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Chapter 6
Mobility Drives Agility

We are about halfway through our book that so far must have enlightened you with a fascinating paradigm shift in business model, business processes, new delivery and deployment platform, whole new tools and technologies for collaboration, and applications to transform your business and to help you create business agility. In this chapter, we touch upon mobility, mobile devices management (MDM), and mobile applications management (MAM) in greater detail.

Gone are the days when mobile phones were used for telephonic conversation alone. Now we check our smart devices for e-mails, text messages, and various applications such as searching for any web content, music, video, and many business applications. It is not an exaggeration to say that we are carrying a smart computer in our pocket all the time to provide us the agility we need in a dynamic and ever-changing business environment. Our lifestyle has changed dramatically in the past few years, and we are getting accustomed to using these smart devices for everything, including business transactions, communication, entertainment, shopping, and leisure.

In the past decade, we have witnessed a smart revolution in the mobile space. The number of mobile devices has increased fivefold from one billion to five billion, with an astonishing increase in the number of connected people from 400 million to over two billion. This unprecedented growth of connectivity has created an overwhelming range of new possibilities that include communication, collaboration, socializing, and performing e-business transactions. Mobility and mobile smart devices have changed people's lifestyles, work patterns, and ways of doing business. Mobile technologies have revolutionized the way in which we work today. Mobility provides two crucial advantages to organizations: location independence and personalization. The past decade has seen the rapid development of the Internet, the advent of cloud computing, and the lowering of costs of both mobile hardware and services. As a result, mobile technology has become a viable and some would say essential way of conducting business. Hugely successful organizations such as Apple Computer have been able to fundamentally alter the user experience, forcing other organizations to change the way they conduct business, interact with key constituents, and collaborate with one other.

The adoption of smart devices has accelerated at a rapid rate, and businesses have relied on mobile devices for their hyperconnected employees for driving business agility. Calls, messages, teleconferencing and videoconferencing, e-mail, music, camera, and access to a corporate network are common utilities to talk about at least. The list of applications on these smart devices has grown considerably, solving some common problems like flashlights, working as remote devices, card swipe for payment authentication (Square), navigation, and many more. The recent acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook for a whopping $19 billion has forced many telecom service providers to guess about the next transformation and convergence of many services.

Convergence of Consumer Electronics into Smart Devices

Consumer electronics (CE) devices, once driven by their ability to provide specific functions, like music playback, video, or voice communications, are increasingly providing multiple functions and Internet connectivity for information, communications, and entertainment. This is resulting in the overlap of features and functions between product categories not only in the mobile segment, but also in other CE devices like digital televisions and set-top boxes. As a result, this entire category is morphing into a larger category often referred to as smart devices. There are three leading platforms in the mobile segment: smartphones, tablets, and notebook PCs. In-Stat (www.in-stat.com) research forecasts that this category of mobile “magnet platforms” will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.7 percent through 2015, compared to 8.7 percent for the overall mobile market.

“The technology driver of all these smart devices is the mobile technology, because it represents the largest and fastest-growing segment of the entire electronics market,” says Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist. “Even in PCs, where increasing performance was once the mantra, CPU vendors are now focused on the performance efficiency of mobile computing and using the resulting products to drive advancements in other forms of computing, including desktop PCs, servers, and embedded applications. The innovation of the mobile market is being driven by four key factors: richer content, network access for communications and content, increased bandwidth to enable this access, and new technologies.”

Executive Insights
Jeetu Patel, General Manager, Syncplicity Business Unit, EMC Corporation

Faced with the megatrends of mobile, social, cloud, big data, and video, the patterns inherent in our society are in the midst of a complete refactoring. Culture, behavior, work, technology use, how software is developed, and how consumers use it—none of these are static.

As we ponder this further, it's clear that visionary business leaders have an opportunity to act now. The starting point is recognizing what values are essential in the transformed world, in order to successfully harness this refactoring and swell productivity and agility levels. Values are the guiding compass, pointing in the right direction, even at times of disorientation.

Design is one such enduring value. How it gets surfaced, acted upon, and predicted can catapult the organization from outright failure to successful implementation.

Just like shelf space in a grocery store, where moving from knee level to eye level immediately impacts purchases, so too will device screen room and interface constructs alter the user's behavior. Particularly in an environment of well-designed apps and heightened user expectations for design quality, the design value will matter considerably moving forward.

Similarly, amidst the backdrop of big data, focusing on the right set of visualization can have a far greater effect than if that crucial step is bypassed. Data that is visualized to show rapid deterioration in a product line renewal rate reverberates faster than columns of numbers directly exported from an order-tracking tool.

This rethinking of design is already emerging within the mobile enterprise software space, the likes of which we will look back upon one day with awe.

In the first wave of mobile software development, incremental innovation simply brought old functionality to a new device. In the process, fundamentals were often missed. How frustrating was it to see a document for review on your mobile screen, yet be unable to edit it? Design was simply your desktop basic functionality, brought awkwardly to your smartphone or tablet.

The second wave brought mobile on par with the desktop. Functionality was refactored amid the new memory and added capabilities of our favorite gadgets. Fewer and fewer research and development (R&D) teams argued if a mobile version of their software was next. But such design was still a parallel effort, a passenger alongside the driver of monolithic application development. SharePoint is now in the cloud? Interesting, but it doesn't solve my problems.

The reality is that mobile technology itself is the new design baseline, cleanly isolated and independent of any lingering PC notions. Mobile is the superset form factor, under which all functionality must be derived and considered.

