Trends in Employee Mobility: How to ensure a successful mobile implementation

Transcription

1 Trends in Employee Mobility: How to ensure a successful mobile implementation Sponsored by HP Speakers: Bryan Glick, Editor-in-Chief, ComputerWeekly Nikhil Kulkarni, Workplace and Mobility Practice Advisor, HP Enterprise Services Bryan Glick: Hello. Welcome to this Computer Weekly video. I'm Bryan Glick. I'm the Editor-in-chief of Computer Weekly. In this video, we're going to be discussing the extremely topical subject of Enterprise Mobility. Many organizations are looking at how they can use things like consumer technologies like smart phones and tablets in order to bring more flexibility to their workplace and to meet the demands from their own employees to be able to use those sort of devices that are familiar with at home and to be able to access their corporate systems. Now to help me discuss this, I'm joined by Nikhil Kulkarni. Nikhil is our Consultant for HB Enterprise Services. Nikhil, thank you very much for coming and joining, appreciate it. Nikhil Kulkarni: Thank you very much for having. Bryan Glick: Now, you obviously work with lots of different customers talking to them about what their mobility plans are. What do you say is happening in the market at the moment? What are the big business issues that your customers are facing? Nikhil Kulkarni: Thank you. The key issue that we are seeing that the companies are highlighting to us is new business models and barriers low barriers to entry for new entrance to join organization. Let me give you an example. There is a lot of social media company that has just acquired a SMS or Service Media Platform which is also now going to be a (Whois) engine. Suddenly, this particular company has one billion users who are potentially a mobile or telecoms customer. So there is a low barrier of entry to compete now with the established players in the market. So our customers are looking at new business models on how to not only

2 compete but stay ahead of these social barriers to entry. Also, they will have to do this with lowering cost but also of looking into new marketplaces as the (rest) in a more concentrated market mature and the market shifts to the emerging break economies for example. So, these are kind of the issues we are saying. How do I increase my revenue while reducing my cost? So, if you see the economic downturn that was there with us for the last few years, people were cutting cost but suddenly they have come with a growth market. And now, they have to sort of shift focus from sort of reducing cost to investing into new technologies where enterprise mobility, social media, cloud technology can toward the platform that can get them the ability to enter on new markets. Bryan Glick: So, yes, mobile is causing a lot of change in business and in companies in the whole industries as you say. What does that mean for IT leaders, for the CIOs in those organizations? What are the IT challenges that they face? Nikhil Kulkarni: Two key points. There is mobility which is to do with mobile phones, smart phones and the applications that it comes with it. And then there is enterprise mobility as you described earlier, which is the shift in the workplace that is moving from workplace as we know which is office-based if you like to a more flexible workplace. A lot of people are calling it the "third place". This is the workplace, your home and this is the other place take the example of a popular café where you can sit and work. And what is this driving is the end-users in traditional workplaces are looking for a innovative solutions. So, IT leaders are saying, "How can they respond to demand that is being created?" This is not only a demand that is rising because of smart phones or, you know, replicating my personal IT ecosystem in the workplace but this is also enabling businesses to do innovative new business models. Take the example of an airline. They are introducing something called "in-flight upgrades". So, because of the social media platform and because of tablet-based computing, the purser or air stewardess in the flight, they know who you are, how many points that have you caught, and then they can offer you in-flight upgrade. Now, this is a new business model which would have been not available to this airline only a few years ago. But this ecosystem of mobility, social media, cloud platform, and business analytics is giving them this platform to offer new business models and new business outcomes. So, the IT leader, the challenges, how do they shift the focus from technology to becoming a relevant partner to the business and co-innovate with them? Bryan Glick: There's a lot clearly there for IT leaders to think about they're really having to engage with the businesses as you described there. How are you saying IT leaders going about tackling some of those challenges? What are they doing in practice? Nikhil Kulkarni: So, the ones that we are seeing who are forward thinking are looking

