Actualidad -- Octubre 31, 2006
CONNECTED WORLD: MOBILITY, THE NEXT FRONTIER
Mobility: The Next Frontier
A CSC field service technician uses a handheld device, which dramatically reduces paperwork.
All of the pieces of the connected world point to a major opportunity for business growth and innovation: mobility. Not just the mobility of cell phones or text messages, but of moving business processes beyond fixed places.
"Because the network redefines the geography of business as boundaryless," says Dominique Purcell, co-author of the Connected World report and CSC’s global offering executive for the Mobile Enterprise, "companies need to focus on the work process, not the work place, when considering the benefits of mobile-enabling the enterprise." Organizations will see some benefits from mobile e-mail, but will see more powerful benefits when they bring mobility to functions such as sales, supply chain and field service.
The report identifies several forces that make mobility critical in today's business world: competitive pressure, a rich underlying network, and better mobile devices and software. For some industries, such as healthcare and courier services, mobility is already fact. For everyone else, “the enterprise mobile market is at a turning point, shifting from experimenting to implementing,” Connected World says.
Organizations follow a path to mobility, initially moving from unmanaged devices to managed device environments. IT departments are faced with a tangle of wireless devices belonging to individual employees. If businesses can find a way to connect these devices, they will be repaid with lower operating costs and the foundation for new business capability.
One of the next steps for mobility will be to work it into business activities. For example, CSC has developed a system for an airline customer that helps speed the airport check-in process. The system sends short message service (SMS) text messages to travelers’ phones 22 hours before a flight, reminding them to call in and confirm flight and seat details.
When mobile devices are tied directly to processes, organizations can see dramatic improvement in the way they do business. Plant maintenance, for example, can be transformed through handheld computers and wireless sensors that allow immediate analysis of equipment in order to prevent breakdowns. A salesperson using a mobile device connected to customer relationship management and supply chain systems can tell the customer in front of him whether an order can be updated or not. "The organization becomes agile, with information on customer needs as and when they occur," the report says.
In order for businesses to reach sustained mobility enterprisewide, says Purcell, they need to create a coordinated mobile environment, rather than several independent projects. That requires middleware called a multichannel access gateway (MAG), which joins wired and wireless communication channels. A MAG allows easier access to varied networks and devices, mobile integration with back-end applications and provides a platform for future growth. CSC uses a MAG in desktop support for one of its large outsourcing customers, pulling customer and technician data from what once were two distinct systems. CSC’s Mobile Field Technician solution sends the combined data into a handheld device carried by 100 CSC technicians, who now have all the information they need to complete a work order at their fingertips. Technicians scan asset tags on equipment to enter information that once had to be entered manually, sometimes more than once. The handhelds eliminate up to an hour of paperwork a day for each technician.
Mobility requires IT departments to understand business goals and to master things like mobile business processes, device management, workforce expectations and enterprise IT architecture that supports mobility. The stakes are higher for the CIO than in traditional projects, in part because mobility touches core business activity. According to Purcell, "The next frontier of mobile-enabling the business is a step-by-step journey into a new world — a new way of running the business." "
Related Information:
Download the Connected World report. (PDF, 10 MB)
Join the Connected World discussion at the Leading Edge Forum blog.
Learn about CSC’s Leading Edge Forum
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