Let it be clear, there will still be coexistence between different form factors, with each finding its own suitable usage. Mobile technology will be used “also,” “first,” or “only” in relation to PCs or tablets, with a more single-purpose approach for each case. It might be used “only” when it comes to driving navigation, “first” when it involves voice calls, and “also” after writing a document on a PC and then just approving it through e-mail on a mobile device.

But it is this third wave of mobile design that will ignite the imagination and drive brilliant new solutions. Once we unleash imagination, it's only a matter of time before the way we think about values will change our world in thrilling ways.

Productivity is the other value, in addition to design, that will pervade and sometimes overtake other factors that prioritize how an organization should change. Shortening the time to complete a task, eliminating the time held captive by inefficiencies, and increasing abstract thinking time are varied ways this value can manifest itself, if implemented correctly.

Consider one example: remember what “taking pictures” used to mean? It was a time-consuming and disparate routine of carrying camera equipment with you, buying film, configuring the camera settings, and at last waiting to process the film.

By rethinking “taking pictures” as “sharing moments,” however, those inefficiencies not only disappeared, but new worlds opened up. Ubiquitous devices brought image capture to the masses. Apps made photos easy and addictive to share. And social media created a place where all the people to share photos with are constantly present.

The same thing will occur as we prioritize productivity as a core value, and leverage it from the mobile implementation perspective. Many technical attributes of mobile are barely tapped today: proximity, location, and personalization, for example. Yet we already see new segments quickly embracing that third wave of mobile design; these are inklings of what's to come:

Retail workers processing credit card payments without the customer ever waiting in line.
Flight attendants logging meal orders as they walk the aisle with their devices.
Citizens never bothering with the red tape to turn on a landline for making phone calls.
Executives at airports sharing presentations delivered live from their devices.

It's time to plan: How else can we eliminate knowledge workers' wasted time, speed their transactions, and heighten their ability to share value?

Yes, the mobile platform itself offers rich new design inspiration, especially alongside the other megatrends. But for those leaders who embrace and fight for the values of design and productivity, their path through the crowded forest of these trends will be the straightest. While we cannot know how and where exactly the megatrends will impact each part of our lives, we can prioritize these key values that are enduring, and thereby steadily develop business agility.

Executive Bio: Jeetu Patel is currently managing the business at Syncplicity, acquired by EMC in 2012. Prior to this assignment, Jeetu was CTO at EMC and was in charge of the long-term strategic vision that helped formulate the cloud, big data, mobile, and collaboration strategies.>

We have focused on mobile technologies as a means of creating and improving existing business, enabling digital business, and driving business agility. The past decade has witnessed the disruptive innovation and business model in the area of cloud, social, mobility, big data, and power of collaboration as discussed in Chapter 5. Mobile technologies with handheld capabilities are unique, as they provide personalization, location, and time independence. Apple Computer has disrupted the mobile market by combining voice and data communication, digital photos and video films, entertainment, and gaming all together with ease of use and a rich user experience. As a result, mobility can drive agility in businesses with unlimited potential. Mobile technologies and smart devices are influencing our social, cultural, and business patterns.

“Mobile is not just about conveniently selling on a mobile device; it's about giving customers all the information they need while they're in the store, and making it a better experience,” says Jon Kubo, CIO of Wet Seal. “One of the trends we're seeing is retailers looking to put tools in the hands of customers that basically empower them. Customers want to be empowered in their shopping experience.”

Bhuvan Unhelkar, national director at the Australian Institute of Business Analysis, defines mobile business (m-business) as evolution of both internal and external business practices through the adoption of suitable mobile technologies and processes, resulting in a mobile enterprise. He argues that m-businesses primarily want to engage with customers and business partners in location-independent and time-independent manners. This allows them to provide customers with new and valuable services and products. Moreover, m-businesses also want to exploit the location and time independence of mobility to improve internal business processes. Because of the dynamic and instantaneous nature of mobile technologies, m-businesses can be in close and even constant contact with customers, partners, other external partners, and internal stakeholders.

In the fall of 2011, Oracle commissioned a survey to look at consumers' perceptions of their experience when they shop across different retail channels. This online study, conducted by an independent service, polled 2,169 U.S. and Canadian consumers aged 18 years and older. It analyzed their use of channels including computers, mobile devices, brick-and-mortar stores, catalogs, and customer service representatives to gain more information about a product or to complete the purchase of a product or service. The survey also gathered data about consumers' experiences with these channels, as well as how they are incorporating social media into their online commerce activities.

According to the report, mobile commerce is a vital link between channels, especially for consumers 18 to 34 years old. Twenty-seven percent of consumers who own smartphones use them to browse or research products more than once a week, up from 13 percent of consumers in 2009. Because smartphones are capable of doing things such as completing in-store and online purchases, special offers, and notifying retailers when the customer enters a store, they are poised to serve as a common platform for the cross-channel experience.

Consumers age 18 to 35 are moving faster than others to use their smartphones to pay in stores and online. Retailers and mobile service providers first must assure consumers that the mobile phone is safe to use as a payment device.

