Managing the Mobility

Connected, IoT and Mobility have been the buzzwords since past two years and the echoes are, undoubtedly, growing across the industry. The organizations are embracing the mobility as long lost enabler, which has come to the rescue, and promises improved efficiency and always connected work force. The change has been much more dramatic than what we saw around 10 years back when industry embraced Laptop, as Laptops were ultimate device to enable mobility, the title which Blackberry took lately. But all these implementations of mobility were spearheaded by IT department in the organization. But over the years multiple models of mobility roll-out has taken place. The area of mobility now is no more limited to mobile devices and laptops used by work force, it is increasing as purpose build hardware, tablets and other connected devices have made it all but manageable.

The situation offers an opportunity to System Integrators to wear their consulting hats and help organizations to make this mobility roll-out cost effective and manageable.

Over past years while working as Digital Product & Solutions Consultant, I met customers who want to improve business efficiency but at the same time doesn’t want to implement Device Management ecosystem in their enterprise. A further probe into such preconceived perception clarified that a misconception pervades all the efforts to such solution rollout, which is that most of Senior Executives confuse Mobility management with “restricting Mobility”. The perception of restricting the usage of organization assets like laptop using various mechanisms still governs the thought process, and this is leading to suboptimal roll-out of mobility in enterprises. Mobility management is not only about security policies, but it includes:

• Supporting/trouble shooting devices when these are in a far flung village with a field executive
• Safeguarding enterprise data when these devices have fallen to wrong hands
• Simultaneous roll out of enterprise apps like salesforce, CRM, & ERP to all deployed devices
• Segregate employees data from corporate data (If that is necessary)
• And lastly ensuring enterprise security policies are implemented across all devices (these policies varies from enterprise to enterprise, so if you really don’t want your employees to face any restricted access, then just avoid creating highly restricted device profiles)

Managing mobility in enterprises is as important to managing core IT infrastructure, as the whole purpose of such roll-outs is defeated if this is not managed. This opens a new business opportunity to services organizations who can provide managed mobility services to their customers which doesn’t restrict itself to device management only but spans across to complete eco-system including device provisioning, app deployment, app-store management, updates management and auditing. As they say “You can’t manage, what you can’t measure”, its not a metaphor anymore for Managing Enterprise Mobility

Mobility New Opportunities & Changing Paradigm….

I have been working in the domain of Mobility, and have been closely associated with many customers on several Mobile Initiatives. During the same time period, I worked on taking a B2C eCommerce platform online starting from scratch. In both the scenarios it has been pervasive nature of mobility and computing that has created new opportunities and new business models.

Going back a 10 years, when the iPhone was just launched and other smart devices were more of bulky bricks, with flaps than anything close to smart, who could have imagined that we will be ordering butter through our mobiles, without speaking a single word. Who could have thought that we can avoid our official laptops at home, and can check all enterprise internet on our mobile. We were talking about PCs and laptops, and comparing them on their boot time, if it is 30 sec to or 40 sec.

Since then we have progressed at breakneck speed. Now tablets need not be shut down, and the time to wakeup devices from standby is couple of seconds. Now more than buying anything, we can sell anything online. Use cases of technology keep on evolving and so is the backend IT models.

But what next, is the value created by technology is ability to buy or sell anything online.

Well if that is true then most valuable tech companies would be the one letting us buy and sell things. The latest Forbes list, of most valuable Tech companies says something else.

Rank	Name
1	Apple
2	Microsoft
3	Google
4	IBM
5	Facebook
6	Amazon

A closer look at the top organizations reveals a generic observation that the top companies are the ones that have control over the eco-system primarily OS. But there is another factor that defines the top technology companies.  These companies invariably have a lot of information about their users, and that information goes till intimate level like what does the user buy, what does he watch,  where does he go etc. And it helps these companies in delivering customized experience to its users. But this doesn’t mean that there are no opportunities to new entrants to enter this market.

IoT and Telematics is opening a new segment of users, which are machines or devices that are connected. These devices will be consumer for those companies that provide communication platform for these devices, which is easier to configure and easier to manage. The strength of platform would lie in the fact that, any device should be able to talk using this platform. The learning curve should be minimal for these devices and the platform should be universal so that any device can use it.

Any organization coming up with such UIT (Unified Interconnected Things) Platform will be able to serve the market that is largely untouched and which is potentially 4 times the consumer market that is there. The buying behavior of these devices would be more reliable, as these devices would not suffer from mood swings. For Example, an inverter which is allowed to place an order for supplies like distilled water within certain budgetary range, can automatically triggers an order without any behavioral dysfunction that delays buy decision. 

Well we may be living in a world with small patches of things/people connected to each other, but the opportunities will continue to exist till we do not reach a state where all barriers to get and share information, from any person or object, are not broken. Once we reach that utopian state, I believe then we will find new mountains to climb, and new journey will begin.

IOT: Why Do We Care

To Start With

Disruption has been the keyword in the technology landscape of lately and the kind of disruptions that we have witnessed in past 10 years have been much more than what human race has seen in past except for the World War II era. We have seen how this disruption have made computing so pervasive that we start and end our day with computing devices, that would have qualified to be called as Super Computers at one point of time in human history.

But after so much disruption, IoT promises to be another disruptive technology that have the potential of impacting every facet of our life and every facet of industry in long term. We have learned from our mistakes from internet era, and the evolution of IoT is cases based as of now. But before embarking on our journey to unfold the impact or potential impact of IoT, we have to understand why connected devices qualifies to be called disruptive technology.

It started with

We have seen over past few years that technology has focused on improving customer profiling, and generating meta-data to make it possible for suppliers to reach to their customers. In the process things have moved from creating all the beautiful arches at entrance of your shop to cost per click model. The cost of click has been largely the game of few large players that control search market, and e-commerce websites who have so painfully captured our buying behavior over months of purchases.

But this data driven approach doesn’t come free, and these players have offered some value proposition to end users. Be it efficient and relevant search or be it discounted products.

But invariably these platforms have captured information that has been shared by users consciously while taking some action or other. Whereas connected ecosystem offers an advantage that the information entry and capture becomes context based without explicit entry by the end user, and hence leads to better data quality.

Threat or Opportunity

There is no doubt that IoT is the biggest change that will impact all our lives going forward, and for various industries, be it e-Commerce, manufacturing or technology the impact of IoT will be the way these industries perceive this. For industries like digital marketing, IoT would require the digital marketing firms to adapt to new technology as the existing technology is going to be irrelevant in near future.

People will spend more time with small screens like wearable, and more time with the benefits from technology, rather than looking at the pretty interfaces. In such scenarios analytics will play increasing role in predicting when a certain purchase decision is about to come, and accordingly customer targeting is going to be precise

Well these are some specific scenarios, and I believe the best way to realize the impact of IoT would be discuss specific use cases in details, that I would touch upon later on. For the time being, lets wait, watch and predict.