• Substituting for technologies that contribute to
  
  intermittently connected business challenges

In complex markets, execution requires people to take

discretionary action. They must "check in with headquarters"

periodically to get the green light, or, agents may have to "check the

system" to determine what commitments they should make. These circumstances

create latency, which can lead to lost business opportunities in a competitive

global marketplace.

Execution speed is a coordination problem. Mobilized

solutions allow distributed business resources to act faster while remaining

under control. Through mobility, the business system function that today frames

business behaviors in connected locations can be distributed to agents anywhere

and at any time. As a result, the quality of business behavior becomes less

dependent on the agent's location or mastery of complex business protocols.

Through their business systems, agents literally can be anywhere.

The coordinative capacity made possible through mobilized

solutions creates a list of emerging application domains, each of which promises

significant business returns:

• Self-service portals feature significant testing or other
  
  interactive features, and not just the type of "how to" content
  
  that customers reject.

• Product lifecycle management (PLM) applications are
  
  capable of enfranchising expertise irrespective of physical location, time
  
  zone, or institutional affinity.

• CRM applications integrate customer requirements with
  
  business capabilities in a collaborative, mutually beneficial way.

• Complex service response (SR) applications can
  
  intelligently transform service workflows in response to difficulties
  
  identifying problem causes; availability of expertise; location of service
  
  resources; and determination of service-level commitments.

This is just a partial list. But all will come back to this

simple notion: mobilized solutions revolutionize the coordination of business

processes, not merely their automation.

Mobilized solutions can also create business value by

reducing a firm's dependencies on proprietary technology assets. Just as the

Internet dramatically altered the need for proprietary investments in wide area

data networks, so too are mobilized solutions creating new opportunities to meet

the vexing challenges of intermittently connected business, including the

following:

• GPRS/EDGE/CDMA/UMTS and other 3G networks which span much
  
  beyond WiFi

• Software that automatically synchronizes information
  
  across different device types, including personal computers, PDAs, and
  
  telephones

• Business continuity solutions that aren't dependent on
  
  access to data centers

• Application integration tools that can be utilized for
  
  less than INR500K

Again, this is just a partial list. There are numerous areas

in which mobilized solutions can provide more cost-effective approaches to

implementing information system infrastructure.

Ravi Subramanyam director, a mobile solutions based

company, MobileOne, Infocomm