As security measures improve, however, adoption will soar. Wholesalers and retailers should move aggressively to understand unique opportunities to connect with customers via their mobile phones and create a more seamless and personalized cross-channel experience. The following are the results when consumers were asked whether they use their mobile phones to complete purchases in a store, and how secure they believe the mobile device to be:

For those who have a smartphone, 44 percent of consumers age 25 to 34 and 30 percent of consumers age 18 to 24 say they are using or soon will use their mobile phone as a payment device, though that number drops to 22 percent of consumers age 35 to 44 and to 9 percent of consumers overall.
For adopters, 52 percent say they would use a smartphone to pay in stores because it is faster and more convenient than getting out your wallet or using a credit card.
Security concerns are a barrier, as 25 percent of consumers worry that someone will steal payment information if they use their mobile phone to pay in stores, and 68 percent of consumers globally say information stored or transmitted on their mobile phone is not secure.
When it comes to making purchases online, 45 percent of consumers age 18 to 34 who own a smartphone will use it to purchase products online as often as a few times each week, a number that drops to less than 6 percent among older consumers.
Eleven percent of U.S. consumers use their smartphones to make an online purchase at least once a month, compared to just 5 percent of Canadian respondents.

Increasingly, the mobile web is a primary touch point for individuals to interact with an organization and find information on products and services.

Executive Insights
Naeem Zafar, Cofounder, Bitzer Mobile, and Faculty Member, University of California at Berkeley

While some companies are asking, “Why do I need mobile technology?,” progressive companies ask, “How can we do things differently with mobile technology so that we improve productivity and reduce costs?” And that is exactly what has happened with the proliferation of mobile technology in the enterprise. There are tremendous cost benefits in being able to disseminate searchable information easily via the web and mobile to customers, partners, and employees rather than having call centers or expensive printed brochures for the same objective.

The adoption of mobile technology at work is as dramatic as the introduction into the enterprise of the Internet in the mid-1990s. When the Internet came into the workplace, it was thought to be a fad. However, that proved to be wrong, as there is a huge cost benefit and competitive advantage associated with delivering information in an efficient and timely manner.

Mobile technology in the workplace may be even more profound than what the Internet first caused. For 200 years we put on the monkey suit, fought traffic, and came to a building to go to work. What was special about that building was that it contained all the data and that was where the people were. Employees no longer need to come to the office to get access to the information and connect with people, as most tasks can be accomplished with e-mail, videoconferencing, phone, collaboration tools, and so on. The definition of work stands to be redefined forever as mobile technologies are adopted within the workplace.

We've seen some large corporations be very effective in using remote workers. In many cases people don't even know where their manager is located, but they have conference calls, videoconferences, and other collaboration tools to get the job done. That is one of the reasons we have not seen the unemployment rate go down much while productivity and profits are at an all-time high for corporations. We have learned to be extremely productive, and that is changing the concept of work.

Mobile Transforming Work Flow

Let's consider a few cases where adoption of mobile technology is changing the way people work. When an insurance agent talks to Mr. and Mrs. Johnson at their home, not only is he able to have a conversation and understand their needs, but he can now pull up the right rate quotations on his iPad, explain nuances, and get them to sign the contract right there on the spot. That's the new paradigm that enables the insurance agents to do several more deals a day. The economics are so powerful that it will be hard for an insurance company or other service-based agency not to adopt this model.

Imagine coming to address the claim for a traffic accident and being able to take the pictures, pull up the right cost structure, settle that account, let people sign on the iPad from the scene of the accident, and have the company transfer the claim settlement money into their bank account. That's possible today.

A doctor is able to consult with patients all over the world on videoconference. Using a mobile device, the doctor does not have to travel to each hospital, and patients don't have to travel for a week from the village to come to the hospital to consult the doctor. These are very profound changes that have an economic impact that is multifold; that's what mobile technology enables.

Mobile Infrastructure Needed

What building blocks are needed to make all this possible? Those building blocks include authentication, data security, user experience, ability to access applications, and ability to have different applications access each other to fetch the data between them. Bitzer Mobile has put many of these pieces together. Going forward, we will see all of this become as normal as it is today to use the Internet to access anything that was not available 20 years ago. That's what the promise of mobile technology is. It will profoundly change how you think of work and how people get paid for doing work.

New Ways to Work

Education is another area that is being completely transformed. Today, the role of teacher in any part of the world is to create curriculum, do the instructional teaching, generate conversation in the classroom, and also manage the social aspect. That's a lot to ask from a teacher, and there is lack of uniformity among the teachers.

Now, imagine that you can access some of the best content created at Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, Brown, and similar institutions. You can also consume it anywhere from Uganda to Australia to South America. The teacher now only has to do half the things and can focus on social interaction among the students, and just look at analytics to figure out who is stuck where and how to help them. All of that is possible with the mobile tablet. It is possible today, and adoption and wide use are happening right now. Khan Academy is in 60 languages today and has more than 5,000 videos that are available for free while the Khan Academy is providing analytics and teaching tools to help the teachers in the classroom. That's just a start. I just began teaching my first massive open online course (MOOC), on financing new ventures with the University of California at San Francisco on the NovoEd platform, and 6,000 students have signed up from all over the world.

Adopting Mobile Technology in the Enterprise

There is a great disadvantage to a company if its employees are not set up to access information and data easily today. With regard to mobile access, there are ghosts of security that hound the IT teams; but all these issues are being addressed by new technology solutions that are available in the market today, and most of those do a much better job when enabled via the cloud and mobile. So not adopting mobile early and not asking the question of what can we do better as a company with mobile technology puts a company at a severe competitive disadvantage.

There is demonstrated return on investment (ROI) by not investing money in equipment such as company-owned computers and mobile phones. Companies used to supply these devices in order to control the data network and access and to ensure security. Today there is no need for that. With the bring your own device (BYOD) movement, you can implement enterprise-grade security for data access and control. A secure container from mobile devices can achieve a level of security that is equivalent to or higher than that of earlier networks that were strictly controlled by IT teams.