3 at producing end-to-end strategy. So, they are not anymore looking at platform devices, application, legacy system, mobile systems, et cetera. They're looking at the more holistic strategy. Take the example of workplace. People are looking at how do I move away from a device-centric workplace, that is traditionally what IT provides to the enduser, to a more user-centric workplace? So, the user based on his or her role can create their own IT that he or she needs to function and to be more productive. So, this increases the employee engagement and productivity. For this to happen, you have to replicate the experience that you and I have on our smart devices and the end-user workplace. I do not wait four to six months, for example, to download and use an app on my own personal device. But that experience doesn't sadly reflect, yet, in many corporations. Bryan Glick: You know, you mentioned earlier, you know, you're sharing some of the experience of early adopters in this area. For those early adopters, what are you finding that some of the key business benefits that they're achieving as a result of putting up some of those plans into place? Nikhil Kulkarni: OK. So, the key business benefit still is relied on cost. So, the cost is reducing significantly because look at the standard lockdown desktop environment for example. I'm only talking about workplace at this moment but it's a good example. It is a let's talk about in oil and gas company. They provisioned a desktop to their end-user to, you know, say $2,000 per user. However, if you provide rule-based computing, which is based on smart devices that can be mobile, or tablets, or laptops which are now more convertibles and therefore a mobile device talking to an app Store like you do in your personal rule and the Apps are provisioned dynamically based on your role. Then the significant reduction in cost per user per provision, if a lot, and we are seeing up to 50 percent decrease in per user provisioning. That's from the cost side, but all that cost reduction gives the IT therefore to co-innovate with businesses to provide the platform upon which the business can innovate and be a leader in the marketplace. So the business' view of IT is changing where the leaders are taking the IT leaders are taking this proactive step of changing IT from a co-center to a co-innovator with their business units. The example of the airline is great. It was initiated from IT co-developed with the marketing organization within this airline and you have a fantastic new market bidding opportunity. Bryan Glick: You've mentioned that a couple of customers are already airline and another one. Just to help to bring sort of bring this story to life a little bit, perhaps could you perhaps give us an example maybe one of those organizations and tell us a little bit about how they went about putting in place all the things that you've talked about? Nikhil Kulkarni: OK. So, let's take the oil and gas company. They started with this

4 end-to-end strategy as we described. So, in many of our customers cases, we helped them develop this strategy with them. And what they see is the first step is to take into account what their end-user is looking for. So, we are looking at end-user segmentation, if you like, as the first step on this journey. Today, customers or the IT department say they do understand their customers and they have some sort of user segmentation, VIPs, task worker, but this mobile enterprise give you the ability to go more granular and have more user profiles. Therefore, you can have a geophysicist in this case in oil and gas company who has the, you know, a very highend system because he is generating revenue to the person who is occasional user of IT to check his pay slip or an HR who can have a very web-based, browser-based IT. And therefore you can reduce the cost there. And putting that strategy in place is the first step. Secondly, we are seeing companies having a mobile or mobility first strategy. So, what they are saying is, "When I invest into any IT environment, I want to see how that is enabled for mobility." So for example, if you are now transitioning a app from a certain technology or platform to another, you have to take into account how does that app give me the ability to get the information because that's what is actually happening to a device at a appropriate and contextual time to the user in the right place. So, therefore you need to have a very good end-to-end strategy. That's step one. And step two is to break this down into chunks of consumable projects. In IT, we still function at project level, so you need to have project that are marked in a roadmap which gives you the ability to say, "OK, you're one, I'm doing this for-projects that ties into this oral strategy." And thirdly, it's to have a business case. So, business case is very important to get any program into action. So, reduction in cost is great but also I think that the IT leaders need to be aware what the businesses are trying to achieve and then co-innovate with the businesses to help the company achieve their business objectives. Bryan Glick: So, clearly, there's a lot that IT leaders need to think about in terms of putting together a mobility strategy. But for somebody who's setting out on that road now, from all the experience you've had in working with all these different organizations, if there was one piece of advice you would give to somebody who's starting out now, you know, something absolutely essential and need to bear in mind, what would you say that would be? Nikhil Kulkarni: So there is a coin that a chief technologist in HP had coined. It's called the random acts of mobility. So the, you know, lots of business units are frustrated that IT not responding as quickly. And therefore, I think, so the first thing that IT leader do is to have a plan and publish that plan with the business. So the businesses then buy into the ITs vision and therefore know what they can achieve at what time. So, the merger of business objective and IT reality, because only certain things can happen at

5 certain pace, are merged and therefore random acts of mobilities are awarded. And one top tip is use of segmentation. Really look at how you segment your users and therefore you give the ability for the businesses to provide the tools that they require to empower, and energize, and make their end-users productive. Bryan Glick: OK. Nikhil Kulkarni from HP, thank you for coming along and sharing your experiences of working with all of these organizations and putting together their enterprise mobility plans. That's all we got time for on this video. We've talked about enterprise mobility, the changing nature of the workplace and I hope that some of the tips and advice that had been shared here have been useful for you in putting your plans together. If you want to read more about enterprise mobility, you can do so at our website at computerweekly.com. Thanks for watching.