Mobile Data: We’ve Been Here Before

By Rick Sklarin and Elissa Comsudi

When it comes to deployment of mobile and wireless data services throughout the enterprise, it seems like we’ve been here before. In the early 1980s, personal computers began populating desks of accounting and marketing executives, often without the knowledge or involvement of the IT department. Then, the PC battle began between the end-user’s desire to customize their desktops and IT department’s desire to limit the number of configurations offered and supported throughout the enterprise. Over the next decade, efforts were made to integrate the standalone PC into the enterprise’s technology architecture. These efforts gave end users the independence they sought, and the IT department the control and discipline the organization required. A compromise was reached between standardization and customization—and the PC became integral to the IT architecture of the enterprise.

Now, history repeats itself—at least it exhibits a strong parallel—with the deployment of wireless enterprise technology throughout an organization. The corporate ‘early adopters’ of personal digital assistants and other wireless devices for business use are about to be inundated by a tidal wave of new devices including smart phones, personal communicators, ruggedized laptops, wireless scanners, and PDA-phone combinations. Third-generation wireless technology promises to bring broadband to the handheld wireless device. Short messaging service (SMS) has the potential of delivering billions of emails from phone to phone, without ever involving the corporate server. Access to calendars, contact lists, corporate sales information, inventory data and other critical time-sensitive corporate data that once was available only via a networked PC will now be available on the mobile device.

Corporations need to plan for this explosion of next-generation mobile devices now, to avoid the proliferation of disparate devices, applications, operating systems, and other solution components that propagated through the desktop environment of the 80s. Once the 2.5G and 3G wireless networks are activated and the broad range of devices are distributed throughout the enterprise, the mobile data genie will be out of the bottle. IT departments could find themselves, once again, playing catch-up as they search for ways to provide security, structure and interoperability with existing enterprise applications to all mobile executives as well as, sales, field service, logistics, management and support employees who seek access to corporate databases and conduct business transactions with their wireless devices. Mobile data has the potential to dramatically reshape the way people interact with corporate information systems. Free and un-tethered, wireless devices enable an organization to extend its business relationships virtually anywhere and at anytime.

But there is a tremendous amount of complexity behind the scenes, and IT departments will likely bear the onus of sorting out a rational and economic corporate policy for mobile data device purchases, deployment, activations, maintenance, repair and replacement. And, of course, this entails more than merely doling out a wireless devices across the board. With complexity often comes the potential for inefficiencies and higher costs of doing business. The real challenge, then, is to mitigate these inefficiencies early on by devising an approach that balances corporate wireless standards to reduce unnecessary complexity with local user flexibility.

Recently, Accenture conducted an in-depth study of the wireless commerce plans of some two-dozen major North American Fortune 500 organizations from a broad spectrum of industries (finance; communications and high tech; energy and utilities; transportation and logistics; pharmaceutical; and government). The organizations were either currently using a wireless solution or had indicated some level of interest in wireless commerce for their employees.

The respondents fell into one of three main categories:

• Insight Gathering: Roughly one-third (thirty-two percent) of the group was actively collecting marketplace data to make a go/no go decision about whether to deploy a wireless commerce solution for their organization.
• Piloting: Another roughly one-third (twenty-nine percent) was already piloting wireless solutions in limited areas of the organization to test the solution and seek enough information to design a scalable implementation plan.
• Implementing: The largest group (39 percent) was already deploying wireless solutions to target functional or process users and evaluate the potential for larger cross-functional organizational implementation.

The study results echo the situation that existed with the deployment of PCs throughout organizations in the early 1980s.Currently, 68 percent of the organizations in our study are piloting or implementing a wireless solution. And while there are some large-scale deployments, most projects are relatively limited in scope, address departmental issues and are “owned” by the functional manager within a business unit or division. Fragmented approaches to deploying these solutions throughout an organization will result in higher costs and more time consuming rollouts.

IT should be proactive in balancing corporate standards with local customization before, during and after deployment. Enterprises could realize greater value from mobile commerce if they would invest the time up front to adopt and enforce a standard infrastructure and governance process under the auspices of the IT department.

An enterprise suffers significant incremental costs due to the lack of standardized processes and the fragmented, departmental approach to wireless solution deployment. Currently, we have observed organizations primarily viewing wireless solutions as “one-off” answers to specific opportunities, rather than as a cohesive change agent for the entire enterprise. Consequently, most wireless initiatives are identified, funded and measured at the local business unit level, with limited involvement from corporate or IT outside of the pilot stage. The costs manifest themselves in two forms: a premium on operations and impending future standardization costs. Supporting and managing many disparate wireless environments means added complexity of software updates, customer support, hardware, training, resulting in higher cost of operations. Solutions ultimately cost more than they should since fragmented platforms and architecture cannot benefit from efficiencies of scale and streamlined operations. To alleviate this operational inefficiency cost burden, enterprises will eventually need to standardize the wireless environment, which can cost $500 or more per user. To understand the full impact of these inefficiencies on a larger scale, based on Ovum’s estimate of 1.5 million enterprise subscribers in North American using wireless applications in 2002, Accenture estimates that these enterprise subscribers could be needlessly spending as much as US$1.1 billion collectively in 2002.

Regardless of at what stage an organization is in its quest to explore—or implement—a wireless solution, there are some important strategic, financial and operational/technology implications to anticipate based on our study. The approach an enterprise takes to optimize and maximize benefits from their wireless initiatives should include the following considerations: Strategy

• Develop top-down organization-wide guidelines on technology infrastructure decisions.
• Establish governance process to manage wireless solutions selection.
• Finance
• Develop standard recovery scheme for build-out of common infrastructure.
• Centralize purchasing for hardware, software and support services to obtain better price points.
• Operations/Technology
• Deploy common, organization-wide wireless platform.
• Establish a subset of approved devices the organization will support.

About the authors: Crimson Partner Rick Sklarin wrote this article in 1999 when he was a partner in Accenture’s Communications and High Tech Strategy and Business Architecture practice, focusing on Wireless solutions. Elissa Comsudi is a Manager in Accenture’s Communications and High Tech Strategy and Business Architecture practice.