Once we have the security in place, we can now focus on leveraging the data and apps. Those companies that are not focused on utilizing the data will pay a severe penalty in a competitive landscape. Firms need to be focused on how to increase productivity while reducing capital and operational expenses, and mobile technology has to be a big part of that conversation.

Executive Bio: Naeem Zafar is a serial entrepreneur who just sold his sixth start-up to Oracle in 2013 in the enterprise mobility space. He has taught entrepreneurship and innovation at the University of California at Berkeley since 2005 and is the author of five books. He has degrees in electrical engineering from Brown University and the University of Minnesota.

Mobility Strengthens Ecosystemism

We discussed the concept of a business ecosystem in Chapter 1 that provides a model for sustainable competitive advantage via a collaborative commerce synergy to develop and execute a customer experience management strategy enabled by social business technology to drive a customer-centric value chain. Mobility with smart devices renders pervasive access of content, and information strengthens the business ecosystem and offers enhanced agility. Customers, employees, and business partners of any organization can reap significant benefits with the help of mobility and smart devices.

Let us examine some use cases that businesses can leverage by deploying mobility across the enterprise.

Mobility Empowers the Workforce

Mobility and mobile technologies have empowered the workforce on the move such as sales, service, shop floor, retail outlets, hospitality, health care, banking, travel, and many more. It is a common sight to find sales or service persons irrespective of industries walking with smart devices such as tablet PCs or iPads to demo their products or services with their customers or simply to capture some facts and obtain authorization for carrying out some services.

Enabling Sales Team to Get Smarter

Mobility has provided access to powerful systems such as customer relationship management (CRM), enabling salespeople to perform their jobs more effectively than before and helping them to talk to their customers with all resources at hand at all times remotely in front of their customers. With the help of smart devices, the sales team is getting smarter and more efficient, whether they have to deal with the marketing cycle (prospecting, cold calling with customer intelligence, lead generation, e-mail marketing) or handle requests for proposals (RFPs), proposal submission, or customer presentations and demonstrations. They are now able to carry out all of these tasks simply on smart devices with all resources available to them delivered via the cloud infrastructure, discussed in Chapter 3.

Most of the leading enterprise CRM systems, such as Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud, Salesforce.com CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar CRM, and SAP CRM, are offered on the cloud infrastructure and are accessible on smart devices, making sales teams smarter and more efficient to help them achieve their sales quotas. Mobility has not only helped sales teams get smarter; it has also helped customers to get the right solutions for their business needs, cutting the sales cycle drastically.

Helping Services Team to Get Proactive

Mobility has also helped service personnel to serve their customers proactively with the help of smart devices and iPads, accessing their systems of records and guiding them with facts and figures at hand. Integrated CRM systems with service deployed on the cloud assists them with scheduling warranty and routine services and helps them with greater intelligence about previous history on breakdown and maintenance service. For example, if we take our car in for scheduled maintenance service, a service adviser of a reputed car manufacturer comes with an iPad to pull the details of the car history and its maintenance record. Based on inputs, the service adviser records tests and diagnostics to be carried out and takes our signature for parts and labor for the maintenance service. Isn't it a neat, smooth, and pleasant experience that we get these days thanks to mobility and smart devices?

Enabling a New Mode of Communication and Customer Interaction

Smart devices have improved accessibility and communication among ecosystems. Customers, employees, and partners can access information in different ways and access different information altogether. Mobility has offered more availability to ecosystem users. For example, an airline passenger can access flight times while being driven to the airport in a taxi without actually calling the airline. It is common to print the boarding pass with a bar code on smart devices and pass through security check-ins at the airport. Similarly, accessibility to sports scores, medical information, and other types of information is increasing every day. Rapid growth and availability of hotspots is enabling connectivity around airports, hotels, restaurants, schools, and universities, providing greater agility in information access, consumption, and execution of significant tasks.

Executive Insights
Harbinder Khera, Founder and CEO, Mindmatrix

“Mobility Playing the Role of a Catalyst”

Mindmatrix empowers sales and marketing teams to engage with customers and prospects through both direct and indirect channels and seamlessly across a combination of online, social, mobile, and offline mediums. Using the Mindmatrix Revenue Growth Platform, sales and marketing teams are able to spend less but sell more. Adding to this revolution is the ever-increasing use of Internet-enabled mobile devices that make information available on the go to the sales and channel personnel, at the touch of a finger. As a result, companies are now dealing with empowered prospects who are more informed than ever before. For companies, keeping up with such prospects requires being able to engage them across multiple channels in real time; mobile devices offer all information such as sales and marketing information at their fingertips, and those assets get personalized and delivered using Mindmatrix services. Mindmatrix has added agility to sales and services personnel by helping them with actionable and follow-up actions for their customers and prospects, and mobility has played the role of a catalyst.

Location-Based Targeted Customer Outreach

Smart devices also offer location presence, enabling marketers to target and communicate about their products and services in real time specific to the location. For example, if we go to any mall and check in to services offered by Foursquare or Google Places, all subscribers to these services will know about our presence in the mall. Merchants in the mall may target us with their products and services promotion by sending brief alert messages while we are in the mall. This has opened up a new targeted communication in the field of marketing and advertising. It helps merchants to target customers walking near their stores and also helps customers to get good bargains of products and services.

Mobility Enables Crowdsourcing

The current smart devices (such as iPhone and Samsung) are powerful with all their built-in gadgets such as cameras, sound recording, and access to all apps, including social media (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, Viber, and many others that enable crowdsourcing). Many breaking news stories these days come first via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn updates with the help of smart devices capturing photo or video on the site of occurrence. Active journalists also refer to Twitter pool or crowdsourced news for credibility and authenticity.

Government agencies are seeking public help to curb crime and report incidents with the help of smart devices, uploading photos or videos of a crime at the scene. Neighborhood watch is a great initiative to monitor. Nextdoor is great example of portal services where we can update, report, or upload any findings in the neighborhood that are observed by residents, and counsel authorities. Smart devices are enabling us with smart walk, capturing any issues with roads, pathways, streetlights, or abnormal activities and behavior, and report them live instantly.

Mobility Strengthens Health Care Services

Mobile networks and smart devices combined with social networking, cloud technology platforms, and big data analytics have laid a strong foundation for patients to receive health care not only in hospitals and clinics but also in the communities where they live. Mobility is becoming a core attribute of patients, practitioners, providers, and payers, helping them to work together toward greater access of health care services and better outcomes. One of the most visible patient empowerments is at the intersection of mobile and social networking. Patients are now actively participating in health-related discussions in online community forums and blogs, often using smart devices. Patientslikeme.com, one of many community portals, has more than 150,000 users who share and discuss conditions, symptoms, and treatment information on over 1,000 health issues.

More interestingly, patients have started using smart mobility for their fitness and wellness. The list of social and mobile fitness apps is long and growing every day. Some examples are Nike FuelBand and Abvio RunMeter, Walkmeter, and Cyclemeter, all mobile based and with GPS capabilities. Monitoring of chronic diseases by these devices is another great application that is growing significantly. For example, patients are able to enter blood sugar information by Internet and mobile devices, and their care provider is then able to provide coaching and corrective care.

More advanced capabilities such as blood pressure cuffs are being connected directly to smart devices for measuring blood pressure and transmitting the readings to care providers in case of any anomalies.

Mobile Development Framework

In order to provide a robust enterprise-class development platform for developers, Oracle recently introduced a mobile enterprise application platform comprised of Oracle ADF Mobile, Oracle Berkeley DB, and Oracle Lite Mobile. ADF Mobile and JDeveloper enable application developers to rapidly extend enterprise applications to mobile devices. These mobile applications use Berkeley DB for reliable device/local data management. The Oracle Lite Mobile server runs on the Web Logic server in the middle tier and provides connectivity between the Oracle Database server applications and mobile devices. This allows for automatic and bidirectional synchronization with the data center, as well as robust remote management of devices.

Medtronic Reaps Benefits of Implementing Mobility Across the Enterprise

Medtronic has become a world leader in medical equipment and therapies for cardiovascular, neurological, and musculoskeletal disorders, chronic health conditions, and surgical procedures with its technological innovation in health care services. First it introduced a battery-powered pacemaker, a device that is saving many lives today, and now it has taken yet another major innovative step by introducing an iPad system to deliver its state-of-the-art medical technology to physicians and patients worldwide. With recent advances in information technology, Medtronic had an opportunity to build a system that could share documents and presentations to explain complex and highly technical products through a visually rich, interactive, easy-to-use mobile platform. The solution needed to be a system that is very accessible—requiring little or no training while abiding by the Medtronic security policies already in place.

“Our mission is to alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life,” says Linnea Burman, director of marketing and drug delivery systems in Medtronic's Neuromodulation division. “We're working every day to help more patients have access to our therapies. The iPad helps us communicate with clinicians; it helps our stories come to life. The sales representative can pull up information quickly and use graphics to tell a story in a very memorable way.”

Putting iPads into the hands of thousands of employees gives Medtronic the ideal platform to present and explain its visionary medical technologies to health care professionals, individual patients, and patient advocacy groups. “IPad lets us get information to our customers much quicker than we could before,” says Michael Hedges, Medtronic's chief information officer.

Since 2010, Minneapolis, Minnesota–based Medtronic has purchased nearly 13,000 iPads and created its own app store for internal-use mobile applications. Working with Oracle Partner Fishbowl Solutions, also a Minneapolis-based company, Medtronic IT staff has extended its Oracle WebCenter content-based system for managing and distributing documents. This mobile content management system (mCMS) for the iPad links to Medtronic's Oracle WebCenter-based back-end system and enables field sales staff to provide current and accurate product and therapy information to customers, with content designated by audience or topic.

Source: www.apple.com/ipad/business/profiles/medtronic/; www.fishbowlsolutions.com/fishbowl/groups/public/documents/case_studies/031170.html.

Next Generation of Applications Leverages Mobility Platform

New applications are getting built and developed, which are keeping mobility in mind that can be extended across mobile platforms and devices. Oracle's next-generation Fusion suite of applications is built with that vision with the Application Development Framework (ADF) Mobile and offers cross-platform, rich on-device mobile capabilities with tight device services integration, and a mobile-optimized user interface. ADF-based applications enable enterprises across industries to meet frequently changing mobile requirements by allowing developers to rapidly and visually develop applications once, and then deploy them to multiple devices and channels.

Fusion Tap is a collection of mobility application modules that work across the Oracle Fusion Applications suite to provide mobile workers the ability to be productive anywhere and anytime. By taking an information-driven approach to mobility, Oracle Fusion Tap enables mobile workers to know what they need to do through a common exception-based work list, what they need to know through embedded analytics, and whom they need to connect with for immediate resolution.

Fusion Mobile Sales drives further sales team productivity by enabling direct access of Oracle Fusion CRM within iPhone and BlackBerry, and allowing instant access and team sharing of important customer, contact, and opportunity details within smartphones. Through mobile technologies, employees can spend more efficient time with customers. Employees are now able to access enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM), self-service, and many other applications on their smart devices remotely from anywhere. Employees can gain a better understanding of their internal inventories and respond immediately to changing customer demands. Mobile customer relationship management (M-CRM) must create close relationships with customers by providing value. Customers want reliable and fast service, and CRM provides those services to enable the business to gain more customers. The CRM is crucial in a mobile business, as it is the system that provides the business with the ability to directly contact the customers and users. Furthermore, personalization of the customer's interaction is extremely valuable in M-CRM. The combination of technology, software, people, and reengineered business processes converges to provide value through CRMs.

Enterprise Mobility Platform

Enterprise mobile platforms are becoming increasingly vital for businesses. With wider use of smart devices, large enterprises are forced to formulate plans and strategies to encourage a bring your own device (BYOD) policy by employees. When employees are encouraged to bring their devices to the enterprise, they need to have access to corporate applications and data. That may pose a challenge for businesses to provide secure access to data and applications with identity and access validation. An enterprise mobility platform must deal with mobile device management (MDM) as well as mobile applications management (MAM).

Major technology vendors such as IBM, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and SAP have formulated comprehensive strategies to offer enterprise mobile solutions and introduced their robust mobility platforms. Oracle recently acquired Bitzer Mobile while IBM snapped up Fiberlink to strengthen its BYOD security offerings (http://investorplace.com/2013/11/oracle-buys-bitzer-mobile-bring-device-bid/#.UqnVp_QW0lo).

Oracle's mobile platform is robust and comprehensive to help developers build cross-platform, multichannel, and multidevice applications. It helps in integrating data and services across the enterprise and mobile devices. It leverages their identity and access authentication services to provide secure information uniformly across all layers of enterprise and mobile applications. Most important, the platform enables deployment and management on the cloud as well as on the premises for multidelivery. With the Bitzer acquisition, the platform adds BYOD security capabilities, enabling employees to bring their own devices, and, with single sign-on (SSO), they get access to all enterprise applications segregated from their personal applications on their devices.

Mobile Deployment Framework

Companies are changing how they conduct business due to the growing demands for mobility and access to business applications. As the corporate enterprise network evolves into a wireless-centric, cloud-based, mobility-applications-driven environment, mobile solution providers have developed a comprehensive suite of products and services that address this market known as mobile device management (MDM). Such solutions enable enterprises to:

Manage and control subscriber inventories.
Control and optimize the expense side of corporate mobility.
Secure and protect the enterprise infrastructure.
Monitor and manage usage.
Manage applications and security.
Manage users and access on a real-time basis.

Business Considerations for Mobile Platforms Deployment

It is very important for businesses to consider each of the following factors before deploying mobile platforms across their enterprises:

Different approaches to the content carrier versus the business partner that is going to provide the content and services
Pricing model for the relationship with the carrier and the partner
Ownership, privacy, and security issues in terms of mobile contents
Licensing to ascertain and use location information on customers in order to promote business
Quality of service (QoS) based on mobile network technologies and their coverage
Collaborations and service-level agreements (SLAs) with location-based service providers
Strategies for the development and management of contents for mobile services
Managing the changes to the business model and organizational structure resulting from mobile technology adoption
Managing the changes to the relationships with clients and suppliers resulting from mobile technology adoption
Development of mobile applications that will create value for customers
Integrating online and offline contents and services in order to provide a unified view to users
Using extranets and intranets to enable clients and partners in the dynamic decision-making process required in mobile business
Handling quality and testing issues related to dynamically changing business processes
Providing for regulatory compliance by business, especially in a global mobile context

Mobility has increased real-time collaboration (discussed in Chapter 5) and improved accessibility and communication among the employees, customers, and partners ecosystem. Oracle Social Network addresses the collaboration gap through stream-based conversations that are designed to capture information from people, enterprise applications, and business processes to facilitate collaboration between individual users and teams of people both within and across enterprises. As a system of engagement, individuals can collaborate, network, drive decisions, and update data, both in the focused pursuit of business objectives as well as in the serendipitous discovery of information and expertise.

Mobility can enhance knowledge management (KM) within an organization by making it more robust, accurate, reliable, and accessible. Mobile technology is a rapidly expanding part of everything we do, from how we reach customers to how we access information to how we collaborate with colleagues. End users can update key documents or add new ones anywhere and at any time.

Smart Devices Protection Is Important

Use of smart devices offers great benefits, but it may also pose severe threats to businesses if not protected with security measures and strict policies. In businesses today, smart devices are commonly used for corporate e-mails, documents, and many times for accessing corporate applications via VPN access. These devices also provide access to corporate contacts databases and repositories of information, and sometimes valuable financial information systems. In these cases, the confidentiality of sensitive business data must be secured and protected. These devices when logged to corporate systems may become vulnerable to unauthorized access by other users. For example, corporate e-mails, contacts databases, and financial information should not be available to unauthorized users, and these devices should be protected from such vulnerability.

It has been common practice for companies to protect their servers, workstations, and other IT systems and services, and protecting and securing smart devices should also be taken to the most important level. There are some obvious threats against which smart devices must be protected. The most common is loss or theft that could result in corporate data leakage. Another threat is unauthorized use of these smart devices that may lead to corporate data misuse. The third threat is malware specifically designed for these devices.

Identity is at the center of the Force 5 Tornado technologies that are reshaping the enterprise. To reiterate, Gartner has observed that these are forces that are fundamentally changing business. Collaboration has become mainstream with organizations now using social platforms to communicate not only with customers, but internally among employees and with machines as well. Employees everywhere are accessing business applications and data through mobile devices. Information is evolving in tandem, moving beyond a single system, and SaaS applications continue to be widely accessed and adopted.

Digital businesses must now employ identity as a crucial component in managing and securing the changes brought by social, mobile, information, and the cloud. These forces are pushing data and access beyond the firewall, requiring the enterprise to address the resulting security and management issues. Legacy identity and access management (IAM) software is no longer a practical solution for an IT that must deal with cloud applications and remote employees accessing these apps on mobile devices.

Virtual enterprises need identity solutions that are built to manage an environment that extends beyond the traditional network of firewalls. Cloud-based IAM brings visibility to digital businesses internally and control of the shared IT environment throughout their various virtual enterprise partnerships that may span multiple business ecosystems. It is a business management solution that addresses the new identity and security issues in the changed world of enterprise IT. Furthermore, cloud-enabled IAM is scalable and nimble so that a digital business may respond to the adaptive dynamics of diverse identity scenarios.

Business is changing, and the enterprise needs a cloud IAM solution that's up to the task. As enterprises keep moving to the cloud, and as their employees continue going mobile, it just makes sense to solve identity issues from the cloud. IAM is a fundamental element of cloud IaaS for the competitive social and mobile virtual enterprises.

Gartner envisions that half of all enterprises will mandate employee BYOD policies by 2017, introducing potential threats such as:

Inserting viruses or malware into the virtual enterprise network
Violation of virtual enterprise data governance rules for access and handling of proprietary data
Noncompliance with government or industry regulations related to accessing and using restricted data

Gartner further predicts that by 2020, about 70 percent of enterprises will use attribute-based access control (ABAC) as the primary mechanism to protect critical data assets, up from below 5 percent in 2014. There are several technology solutions in the market to ensure safety against these threats, and enterprises need to use careful evaluation and deployment.

An example of this data protection and security technology innovation comes from WidePoint Corporation for a new cloud-based identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) offering. According to WidePoint this service assigns digital certificates to mobile devices for protection of shared data as well as better managing access by laptops, tablets, and smartphones for access to corporate data.

The WidePoint offering leverages cloud-mobile convergence, and may provide big data protection. The IDaaS Certificate-on-Chip service enables:

Creating a secure VPN connection between the virtual enterprise network and the devices used by mobile or home-based employees—without a proprietary software client
Ensuring that employees download sensitive data only to authorized, properly configured, and protected devices
Remotely revoking certificates of devices that were lost or stolen, or belong to an employee who has left the organization
Implementing a multilevel information security policy that is beyond a discretionary access control-based username and password VPN solution
Assigning different levels of access to employees, consultants, and trading partners in the virtual enterprise, based on the specific BYOD user device being used to establish connectivity
Using ABAC to provide the flexibility that digital businesses need to manage their global teams in multiple virtual enterprises throughout multiple business ecosystems

WidePoint CTO Daniel Turissini explained, “Our expertise in building out a federally authorized credentialing infrastructure to a base of over three million users has uniquely qualified us to develop and bring to market a cost-effective, scalable, and easily deployed service that addresses the problems that organizations are presently facing as they extend their IT infrastructures into the cloud.” WidePoint CEO and chairman Steven L. Komar added, “With our long and proven history of expertise in communications life cycle management and identity assurance solutions, WidePoint is uniquely attuned to providing higher-level security as part of its portfolio of managed mobility solutions offerings to commercial and government markets. The IDaaS Certificate-on-Chip service provides customers with additional security in a manner that not only can increase worker productivity, but is also complementary to the organization's unique security policies and related compliance requirements.”

Additionally, IDaaS data protection and security technology with ABAC may be the solution to the hybrid cloud multi-tenancy security challenges of big data. This approach involves the use of so-called data lakes as data storage architecture. Peter Guerra, principal at Booz Allen Hamilton, explained, “We have built a series of big data platforms that enable clients to inject any type of data and to secure access to individual elements of data inside the platform. We call that architecture the data lake.”

The difference between a traditional data warehouse and the emergent data lake reflects the issues for the system of record (SOR) transformation into the system of engagement (SOE). As a result, the rigid pre-analytical processing data structures of the warehouse are replaced by the fluid metadata tagging of the big data streams being collected and stored as they flow into the lake. The IDaaS-ABAC approach can be applied to securing discrete data elements or the whole lake, depending on security needs and performance considerations.

Mobotory: Business Agility Strategy in Action

Jon Stevenson is CEO of Mobotory, a young high-tech start-up. It is fast growing as a digital business by leveraging relationships with key partners and has formed virtual enterprises with a global reach. This business agility strategy has enabled Mobotory to become a valued member of several business ecosystems in diverse industries around the world.

Mobotory creates mobile enterprise solutions for management of large-scale events that utilize the convergence of the Force 5 Tornado technologies to disrupt its target event market spaces. It is based on a modular architecture with a core app engine that integrates safety, security, operations, engineering, production, and broadcast television logistics management applications.

This is his creating business agility story.

Why We Started This Company

While building an informational mobile application for a sports client, we gained access to operational teams of the sporting events and realized that operations were still being run the same way as they had been for decades, and we saw the need to build something to overcome the technical limitations of paper, walkie-talkies, and analog systems. We built the Enterprise Operating System (eOS) to enable seamless real-time simultaneous collaboration, to track flow of information, and to create ease of use for the end user.

What Sets Us Apart

We designed eOS from the ground up for the mobile environment. It is a native application that makes data easy to access, navigate, and interact with right from a handheld device. It's a white-label solution that is easily customizable for different industries with modules that integrate easily.

What the Enterprise Operating System (eOS) Can Do for You

Mobotory delivers easy-to-use mobile platforms with reliable network architectures designed to make your events manageable. Our Enterprise Operating System (eOS) is an integrated mobile software suite that lets you run all aspects of your event in real time from virtually anywhere.

We understand the challenges that you face on a daily basis. Unexpected change, disorder, and confusion are inevitable. Without the right tools, keeping track of staff members, patrons, vendors, and parking, along with stacks of scripts, session schedules, and maps, can quickly become an overwhelming ordeal.

Our eOS is the next evolution in event management. It is a simple and intuitive app that lets you and your team capture, share, and act on information on the fly from wherever you are. Stop problems from unnecessarily complicating your event, and give yourself an edge before, during, and after game day. Its seamless communication and flow of information allow you to proactively manage risks, resolve issues faster, and reduce operating costs.

With eOS, your data is safe and accessible. Behind the scenes, this agile platform is built on secure private cloud technology. Consolidate data centers and deploy workloads on shared infrastructure with built-in security and role-based access control. Our intelligent networks and architectures ensure connectivity you can rely on. Moreover, eOS works with your existing hardware and software investments.

The eOS system's central database puts your historical data to work for you, safeguarding your time, resources, and public image. Textual, photographic, and video data logged by your team with eOS can mitigate, and even prevent, legal exposure stemming from incidents. Understand details of your operations by reviewing key metrics during and after the event with eOS's analytics module, and use this information to improve management going forward.

What Features and Benefits eOS Delivers

Features

Manage incidents when and where they occur.
Stay connected with flexible and reliable network infrastructure.
Capture video, photo, and text.
Store data securely for future reference.
Track issues using map and list views.
Use the virtual command center.
Receive live event script updates.
Use the simple and intuitive interface.
Communicate in the field.
Act quickly with customized task assignments.
Paperless general information integrates with existing IT infra-structure.

Benefits

Better response coordination
Real-time situational awareness
Streamlined communication
More efficient personnel deployment
Reduced incident frequency and severity
Lower insurance costs
Better lawsuit protection
Reduced negative publicity
Superior patron and partner event experiences

What the eOS Modular Architecture Includes

The eOS core feature set consists of the following interchangeable modules:

Incident reporting. Create a robust, reliable record of issues as they happen using pictures, video, and text.
Security suite. Maintain situational awareness with an interactive bird's-eye view of your event.
Task management. Assign, track, and document your team's work flow more effectively and comprehensively.
Contacts. Connect at the touch of a button by phone or e-mail.
Activity script. Create your playbook, free from the constraints of paper and updated in real time.
Information. Keep all mission-critical information and documents at your fingertips on any device.
Notes. Record additional on-the-fly observations for real-time and future use.
Command center. Create your operations hub from anywhere.
Parking. This gives you a 360-degree view of your venue's parking, including allocated car space and revenue.
Analytics. Understand how you are doing by evaluating key metrics during and after the event; map your progress event by event.
Customization. Tailor the look and feel of eOS to meet your needs.
Secure database. There is reliable data storage using high-level encryption with built-in security and role-based access control.
Live debrief. Record and share new information as it becomes available.
Infrastructure. We provide the hardware and software necessary to get eOS running.
Implementation. We'll get you up and running as soon as possible.
Network architecture. A secure cloud solution with intelligent networks and technology architectures ensures reliable connectivity that works with your existing hardware and software infrastructure.
Fan module. Fans have one-touch access to event security by phone or SMS, as well as the ability to report incidents directly to the central system.

We listen to your needs and can also custom-tailor additional modules to fit your unique circumstances.

Our Keys to Success

We understand our clients' businesses, and we know how to use mobile technology to address the challenges that they face on a daily basis. We've partnered and codeveloped white-label solutions with companies to license to their clients as well as working directly with event properties. Our team's diverse background in sports, entertainment, engineering, software, and law allows us to sit down with our clients to create reliable, easy-to-use solutions that our partners actually use.

Our Accomplishments

We have launched a full-product version of eOS with its core features to address our partners' and clients' industries, and we have licensing agreements in place with several companies to white label eOS for their clients. In addition, eOS has already been successfully deployed at a number of events in 2011 and 2012, including the Fiesta Bowl, Insight Bowl, and the Summer Olympics in London, as well as the visit of Pope Francis to Brazil in 2013.

The visit of Pope Francis to Rio de Janeiro for the 28th World Youth Day program, July 22–29, 2013, served as a full-scale field test and evaluation of the Mobotory eOS solution for potential nationwide deployment by the Brazilian Federal Police. The Federal Police established a partnership with Mobotory to use eOS for monitoring the big events being produced for the Pope's tour. The objective was to provide a faster response to event problems if they arise, such as evacuation during a fire or to detect and prevent street congestion, accidents, or crime. Mobotory is working with the Federal Police on a proposal that could be adopted for the Summer Olympics in 2016.

In the next chapter, we will elaborate further on the convergence of these Force 5 Tornado technologies and of social media in particular that is enabling digital businesses in many ways by listening to the voices of all the various stakeholders (customers, partners, employees, and independent consultants) in their business ecosystem.

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Table of Contents for Chapter 6: Mobility Drives Agility

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